Today’s news: The io9 site has listed Postsingular as one of the Best SF Books of 2008!

And now for a photo story…

The other day, I was walking by a curved glass sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco, and I noticed this intersecting pattern of bright reflections on the ground. These are what scientists call “caustic curves,” because the heat along these lines can grow burning hot.

I stepped into the caustic focus and the gravitational field warp made me as wide as I am tall.

A crow showed me the way to a new land.

The kingdom lay inside the gills of a shelf mushroom.

Shrunken to minute size, I followed a long, winding forest trail into the subdimensions.

Part of the way was uphill, overlooking a landscape of bokeh pastels.

I found the subbies’ great gathering place.

And I glimpsed the Topknotted Sphere.

I pricked up my ears to receive Her wisdom.

The Topknotted Sphere’s voice spoke to me as if from within my own blood.

I learned the secret machinery of the world.

So I can hear the music of a roofline.

And I can see inside the trunks of trees.

Happy New Year!

I always like to think about the mathematical properties of each new year’s number.
2009 = 49 x 41 = 7^2 x (5^2 + 4^2), where “^2” means squared.

So in plain words:
Two thousand and nine is seven squared times five squared plus four squared.

And now a message from our sponsor…

I got my first printed copies of my new art book, Better Worlds the other day. It looks really nice, better than I expected. You can order your own printed copy for $29.99. I blogged more about this in my “Better Worlds” post a couple of weeks ago.

Onward into the year!

As I mentioned in my post on “Starting Jim and the Flim,” I’m thinking of writing another SF novel that includes some UFO elements.

My blogger friend Mac Tonnies responded with a couple of links to posts relating to SF UFO novels. The first is a piece, “UFOs and Science Fiction” discussing the relative scarcity of UFOs in contemporary SF novels.

I do remember reading some SF UFO tales as a boy, that is, about fifty years ago, although at that time, the subtext of the stories was the American fear of Communism and Soviet attack. More recently, Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors, John Shirley’s Silicon Embrace, and my own Saucer Wisdom are among the very few modern SF UFO novels.

In order to have something to discuss, I think we should distinguish between, on the one hand, SF UFO novels and, on the other hand, alien invasion novels along the lines of, say, Greg Bear or Larry Niven. I think, for instance, Neal Stephenson’s recent Anathem, is more of an alien invasion novel, although it’s close to being an SF UFO novel as well.

How to characterize the sought-for genre of the SF UFO novel? I’d say the essence of an SF UFO novel is point (a) below. Points (b) through (f) all follow from (a).

(a) The novel includes flying saucer alien encounters similar to those described in lowbrow tabloid newspapers, but is neither ignorantly credulous nor mockingly parodistic.
(b) The aliens use a fuzzy technology that might amount to psychic powers. The saucers, in other words, aren’t machines.
(c) The aliens are surreptitiously observing or infiltrating Earth rather than overtly invading—at least for now.
(d) We have some creepy human/alien sex acts.
(e) The aliens aren’t necessarily evil, they may be bringing enlightenment and transcendence.
(f) The aliens might be from somewhere other than a distant planet, that is, they might come from small size scales, from a parallel world, or might be made of some impalpable substance like dark matter.

Part of the game in writing an SF UFO novel is making up scientific reasons why the tabloid-level UFO phenomenon could in fact relate to something real—although certainly it’s fair to mention in mind that many of the people who encounter aliens are stoned or mentally ill.

Coming back to Mac Tonnies again, in his 2005 post, “Alien Visitation: A Global Quantum Event?” Mac discusses the notion that the aliens might in some sense require a human’s presence in order to manifest themselves.

Thus, the fact that there are never any unobserved UFOs could indicate not that the UFOs are human hallucinations, but rather that a human presence supplies a kind of bridge or beacon that allows the aliens to project some visible form into our reality. Note that you can use this move without having to get into the mysto steam of quantum mechanics which is, I feel, a vein that’s been somewhat overworked.

The tone and intention are also essential in distinguishing an SF UFO novel.

One the one hand, if the book is serious, exhortatory, or paranoid, then you’re not getting the SF part. You’re writing a kind of True Believer recruitment tract running a kind of scam, and those motives get in the way of novelistic art. This said, it should be possible to write a great SF UFO novel that does in fact have that intense, paranoid tone—in some ways Phil Dick’s exemplary Valis is this kind of book.

