May 20, 2008. A twenty minute reading from my novel POSTSINGULAR, followed by a difficult Q&A period. This was a Google Tech Talk on the Google campus, hosted by Director of Research, Peter Norvig.

I finished my painting “Montgomery Hill” today, prints and cards available at rudy.imagekind.com. The terrified humans are oddly less real than the Saucerians from the stars. Come to think of it, the Saucerians are stars!

My friend and neighbor Gunnar showed up and watched me finish. He took a couple of pictures of me, and later we went biking.

I like painting a lot, it gets the other part of my brain working. I think of writing differently now that I paint. If something’s not right, you just paint it over and do it again.

Last night I had dinner with Oliver Harris, the Burroughs scholar. It was fun hanging out with him, a civilized, knowledgeable Englishman (although he takes exception to this description). He’s in the area to root through the Ginsberg archive at Stanford, looking at manuscripts that Bill mailed Allen.

“One final box had escaped previous scrutiny. As the Scholar slid it out from under the lowest of steel shelves, he noticed that it had been sitting in a viscid pool of clear fluid. A ripple passed across the congelation and a small tentacle formed. Moving with savage speed, the tendril wrapped around the Scholar’s ankle, dragging him closer to the Last Box. Slowly the folded-over cardboard edges unfolded to reveal—” Maybe a giant eye. Or the Muse…

He’s organizing a conference in Paris next summer in honor of the 50th anniversery of the publication of Naked Lunch by the Olympia Press…I’ll post more info when it’s available.

When I got home, oh joy, my Haoda adapter ring was here, meaning that I can now attach my old green 50 mm Summicron Leica R lens to my new digital Canon—at the cost of difficult focusing and slightly flaky exposure metering—so I stayed up late tinkering and reading camera geek posts on the web.

I’ve been writing some short stories, recently. The last two have to do with the Steinhardt-Turok Cyclic Universe model that I’ve been blogging about lately.

I wrote a 1,000 word short-short “Message Found in a Gravity Wave” which I sold to Nature Physics, it hinges on the idea that the Big Splat comes tomorrow, and a guy wants to preserve a token of himself by leaving a message in the form of a gravity wave—the kicker is that he creates the gravity wave by writing his missive (which is the text of the story) in a somewhat surprising form. I figure he lives in Skylight, Kentucky on a former horse farm that’s now a chicken farm — right down the road from where I grew up.

And I’m working on a (slightly) more serious story with Bruce Sterling, still underway, working title “Colliding Branes,” which is also about events during a near future end time that results when the brane collision happens very much sooner than expected.

I’m thinking of yet another take on the Cyclic Universe, although this time I’ll stay well away from the Big Splat aspect, as I don’t want to use the same thing a third time.

An angle I haven’t touched yet is that our space might have infinitely many planets right now. I want a story that somehow assuages my frustration over our seeming inability ever to see the infinitely many other planets that are right there right now. The problem is that we had this space-filling Big Flash 14 billion years ago, and we can’t “see” through that. Also everything was wiped out by the flash.

But what if there are somehow surviving signals from the more distant zones, signals from previous cycles. SF element: the signals come through the subdimensions.

I see the working title as “To See Infinity.”

I think about a Golden Age story, James Blish’s “Beep” of 1954, (later expanded into The Quincunx of Time, 1973) in which the spaceships have some kind of faster-than-light radio (called a Dirac transmitter), and messages end with this annoying beep, and they’ve found a way to edit out the beep most of the time. But then some guy fools around with the beep and realizes its a compressed version of all the messages from all future times, the scientific justification being that, in special relativity, faster-than-light messaging is logically equivalent to sending messages backwards in time. [Gregory Benford mentions the story in his article “Time and Timescape” in Science Fiction Studies #60, see abstract.]

In “To See Infinity” maybe the characters are messing with subaether radio. And the compressed message could be incoming radio telemetry from the previous cycle of the universe, call it cycle minus one, and these signals come from a spherical shell of space with inner radius one trillion light years and outer radius of a two trillion light years. And there’s a subtler overtone type beep from the two to three shell of cycle minus two, and yet another still more rarefied signal for the three to four shell of cycle minus three, ad infinitum. (Actually the shells are in some sense bigger than a trillion miles thick, now, due to the stretching of space, but they were that thick when the messages got into the subaether.)

How to narrate it? I was watching the Amadeus movie last night, and thinking what a brilliant device it is to have Mozart’s rival Salieri narrate his life. So we have this somewhat ordinary guy (who we relate to) telling us about the genius. And we don’t know enough about music to appreciate why Mozart is so great, but Salieri explains it to us, not as if he’s explaining, but as if he’s drooling over the upstarts work. By the same token, people cant appreciate math, but if we had a narrator talking about a young upstart, he could in passing give us a flavor of the upstart’s math.

