Last weekend we went to see a bout between two teams of the Santa Cruz Rollergirls at the Santa Cruz Civic Center. What I totally couldn’t believe was that the place was SOLD OUT, and we could barely get tix to get in! People are so frikkin’ organized anymore.

The bout we saw was the Beach Flats Betties vs. the Lost Girls. I might pedantically mention that in Santa Cruz, the Beach Flats is a somewhat low-rent area, and of course “betty” is an old surfer slang term for “woman.” Everyone involved seemed kind of punk, in a 21st Century way.

I had a little trouble figuring out the rules for roller derby, but a friendly young woman explained it to me, and back home I looked it up in Wikipedia. Basically each team has a “jammer” who scores points by lapping the pack.

The women wore impressive shiny pants, and looked awesome on their old-school four-wheeled skates. I think that’s Raven von Kaos of the Lost Girls in the middle.

And I think this is Lulu Lockjaw of the Beach Flat Betties jammin’ through the pack.

The MC was a rather stout middle-aged woman in tiny jeans shorts and a miniature red cowboy hat. When some heavy metal music came on, she started capering around on the stage doing knee-bend dancing—what a hoot.

Even the intermission was great, they had unicyclists, mini cyclers, jugglers on stilts, and hula hoopers in wild costumes—everyone parading round and round the rink slowly to music, including the Ramones—just local amateurs of all ages having fun. It was like a Fellini movie.

It takes a relaxed Cruz-type vibe to carry off this kind of thing—some communities would be all SERIOUS about it. A wonderful evening.

A couple of weeks ago, I did a one and a half hour long phone interview with my favorite computer scientist, Stephen Wolfram. He’s about to launch a new web product called Wolfram|Alpha. It’s a little like a search engine, but unlike an old-style search engine, it does deep background computations in order to calculate the answers that you might actually be looking for.

My written article based on our interview went live today in a cool new webzine called H+ Magazine . H+ is edited my no less a cultural hero than my old pal R. U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame. Nuff said!

Go read the article online: “Wolfram|Alpha: Searching for Truth.”

To further sweeten the infodump, Stephen taped our phone conversation and edited it down to a 65 minute podcast which H+ Magazine has posted as well. You can click on the icon below to access this podcast via .

I finished a new painting today, “Pig Surprise,” 40 inches by 30, acrylic on canvas. Or maybe the title should be Tax Time!

I started out with random blotches of paints, and then I started seeing some images. At first I had the picture rotated 180 degrees from this, and the yellow stuff was fire, and the red disk was a setting sun. But that looked dull. So I turned it the other way, got a claw…and added pig snout and ears. Pig Surprise! Poor pig.

Actually I got the title for this picture because when I went to Big Sur last week, my daughter Isabel was teasing me, and said I was going to Pig Sur. A real pig sur prize…

As always you can find more info about my paintings at my Paintings page…prints, note cards, originals, and a book of the paintings are all for sale.

As I mentioned in a post the other day, I’m thinking about having a little green goblin in Header’s skull in Chapter Four. I want to have a creature living in his head and controlling him, but a green goblin seems too much of a default choice, that is, too much like a golden age Kelly Freas image of a Martian. Not that I don’t love those images…

But I had some ideas for making it a little new.

First of all, don’t call it a goblin, call it a voor. Somehow I’ll need a way for the voor to take physical residence inside people’s heads. I’ll mention that the body of the voor’s previous host has no brain at all. He’s not exploded or anything, but his skull is empty.

Second , suppose that I do want a little green man with a gnome look—this makes sense, as a gnome resembles a bald old person, and old age is one of the subtextual themes of this novel. I have a vision of my voors in armies and in underground cities like in, yes, Lord of the Rings. But just to warp it a little, suppose I give each voor an extra pair of arms to suggest a six-legged ant-like quality.

Third of all, I’ll give the voors a superpower that’s along the lines of the implicit biotech in my existing menagerie of space-bending jivas and colony-organism shapeshifting yuels.

To wit, I’ll suppose that a voor is like the Plastic Man cartoon character, who can change his body shape. Unlike the yuels, who are colony organisms, the voors can’t completely change their shape and color, it’s more that they can change the sizes of their parts. They do this via a jiva-like technique of space manipulation. Note that, by the way, jivas can change their own size via space manipulation, so the skills of the voors and the jivas are similar. Perhaps voors are dark-side jivas—comparable to how devils are sometimes regarded as fallen angels.

I’m thinking of the 1940s comic Plastic Man by Jack Cole, by the way. Art Spiegelman and Chip Kidd co-edited an interesting art book about this strip, Jack Cole and Plastic Man: Forms Stretched to Their Limits .

And the character is mentioned (as Plasticman) in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow:

“Four-color Plasticman goes oozing out of a keyhole, around a corner and up through piping that leads to a sink in the mad Nazi scientist’s lab, out of whose faucet Plas’ head now, blank carapaced eyes and unplastic jaw, is just emerging. ‘Yeah. Who’re you, Ace?’” (p.206)

And later in Pynchon’s novel, in the gloomy twilight of the tale, “Plasticman will lose his way among the Imipolex [plastic]chains, and topologists all over the Zone will run out and stop payments on his honorarium checks” (p.752)

The topologists are upset, you understand, if Plastic Man becomes no longer “perfectly deformable.”