On the other hand, if the author goes for every joke in sight, you end up with something more like the Hitchhiker’s Guide novels by Douglas Adams. This kind of work has its own appeal and its own audience—but it’s not what I’m thinking about when I talk about my vision of an SF UFO novel. I want something a little heavier, a little deeper.

Not that an SF UFO novel has to be sober-sided and portentious. My personal inclination is to leaven my books with a certain amount of satire and dark humor—and John Shirley and Ian Watson do this too. For instance, the aliens in Shirley’s Silicon Embrace are heavy smokers. And the main character in my Saucer Wisdom really is a true-believing UFO nut—who just happens to be right.

The world really is stranger than we as yet understand. Tying our dreams of cosmic exploration to government-made machines is like expecting to ride a sailing ship or a hot air balloon to Mount Olympus. The door might be closer than you think. Rabid knows.

On December 23, 2008, during the big family Christmas reunion at our house, I had a few spare minutes and managed to write a kind of start for my next novel, with working title Jim and the Flim. I pasted together some bits that I liked from some SF warm-up raps that I wrote this summer while I was still getting ready to write my memoir—see, for instance, my blog posts, “Cow Liver Goddess Satori,” and “Novels as Memoirs.”)

I put the material into the past tense and changed the parts that were first person to third person, though I may yet flip back to first person. And now I’m smoothing the material and revising it, and thinking about how to complicate it into a novel. I can feel a little pulse, it’s coming to life.

The main character Jim Oster lives with a woman, Weena Wesson, whom he believes to be an otherworldly being called a flim. The flim mind is embedded in a body that she’s grown from a cow liver. Jim and Weena are seedy older people living in Santa Cruz. I’m looking for a Dickian tone this time out, with the tech pretty simple and some what-is-reality elements.

I’d like the reader to believe, initially, that Jim Oster is mistaken in his belief that Weena is an alien flim inside a cow liver. But I think by the end of the first or the second chapter we learn that he’s not nuts—for if he were, we wouldn’t have much of an SF novel, would we?

Why is Weena living in a tweaked cow liver? Well, mainly I’m goofing off the traditional notion of UFO cattle mutilations. But I want a science reason to explain it. Suppose that the flims can’t physically come here unless they’re in one of those spacetime regions where our mundane world and the Flimland happen to overlap. When the worlds are separate, a flim can nevertheless project their personality information into a piece of mundane host matter. And for some mumble-mumble science reason, a cow liver is very suitable. If carried out fully and for a long period of time, the flim’s astral projection kills the flim’s original body. Weena makes this sacrifice as she has an important mission in the mundane world.

What is the mission? This has to do with my theory about where the flims are from. Note that I’m not interested in having the flims come from distant stars or planets, that whole concept feels hackneyed and boring. I want them to come from right here, like nature spirits.

A standard way of explaining otherworldly beings is to suppose that they live on a universe parallel to ours, and they are able to reach over into our world or even hop back and forth. Like from the astral plane. But I want a sense of the flims being essentially embedded in our world—like elves or ghosts. So I want a more intimate connection than a some parallel world, something more integrate than alternate sheet of spacetime that’s stuck to ours like a protective plastic sheet stuck to the viewscreen of a new digital camera. If there’s any fixed, uniform distance between the two hyperplanes of reality, the worlds are separate, even if the distance is a mere Planck length.

So I’ll suppose that, yes, flims live in a parallel spacetime, but that their astral plane and our mundane plane are in fact precisely the same in many spacetime regions. I think of an astral veneer that’s irregularly delaminating from a mundane tabletop. At certain places and times, the world of the flims is identical with our quotidien reality, in other spots their reality sheet bulges up. I suppose that the bulge pattern is, like any other naturally occurring shape, a chaotic fractal.

If we go with the delaminated sheets model, we can have the traditional fantasy notion of there being certain times and lands where “the elves are real.” Locales where Flimland and our mundane world are one and the same. And the action of my book has to do with a Return Of The Magic. We’re about to pass into an era when the flims are fully visible to us all the time, and the astral and the mundane worlds are one.

Do the flims welcome the impending unification? I think not, no more so than will the conservative elements of our own society. Let’s suppose that the elvish flims are green and Earth-nurturing. They won’t relish being merged into a world full of real estate developers, gross polluters, and shopping malls. Weena’s mission is to try and reform humanity a little before the worlds merge. And it may be that Jim’s mission is to teach the flims to love us.