I did three readings from Hylozoic over the last few days. The picture above shows me at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, photo courtesy of Bogeon Kim.

At Books, Inc., in Mountain View, I recorded a podcast of me reading the first part of Chapter Two of Hylozoic, along with about a half hour of questions-and-answers with the friendly crowd. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

When I went to Berkeley to read at Moe’s Books, I got together with four of my SF writer friends: Kim Stanley Robinson, Terry Bisson, Carter Scholz, and Michael Blumlein. It’s good to have Terry in the Bay Area, he’s very dynamic about organizing get-togethers. I really enjoy talking to other writers about the craft and the biz—being a writer can feel like a rather lonely life.

In Berkeley, I went into Amoeba Records. There’s so few places to buy CDs anymore, it seems like. The Borders store in my home town stopped selling music and the Wherehouse music store left…and the big Virgin music store at Powell and Market in downtown San Francisco is gone.

But good old Berkeley—they’ve got Rasputin Music and Amoeba Music side by side. Looking through the Ramones holdings at Amoeba, I found an interesting little book mixed in with the CDs, shrink-wrapped and everything. Talk about targeted book marketing!

The book was Ramones, by Nicholas Rombes from the 33 1/3 line of books from Continuum Publishing, and it’s mainly an analysis of the first album by our boys, an album called Ramones. Rombes makes the point that one aspect of punk was a quality of self-awareness and irony about the media we work with. He says Ramones was “…one of the first pop albums to recognize the artifice of pop culture while simultaneously glorying in it.”

To me, that’s a good description of the attitude I’ve had about writing my SF novels, ever since I started in 1978.

One more good line from the book: “In [a] sense, the Ramones’ career is about creating the conditions under which their music would be retrospectively accepted.”

Speaking of books, Owen Hill, a writer who works at Moe’s, gave me a copy of his great short novel, The Incredible Double. It’s a fast-paced, wonderfully written noir novel, very much in the style of Raymond Chandler, but retooled for 21st C Berkeley. It’s full of tasty little local touches about the town and its denizens. And it has a wild SF-like ending—and a touch of poetry: “Oddly green haloes surround summer love, my skeleton has gone on vacation.”

Fast, short and tight. And now for a word from our sponsors.

Jackie is a punk, Judy is a runt
They both went down to Berlin, joined the ice capades
And oh, I dont know why, oh, I dont know why
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah, perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah, perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah

Second verse, same as the first — Jackie is a punk, Judy is a runt
They both went down to Berlin, joined the ice capades
And oh, I dont know why, oh, I dont know why
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah, perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah, perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah

Third verse, different from the first — Jackie is a punk, Judy is a runt
They both went down to Frisco, joined the SLA
And oh, I dont know why, oh, I dont know why
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah, perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah
Perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah, perhaps they’ll die, oh yeah

I’ve decided that my character Weena Wesson in Jim and the Flims should be a very old living person from Earth, like 150 years old. And she should have some knowledge of the fourth dimension.

And thus I’m led to Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940), an intuitive geometer of the fourth dimension, known for her cardboard models of the 3D cross-sections of the 4D polytopes, which are more sophisticated cousins of the “hypercube.” Above is a photo of Alicia with her mathematical collaborator Pieter Schoute.

[Paper models of 3D cross-sections of 4D hypersolids by Alicia Boole Stott.]

Alicia Boole learned about 4D from no less a man than Charles Howard Hinton, who was the suitor of Alicia’s older sister Marry Ellen Boole. Hinton used to bring his set of 4D-vizualization cubes over to the Boole’s house and show them off. Hinton, I should explain, had devised a system for imagining four-dimensional hypersolids by means of a set of blocks. Hinton was a true eccentric—a bigamist, inventor of a “baseball gun,” an early science fiction writer, and a mathematic professor. My kind of guy. It cracks me up to imagine Prof. Hinton teaching 4D geometry to his girlfriend’s sisters.

[A rare family photo of Hinton, scanned for me by Tom Banchoff, , a fellow investigator of the higher dimensions.]