Math? Well, maybe its a futuristic combination of math and music. And I’m supposing that the upstart is in some way tuning in on the messages to do his work. And maybe the big reveal is that he’s using infinity.

I have a personal fondness for the Amadeus movie as when I went to a Flatland Centennial conference on the fourth dimension at Brown University in 1981, I met Tom Banchoff and Kee Dewdney there, two other great 4D experts. I was in my old wild-man conference mode, ecstatic, gabbing, partying with Kee. Another attendee remarked to me——“Did you see Amadeus? The Mozart character reminds me of you.”

So the Salieri-type narrator could be this somewhat plodding guy describing the disappearance of a wilder, younger Mozart-type guy. And the narrator is disturbed, as he blames himself (not without some justification) for the young genius’s death.

The emanations from the higher cycles might be perceived with your subtle body. Perhaps generation to generation, each old brane migrates to a higher brane.

By the way, at first I wanted to use the title, “The Starry Crow,” for my story, as the other day I was looking at a crow, admiring how black and unreflective he is, and it struck me that it would be cool if the black was full of stars. But now I’m thinking, Arthur Clarke kind of used up the conceit, “it’s full of stars,” but maybe I could use it anyway. I really like crows.

I was going to start work on the story this week, but now my Tor editor, Dave Hartwell, has come back with some suggestions on my Hylozoic novel manuscript, so I probably should start working on those. Also I’m still working on my Montgomery Hill painting.

This is an early stage, it’ll look better tomorrow…

I’ve been taking a lot of photos with my new Canon 5D. For awhile my blog may resemble a photo blog even more than usual. To fill in the cracks today, I’ll post some links that people recently sent me.

Emil Rojas sends a link to YouTube video of huge flocks of starlings in Otmoor, England. Just the kind of emergent gnarl I like to see.

In my weighty tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, I was writing about flocking and to celebrate the phenomenon, I quoted some lines from John Updike’s poem, “The Great Scarf of Birds,” describing a flock of starlings lifting off from a golf course:

And as
I watched, one bird,
prompted by accident or will to lead,
ceased resting; and, lifting in a casual billow,
the flock ascended as a lady’s scarf,
transparent, of gray, might be twitched
by one corner, drawn upward and then,
decided against, negligently tossed toward a chair:
the southward cloud withdrew into the air.

Bruce Sterling sent me a link to a simulation of butterfly wings.

John Roche and Bob Reary both sent me links to article about computer-eating ants in Houston, reminiscent of the story “Hormiga Canyon” I wrote with Bruce.

Greg Parker links to his a photo of the Rosette nebula.

Gamma sends news of a Frank Zappa conference in Paris this July.

Nathaniel Hellerstein sends a link to a list of SF cliches. The underlying inspiration for the list is, I think, a desire to systematically list essentially all possible SF tropes and power chords. I myself did something similar in my essay, “What Do SF Writers Want?”

But object to the jaded, snarky, know-it-all tone of the SF Cliches list. I mean, why is every possible idea or archetype to be dismissed as a cliche? Life is a cliche, from beginning to end, and great SF isn’t necessarily about brand new ideas and plot structures. It’s more about language, characterization, and eyeball kicks. If I took the implicit injunctions of the SF Cliches list seriously, it would inhibit me from writing at all.

I rather suspect that working on such a list can become an excuse for not trying to write fiction. It’s as if an aspiring painter were to say, “Hell, I’m not gonna use red, yellow, oragne, green, blue or violet! Those have been done to death. And forget about black and white!” Oh, wait, that’s already happened…

Paul Di Filippo sends a link to an io9 post about colorful nudibranchs, a.k.a. sea snails. I have a nudibranch character named Unger in Mathematicians in Love. He was inspired by a guy I went to grad school in math with at Rutgers.

My son Rudy Rucker, Jr., posted a page of increasingly absurd “cute animal in a bucket illustrating the theme of Thank God It’s Friday,” images on Monkeybrains.net.

Rebecca Sandford-Smith noticed a Wired article that seems to echo the scene in my novel Software where the robots grind up Cobb Anderson’s brain to extract his personality software.

Coop has been Flickr-documenting his insanely comprehensive collection of plastic Japanese figurines.

And my jeweler daughter Isabel Rucker sent a link to an incredible video “Muto” created by Buenos Aires artists as stop-motion photos of repeated overpaintings of wall-graffiti.

On the publishing front, my other daughter’s Georgia Rucker Design is turning two of my paintings into covers for my novels The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts , which will be released in e-book and print-on-demand form by E-Reads later this summer. I used PhotoShop to stretch out the middle of my Spacetime Donuts paintings so as better to fit into a narrowish band wrapping from front to back cover.