In my “Maelstrom from Poe’s PYM” entry on February 7, 2008, I quoted part of the ending of Poe’s Narratiave of Arthur Gorden Pym. My notion was that Poe was describing how it would be to sail into a very large maelstrom.

I’ve been rethinking the meaning of the passage, keeping Poe’s fascination with Symmes’s notion of the Hollow Earth, under which there might be an ocean-covered hole at the South Pole, and that a ship might be able (pace Newton) to be able to sail over the lip and into the inner seas.

I think that’s what Poe is in fact describing here; that’s why the distant cataract of gray mist seems to get higher and higher in the sky and why the sky seems to get get darker. To understand about the rising cataract, look at the figure above. In position A, the opposite side of the hole is just a stripe on the horizon. But in position B, the opposite side of the hole sees to lie some thirty or forty degrees above the horizon.

Of course if there were a really big maelstrom down whose slope you were gradually proceeding, you would also see this effect.

Yesterday I worked this passage into Hylozoic, with today’s (still rather rough) draft quoted below. My hero Chu is flying along over a higher dimesional sea, carried in the mouth of a giant flying manta ray called Duxy, and accompanied by Heironymus Bosch.

Drained by the steady effort, Chu grew numb and dreamy. He didn’t quite notice when things changed, but at some point they’d entered upon a region of novelty and wonder. A high range of light gray vapor hung on the horizon, occasionally flaring up in lofty streaks. Here and there, the surface below them seemed to boil, as if stirred by vagrant eddies.

A huge bubble shot up from the sea below Duxy, accompanied by a wild flaring up in the vapor ahead. Duxy teeped that she wanted to turn away; she begged her passengers to stop pushing. Worn and frightened as they were, they ceased their efforts. Nevertheless they continued sweeping forward in Groovy’s wake, perhaps even more rapidly than before. A swirling wind was driving them along.

As always the interbrane air glowed with light, but a still-brighter illumination rose from the roiled sea’s surface. The glare cast an odd light upon the lean, weathered features of Bosch, who’d never stopped craning from Duxy’s mouth. Chu was lying beside the artist, also staring out.

The gray band had risen prodigiously above the visible horizon, and had taken on a more distinct form. It resembled a limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart. The gigantic curtain ranged to the left and right as far as Chu could see. But rather than a roar, he heard a singing hiss.

Crosswise currents were ripping the surface of the sea below them. Through the foamy rents, Chu could glimpse a chaos of flitting vegetal beings: the subbies. As they in turn noticed him, he felt the tingle of their root hairs reaching out to his skull, feeding him altered images of how they looked. They took on the forms of men with the heads of birds, and of fish with human legs. Racing along half-submerged beneath the surface, the subbies were awaiting a chance to attack.

Chu had a sense that the ocean’s surface was slanting down, and that the summit of the distant cataract was bulging into heavens. And now he saw something horrific, less than a mile ahead. Beyond a raging band of foam, the ocean surface curved down sharply and plunged out of sight. They were scudding towards the anomaly with hideous velocity, the fierce gale fluttering Duxy’s wings like rags.

With a distinct mental effort, Chu grasped that he was looking across the mouth of a maelstrom some hundred miles wide. As they neared the seething lip and the vast void of the great pool’s core, the Hrull let out an anguished squeal of terror. She opened wide her mouth and spit out her passengers, forcing them forward with her powerful throat and cheeks.

And, huzzah, I pushed on and actually finished the first draft of the ending of Hylozic. As of February 8, 2008, my latest strand of spider silk reaches across the void! Yeah, baby!

I’m working on a big maelstrom scene in the last chapter of Hylozoic. To give it a spooky flavor, I plan to appropriate some material from Poe. He wrote about giant maelstroms in two places. First, there’s his story “The Descent into the Maelström,” and second there’s the ending of his novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, where they seem to be sailing into a giant hole in the ocean at the South Pole. Here’s some excerpts of that (I’m not going to use this much, in my novel, though, more like a few phrases).

[What one thinks of is in the nature of a huge drain in the ocean floor, like in Pirates of the Caribbean model shown here. To where is the water draining? Probably to the interior of the Hollow Earth.]

March 1st.- Many unusual phenomena now indicated that we were entering upon a region of novelty and wonder. A high range of light gray vapor appeared constantly in the southern horizon, flaring up occasionally in lofty streaks, now darting from east to west, now from west to east, and again presenting a level and uniform summit-in short, having all the wild variations of the Aurora Borealis. The average height of this vapor, as apparent from our station, was about twenty-five degrees. The temperature of the sea seemed to be increasing momentarily, and there was a very perceptible alteration in its color. …

[Rudy’s painting of the Hollow Earth. The maelstroms are at the north and south holes.]

