I had my first full day of work after the holiday break yesterday. It felt so good to be tidying everything up, removing some of the low-level anxiety that nags me when I know there are still holes in my plot. And it was nice simply to be working, back in my own world of thoughts.

Hylozoic is nearing a manageable state. I’m looking forward to finally having the titanium skeleton of story in place—and then being free to mold the foam rubber bulges of characterization, clothe the creation in eye-catching garnishes of description, and polish up the dialog.

Alas, last night about 3 a.m. I thought of some problems with Pekka. Here’s the situation (the axioms, if you will).

(1) The invading Peng birds come from the planet Pengö, which has a planetary mind that’s orchestrating the invasion. I am calling this mind Pekka—she’s a counterpoint to Earth’s planetary mind Gaia.

(2) In the current draft, Pekka appears to Jayjay in the form of a Peng bird on a beanstalk leaf partway out towards lazy eight infinity. In order to enslave Jayjay, Pekka weaves her body’s particle strings with the strings of his body, forming a quantum entanglement that can’t be jammed or blocked out in the same way that lazy eight teep signals can be jammed.

(3) Not being humanoid, the planetary mind Pekka is not capable of teleporting or teeking (affecting objects via telekinetic mental powers) or vaaring (using runes to create new objects from thin air, also known as direct matter control).
The difference betwen teeking and vaaring, is that if you can vaar, then you yourself can figure out the proper quantum computational program—called a rune—which will convert some existing chunk of matter into your targeted form. Designing a rune is so computationally demanding as to require, I believe, an infinite mind. Pekka does indeed have an infinite mind so she can design the necessary runes. Her difficulty is that she can’t put the runes onto Earth atoms; she needs a local slave or stooge for that.

(4) Pekka has powerful teep (telepathy), and can mentally contact humans or Peng tulpas on Earth.

(5) We may suppose, if necessary, that Pekka has been to infinity and is an aktual and has mental Turing Evaluator abilities, therefore she can design runes to achieve desired effects. But she can’t vaar them into atoms herself.

Now to lay bare the contradictions in this state of affairs and to deduce some additional assumptions which will resolve the logical clash!

Question: How does Pekka project a physical presence through infinity and partway down the eighth dimension towards Earth? Isn’t this presupposing an ability to teleport to Earth, which is exactly the ability that she doesn’t have?

Answer: Pekka didn’t produce that body, Groovy the pitchfork did! He vaared it into existence and hooked it up to Pekka’s teep, and Pekka quantum entangled that avatar’s body with Jayjay’s. Why, then, doesn’t Groovy just vaar all the Peng invaders directly onto Earth? He could, but he doesn’t want to, it’s too much trouble, and he doesn’t like Pekka well enough to carry out a sustained campaign on her behalf. And neither Pekka nor a loyal Peng aktual can do the vaaring work themselves, as only humanoids can teek.

Question: When Pekka did her very first planetary invasion on Brux, did she need a teeker aktual like Groovy to help her?

Answer: Not necessarily. We might suppose that the teeker zenohead Bruni on Brux was voluntarily willing to help Pekka invade. There is no absolute need for a quantum entanglement between Pekka and some given teeker who’s acting as her runecaster on a target world. The entanglement is only necessary if the teeker is (like Jayjay) an unwilling slave. If the teeker is an eager cooperator, teep can suffice.

Question: Why didn’t Pekka just nose around for a quisling human (e.g. a benighted fundamentalist) to help invade Earth? Why bother asking Groovy to make her an onsite avatar that can enslave Jayjay?

Answer: At the start of Hylozoic, Pekka doesn’t yet have the Chu & Kakar’s Snake operator—which allows any teeker at all to implement a Peng ranch by teeking a rune onto one single atom. Pekka needs to find a native teeker who has also become a zenohead by dint of climbing (or descending) a considerable distance into the subdimensions along the axis of the eighth dimension. And, as the unfurling of lazy eight is still so very new to Earth, there are, at the beginning of Hylozoic, no zenoheads at all on Earth. Eventually someone would have found the way, but Groovy proposes that he initiate an Earthling to zenohead status. Perhaps Groovy could have chosen an Earthling who’d be willing to help Pekka without coercion, but he finds Jayjay to be congenial, and it’s no serious difficulty for him to vaar an avatar for Pekka onto the beanstalk leaf.