After a lifetime of being an SF writer and rejader—and somewhat skittish about fantasy, I’m slowly coming to accept that my new novel, Jim and the Flims, is closer than ever to fantasy. [As of 2016, you browse a free online edition of Jim and the Flims via the book’s page.]

I’m attracted to fantasy just now as I’m tired of making up scientific explanations of things. I just want to go straight for the surrealism without having to incant the by-now-rather-stale rhetoric of quantum-this and dark-matter-that.

So now I’m getting interested in theories about what fantasy literature is and can become. (By the way, today’s illos are still from my trip to Big Sur last weekend.)

I just read a really interesting essay by my friend Farah Mendelsohn (as of 2016, it’s no longer free online), it’s the introduction to her critical volume Rhetorics of Fantasy, which I then proceeded to order a copy of from Amazon. So without having read the book yet, I’ll irresponsibly start outgassing about Farah’s ideas based on what I gleaned from the intro. She distinguishes several modes of fantasy:

Portal-quest. There’s a magic door to another word. The main characters go through, learn about the other world, get to know it well enough to achieve something, and then come back. Things from the other world don’t come through the portal to our world.

Immersive and Intrusive. In the immersive mode, the book simply starts out and is set in some fantastic other world. In the intrusive mode, creatures from another world appear in ours. The mood for intrusive fantasy is one of shock and amazement, what Farah Mendelsohn calls an “awestruck or skeptical tone.” She points out that it’s an effort to keep up this tone of surprise, and to this end, the oddness of the intruders often escalates over the book.

Liminal. Like the intrusive fantasy, the liminal fantasy is set in our world, but there the fantastic elements are fleeting, barely glimpsed. Maybe you see an elf in your back yard, rather than a giant were-pig rampaging down Wall Street. Or a little birdie talks to you. Mendelsohn suggests that in the liminal fantasy tales, the characters don’t get all worked up about the odd things, they take them as a normal part of life. This would set liminal fantasy apart from to intrusive fantasy.

It always surprises me to find such simple archetypal forms underlying such seemingly open-ended forms as fiction in general and fantasy and science fiction in particular. We stick to a few patterns that work—patterns perhaps suggested by basic aspects of our innate psychology.

How do Farah’s modes apply to my plans for Jim and the Flims?

I found I was almost viscerally compelled to put a portal into Jim and the Flims. I was floundering, and the notion of the portal was like a life-preserver to grab.

With a portal, you’re setting several things in play. One is that you have an alternate world. A second is that there will be limited access to the portal, that is, only a few characters can go through it. A third is that finding the homeward portal from the other world may take some effort. A fourth is that the portal can lead aliens to our world as well as leading us to theirs.

In Postsingular and Hylozoic, I had an alternate world, but here the “portal” wasn’t a specific location, but rather a certain meditative technique—akin to a magic spell. And in Mathematicians in Love, I had a certain device that would turn some region of space into a portal. You might think of it as a mechanized spell-caster.

[Merged panorama of a cliff at the end of a little-known and unmarked public path to the sea near milepost 38 and Partington Creek in Big Sur, a little north of Pfeiffer-Burns park. The entrance looks like a gated fire road.]

Of course SF is rife with portals—that’s often what faster-than-light travel devices look like: magic doors. But even a ship that you get inside and then get out of is a kind of portal, particularly if the ship makes a long trip very rapidly. The animated UFO that Frek rides in Frek and the Elixir serves as a portal.

The same portal issues arise with these variations: limited access to the portal, the difficulty of getting back home, and the two-way connection that the portal involves.

[Lucia Lodge, my favorite spot to stay in Big Sur, located some 30 miles south of the “town” of Big Sur.]

A far-future SF novel has the quality of an immersive fantasy novel—you’re in some place where everything is different, and you’re seeing through the eyes of a native, and slowly you get your bearings. The SF equivalent of intrusive fantasy is to introduce have the strange things intrude via a new invention. Or they might arrive as alien invaders.

Jim and the Flims is set in our present time, and it takes the form of an intrusive fantasy. That is, we start out in our familiar world, and the fantastic elements trickle in. Yes, there is a portal, but we first become aware of the portal because of some fantastic beings who’ve used the portal to intrude into our world.

Rather than continuing to escalate the oddity of the intruders, I plan to go the whole hog and have my characters go through the portal to the alternate world themselves. They get used to it pretty quickly, so we get more into the immersive than the intrusive mode, and they don’t have to act awestruck all the time.

Regarding liminal fantasy, I’ve often thought about a notion that there are other beings around us all the time, things we glimpse from the corners of our eyes. I guess this is a liminal fantasy concept. I like the notion that the world is full of living beings or spirits of place, akin to gnomes, elves and fairies. The story I wrote with Paul DiFilippo, “Elves of the Subdimensions,” is a liminal fantasy that turns intrusive, with, come to think of it, a kind of portal.

When starting Jim and the Flims I was thinking along these lines, imagining an alternate world the overlays and is wholly contiguous with ours. But now it seems less likely I’ll use that mode—probably it’s enough to be using the portal-quest and intrusive fantasy modes.

At least now, thanks to Farah, I have a clearer notion of what it is that I’m up to! Now I have to actually read some more of her book…

As mentioned above, as of 2016, you buy an ebook or paperback — or browse a free online edition — of Jim and the Flims via the book’s page. In the end, I backed off from total fantasy and ended up inventing SF-style “explanations” for all the bizarro surreal stuff in the book. But in any case, thinking in terms of fantasy was liberating. Visions first, explanations later!