March 3d.-The heat of the water was now truly remarkable, and in color was undergoing a rapid change, being no longer transparent, but of a milky consistency and hue. In our immediate vicinity it was usually smooth, never so rough as to endanger the canoe-but we were frequently surprised at perceiving, to our right and left, at different distances, sudden and extensive agitations of the surface; these, we at length noticed, were always preceded by wild flickerings in the region of vapor to the southward. …

[The legend of the maelstrom started in Scandinavia. This is Olaus Magnus’s Carta Marina maelstrom (1539).]

March 5th.-The wind had entirely ceased, but it was evident that we were still hurrying on to the southward, under the influence of a powerful current. And now, -indeed, it would seem reasonable that we should experience some alarm at the turn events were taking-but we felt none. … I felt a numbness of body and mind—a dreaminess of sensation but this was all.

[An old drawing that’s floated around for years, an inspiration.]

March 6th.-The gray vapor had now arisen many more degrees above the horizon, and was gradually losing its grayness of tint. The heat of the water was extreme, even unpleasant to the touch, and its milky hue was more evident than ever. Today a violent agitation of the water occurred very close to the canoe. …

[This is a very powerful tidal current near Salstraumen, Norway, also there’s one in Japan. What we see is really a “von Karman vortex street,” rather than a single giant maelstrom. I’ve always wanted to live on Von Karman Vortex St.]

March 9th.-… The range of vapor to the southward had arisen prodigiously in the horizon, and began to assume more distinctness of form. I can liken it to nothing but a limitless cataract, rolling silently into the sea from some immense and far-distant rampart in the heaven. The gigantic curtain ranged along the whole extent of the southern horizon. It emitted no sound.

March 21st.-A sullen darkness now hovered above us—but from out the milky depths of the ocean a luminous glare arose, and stole up along the bulwarks of the boat. … The summit of the cataract was utterly lost in the dimness and the distance. Yet we were evidently approaching it with a hideous velocity. At intervals there were visible in it wide, yawning, but momentary rents, and from out these rents, within which was a chaos of flitting and indistinct images, there came rushing and mighty, but soundless winds, tearing up the enkindled ocean in their course.

[Aether vortex by Edwin Babbitt, 1878]

March 22d.-The darkness had materially increased, relieved only by the glare of the water thrown back from the white curtain before us. Many gigantic and pallidly white birds flew continuously now from beyond the veil, and their scream was the eternal Tekeli-li! as they retreated from our vision. … And now we rushed into the embraces of the cataract, where a chasm threw itself open to receive us. But there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.

You get the sense that they’re sailing into something more than a big whirlpool, actually. It’s like the giant drain where the oceans tumble into the Hollow Earth, and there’s volcanism in play as well. This passage was a big inspiration for my own The Hollow Earth. Note that the date when Pym reaches the Southern Hole is Rudy’s birthday! Sinkchronicity…

Recently when not frantically trying to finish Hylozoic, I’ve been working on an email interview with Cris Hollingsworh and Steve Hooley, intended as a contribution for a volume of articles that Cris is editing: The Spaces of Wonderland (University of Iowa Press). My interview topic is my thoughts about Lewis Carroll and his influences on me. I even started rereading the two Alice books, having nothing else on my reading table just now—other than my notes about the maelstrom and beanstalk bridges to infinity in Hylozoic. More on that anon.

Re. the interview, I started thinking back to the mid 1980s when I read Carroll’s book The Game of Logic, and I described some of his ideas in the “Logic” chapter of my nonfiction book Mind Tools . Carroll made up these wonderfully mad syllogisms to illustrate modes of logical reasoning. The syllogisms are almost like haiku, where the restriction is that the three lines must represent a rigorously logical argument about three properties of things. The essence of a syllogism is that if you accept the first two premises, you are obliged to grant the correctness of the third.

In 1985 I myself wrote a series of transreal Carrollian syllogisms, each illustrating a distinct mode of reasoning, and each of them crafted them to express something about my personal life. (Here’s a link to syllogism info that I found on the fabulously comprehensive Lewis Carroll society page. I’ll quote five of my syllogisms here, taken from pp. 203-204 of Mind Tools, each preceded by a sentence of explanation.