And, ooo, I just thought of something else. The Pekka avatar can come down off the beanstalk and do soemething on Earth, like, say, trying to disembowel Chu lest he learn to spread the reset rune. Like having Hera come down of Mt. Olympus to snapify your ass.

[My cousin (and godson) Brian with his friend Jane.]

I like these new ideas. It’s pleasing to me that I wouldn’t necessarily have thought of these ideas on my own, and that it was the process of logical deduction that led me to them. Ah, what a sweet science is logic! I say this to echo a story that my college roommate Greg Gibson loved to recount, about the painter Paolo Uccello, as described in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists:

His wife used to say that Paolo would sit studying perspective all night, and when she called him to come to bed he would answer, “Oh, what a sweet thing this perspective is!”

You might say that for a novelist, particularly for a science fiction novelist, logic plays a role similar to that of perspective in the visual arts. It constellates the events into coherent patterns, and forces the artist into surprising acts of composition.

I’d say that movie screenplays and fantasy novels often turn away from logic. I can appreciate the value of sometimes abandoning logic—if this results from a deliberate artistic choice (rather than from incompetence or lack of care). Indeed, I’m thinking of pulling this move in Hylozoic’s culminating maelstrom scene.

On New Year’s Eve, my wife and I watched the second half of Ingmar Bergman’s supreme film Fanny and Alexander. There were these Jewish magicians who said something relevant. They said every pebble is alive (hylozoic!). They said that various realities overlay ours, the realities swarm around. And at the baptism at the end, Gustav Ekdahl says that we have our own “Little World” of peace and joy, even though ravening Evil has broken its chains and is on the prowl. All we can do is be happy while we’re happy.

In the very last scene, Grandmother Ekdahl is reading from August Strindberg’s notes to A Dream Play:

Everything can happen, everything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist; the imagination spins, weaving new patterns on a flimsy basis of reality.

My point is that I could abandon logic and have some inexplicable things in the maelstrom scene. I could end the maelstrom scene in a blackout and start up again back on Earth.

[Image by Paul Mavrides]

On a different theme, there’s vibby new science fiction blog called io9, with Annalee Newitz, Charlie Jane Anders, Kevin Kelly (not the Whole Earth Kevin Kelly, but a younger one,) and others—all blogging their heinies off. The blog is owned by a group called Gawker, and according to an entry on io9, Gawker bloggers get paid by their wordage and hitcounts. Rude Boy sez check it out.

So…I had a great Christmas with my family, one of the best.

I always have a little trouble staying calm during the holiday. I want to take control of events, I get overtired, I feel underappreciated.

Now that I’m a clean-living old man, I sometimes have wistful memories of how I’d deal with holidays in the old days, being in back rooms, basements, unused offices, drinking and getting high. Ducking responsibilities. Wallowing in raw sensory pleasure.

For this most recent holiday season, I formulated a notion of having a “basement in my mind.” A way of looking at things. Checking out for a few minutes, even though I’m there. Mentally letting go of responsibility and being a slacker. Staring off into space, drawing raw sensory pleasure from the reflections of light off objects. Being high.

And of course trying to be a kind, loving person helps too—the part of the equation I so easily forget.

On the literary front, I had two articles come out this month. My story “The Perfect Wave”, co-written with Marc Laidlaw in the January, 2008, Asimov’s SF, and a how-to article on “Gnarly CAs” in Make magazine #12, about using my Capow program for light-shows and art patterns.

Also I contributed an answer to this year’s Edge Question: WHAT HAVE YOU CHANGED YOUR MIND ABOUT? WHY? It’s always an honor to join the illustrious thinkers at the World Question Center.

[NOFX plays Rancid’s song, “Olympia, WA]

Best album of the year? Easy. It’s NOFX and Rancid, BYO Split Series Vol III. My two favorite punk bands playing each other’s songs. “Olympia WA” rules. I love that place, too. The live video above has pretty bad sound, there’s better sound on another YouTube post where some guy just puts up the MP3 with a picture of the album.