About thirty years ago, I edited a selection of Hinton’s truly amazing writings, Speculations on the Fourth Dimension, which appeared from Dover Publications in 1980. This slim volume is now seemingly out of print, but a fellow Hintonite has, with my blessing, legally posted most of my Hinton selections online. In order to keep the legend of Hinton alive, I’ve decided it’s time to post the biographical essay on Hinton by me that introduced my anthology.

[Many European universities have these great old pre-computer collections of models of mathematical solids and surfaces—the models are made of paper, wire, plaster and so on. This picture shows a case of Alicia Boole Stott’s models at the University of Gronigen in the Netherlands.]

Alicia Boole Stott was able to visualize the cross-sections of various four-dimensional shapes—which she dubbed “polytopes”—and she made paper models of them. For more about this, see chapter 5 of Irene Polo-Blanco’s dissertation, “Models of Surfaces: A Dutch Perspective,” at the University of Groningen: “Alicia Boole Stott and four-dimensional polytopes. ”. (I copied the pictures of Alicia and her models for this blog post from the Polo-Blanco dissertation. )

I’ve scanned a 1993 letter from Tom Banchoff in which he reports some of the family stories he heard about Hinton and Alicia Boole.

One story is that Alicia Boole’s husband Walter refused to consider that his wife should have any career outside the home. But then there is a mention that it was he (or maybe their son Leonard?) who noticed an appeal by the Dutch mathematician Schoute for the solution to the other half of some four-dimensional geometry program he had partially resolved. Alice had the other half in the models she had made. Schoute came thereafter each summer, and they continued to work together. At the tercentenary of the University of Groningen, they made a big deal about the collaboration and the models, and they sent back to Alice a fancy scroll, in Latin, which she couldn’t read. Later her son read it and exclaimed, “Jesus Christ, they’re making you a Doctor.”

[When we think about 4D it’s like trying to imagine an orchid from its shadow.]

Re. my novel, I’m thinking that, at age 80, instead of actually dying, Alicia Boole Stott used a 4D twist to go over to the afterworld intact. Beyond the veil. And, in the year 2010, she reaches out to inveigle my hero Jim Oster into the greatest adventure of his life—a journey to Flimsy, the land of the flims.

Reminder: I’ll be reading at
Borderlands, 3 PM, Saturday, June 6, San Francisco and
Moe’s Books 7:30 PM, Sunday Jun 7, Berkeley.

I finished a new painting today, “The Abduction.” You can click on the image below to see a larger version.

I painted this scene to help visualize a chapter in my novel, Jim and the Flims. In the background we have a giant geranium plant that’s being used as a castle by a race of flying people called the flims. In the foreground, a man’s girlfriend is being abducted by an alien yuel who’s taken on the shape of a dinosaur. The sun is a glowing alien being that’s known as the Supreme Jiva and is shaped like a beet. On the left is my old dog, Arf. What could be more natural?

As always, you can get more info at my Paintings page.

And now I’m hoping to spend some time with the writing muse. Here’s a sculpture of her by my old friend Jim Skinner. Maybe she’s the reading muse, actually. I like how her bronze aura forms a quilted wingback chair…

Whew. My two week stint as Boing Boing guestblogger is over…I was on from May 18 – May 31, 2009.

My twenty-five posts branched into about 750 comments—most of them nice. Thanks, Boing!

Just to have the posts safe in one place, I’m saving them (without the comments) as a single page , here on my site. The originals, with comments, used to be on the Guestblog archive at BoingBoing—but that link’s dead now, you’d need to seek out an Internet backup site to see it.

Now to get back to writing Jim and the Flims! As I mentioned in one of my Boing posts, I have the idea that the King of Flimsy’s castle should look like a geranium that I painted. To help me get going on the next chapter, I’m now working on a second painting of a really big geranium with little people on it—this is just a detail of the picture, there will be other stuff going on in the foreground. I’ll show you the whole painting when it’s done.

It’s good to back home in the comfort of my own blog.