[Most of today’s pictures are from Moffet field.]

I was living in Lynchburg, Virginia, the home town of evangelist Jerry Falwell.

No beggar is honest;
All evangelists are beggars.
No evangelist is honest.

I was out of my latest teaching job, even though I was in fact a popular teacher.

No teachers are enthusiastic;
You are enthusiastic.
You are not a teacher.

Ronald Reagan was president.

No president is a moron;
Some illiterates are morons.
Some illiterates are not president.

As always, my books were getting less recognition than I would have liked.

Every good book is readable;
Some classics are not readable.
Some classics are not good books.

As always, I was terminally out of step with mass culture.

Everything he likes is esoteric;
No esoteric things are on TV.
Nothing on TV is what he likes.

Kvetch, kvetch! Resent, resent! Poor me, poor me, pour me a drink!

I’m happier now, these 23 years later, in my golden twilight age.

I learned a few interesting things at the NASA Virtual Worlds conference. One is the use of “mixed reality” to describe situations where you’re not fully embedded in a virtual reality, but instead have some aspect of cybernetic reality overlaid onto your visual field. We saw some pictures of a mixed reality Pac-Man game carried out in Singapore, where players wearing goggles saw virtual power pellets on the sidewalks.

[This isn’t the mixed reality Pac Man, instead it’s a funnier video of guys acting out Pac Man on a Japanese TV show.]

Another thing I learned is that Stephenson’s word “metaverse” has edged out Gibson’s older word “cyberspace” as a word for virtual (or mixed) realities. Not that the people who talk about “metaverse” are particularly thinking about Stephenson’s Snow Crash. The word’s taken on a life of it’s own, usually referring to some kind of shared mixed reality.

Speaking of “metaverse” there’s a interesting-sounding conference called Metaverse U coming up at Stanford on the weekend of Feb 16-17, hosted by the Stanford Humanities Lab. I plan to attend at least part of this, though I won’t be speaking.

[Photo by Bruce Damer at the NASA Virtual Worlds conference]

The following is what I used on Jan 27, 2008, instead of Powerpoint slides for my talk “After the Orphidnet” at a Virtual Worlds conference held at the NASA Ames center, in the shadow of the Gothic Blimp Works at Moffet field. (Does anyone but me remember the tabloid East Coast comix zine of that name, ca. 1968?)

Links with info about other speakers can be found at Stan Trevena’s blog.

On to the “slides” for the talk…

My first novel about virtual reality, The Hacker and the Ants, was based on my experiences working as a programmer on the Autodesk Cyberspace project.

In my novel, an artificial life virus takes over the chips that live inside high-definition TVs. All you can see anymore on television is artificial ants. My hero is charged with treason.

I like using cyberspace to enter four-dimensional space, and I worked on some 4D VR models at San Jose state.

I’m also interested in highly dynamic virtual realities. In the January, 2008, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, Marc Laidlaw and I have a story, “The Perfect Wave” about a VR cave that simulates surf in real time.

I think the reliance on polygon-based cyberspaces might go away. I like the “locative art” notion of overlaying computer realities onto the physical world, taking advantage of the GPS grid.

William Gibson picked up on this in his recent book Spook Country, where he says cyberspace has everted, or turned inside out.

“‘And once it everts, then there isn’t any cyberspace, is there? There never was, if you want to look at it that way. It was a way we had of looking where we were headed, a direction. With the grid, we’re here. This is the other side of the screen.’” p. 64.

One SF idea for a reality-based VR is in my novel Saucer Wisdom : flying cameras called dragonflies.

In my latest novel, Postsingular, I talk about carpeting the planet with a GPS grid based on self-reproducing nanomachines called orphids.

Orphids self-reproduce using nothing but dust floating in the air. They’re not destructive. Orphids are territorial; they keep a certain distance from each other. They’ll cover Earth’s surface, yes, but only down to one or two orphids per square millimeter. They’re like little surveyors; they make meshes on things.

She let herself see the dots on her fingers, dots on her palms, dots all over her skin. The glowing vertices were connected by faint lines with the lines forming triangles. A fine mesh of small triangles covered her knuckles; a coarser mesh spanned the back of her hand. The computational orphidnet was going to have realtime articulated models of everything and everyone.

=====

The con was co-organized by the dynamic, multiferous, and cheerful Bruce Damer, photo below.

[Photo by the husband of the one true SF fan in attendance, who kindly asked me to autograph a book, but whose name I don’t remember.]