And here’s Rancid playing the same song in Tokyo. Lars Frederidkssen looks great.

[Rancid plays “Olympia, WA”]

Nosing around Youtube, I even found a video of the Ramones onstage with Rancid… Seek and ye shall find.

In my spare moments (and always in my subconscious), I’m trying to fix the plot of Hylozoic. The problems I’m working on are, like, too complicated to explain. Not really a good sign in terms of the book’s appeal!

Just to fill out this blog entry, here’s an excerpt from my (increasingly desperate) recent writing journal notes

With the runes finite, I still need to find a way to achieve my prime desideratum:

Runecasting requires a special capability that only Jayjay has.

I should explain that runecasting is the ability to alter the programs of ten tridecillion atoms in a hundred-kilometer-on-an-edge cube of space so as to generate matter holograms tulpas in the shape of invading Peng. Jayjay acquires the capability during his trippy vision at the end of Chapter One—a vision which I keep rewriting as I change my mind about the capability.

Atom Charmer Option (Discarded)
This comes out of a question I never though of asking before: why do the silps of atoms (or the silps of larger blocks of matter) allow someone to reprogram them? Teeking is one thing—you’re just moving the object. But maybe reprogramming is more invasive?

I could just mention atom charming as a skill that people have. Like another form of teek. Or I could act like it’s a skill that only Jayjay has. Atom charming is a crisp, binary ability, either you can charm atoms or you can’t. Less fuzzy perhaps than whether you are enough of a zenohead to nuke ten tridecillion atoms.

Here I’d have to ask how Jayjay learns to charm atoms. I see him going under the Planck frontier, he’s looking up at atoms like a submerged snapping turtle looking up at ducks on a pond, he can grab them by the legs. I hear the shocked, outraged squawk of an atom as I grab it. Why can only Jayjay do this? Does he still go to infinity at all? Or is it really just a matter of getting subdimensional view of things.

And I’d have to ask how Chu and the Crownies’ version of runecasting in Chapter Six works if they can’t charm atoms? Maybe they spray out a fog of slave atoms that have somehow been zombified. Maybe the slave atoms are the sh*t and p*ss and exhalations and sweat of Chu and the Crownies [the Crownies are right-wing fundamentalists who are, of course, whole-heartedly supporting the alien invasion as it will reduce creativity and originality]. Nice symbol of pollution/exploitation. And their atoms infect the other atoms, but it doesn’t spread perfectly smoothly which means that the tulpas the create are a bit feeble and clunky. For this to work, we have to assume that you are able to charm your own atoms, so we have a kind of petitio principe, which is unsatisfying.

Zenohead Option (Implemented)

This approach is only a slight deviation from what I was saying when I thought runes were infinite. Instead of saying that Jayjay’s capability is that he can have infinite thoughts, I say the capability is that he can think quite fast. Call this becoming a zenohead, zenobrain, zenoteeker, a zenobrain teeker, a zenohead teeker—let’s go with zenohead.

Being a zenohead helps him speed up his mind enough to rapidly program ten tridecillion, that is, 10^43 atoms in a row. (Possibly being a zenohead also helps you understand the perhaps very large rune. (Later, Chu will round-off the large runes as well as chunking them onto larger sites.))

In earlier drafts, I’d been taking the zenohead ability for granted, but now I should make a big deal about it. Note that if I’m not using actually infinite runes or infinite numbers of atoms, we’re not talking about a qualitatively new power, it’s just a matter of having a still-more-powerful mind. Another step towards intelligence amplification. I can speak of the Zeno speed-up as a new technique that only Jayjay learns. Carrying out a Zeno speed-up, or even a lesser speed-up is done by taking advantage of matter’s infinite divisibility.

Note that if Jayjay actually has to touch all those atoms, there is some fixed cost q per atom, so he needs q * 10^43 units of energy. Suppose he’s siphoning it up from the subdimensions, and that’s another part of being a zenohead, the access to “subdimensional energy.”

A seeming problem with saying that uniquely Jayjay can think fast is that people are already doing very large tasks by accessing their lazy eight RAM (in principle it’s infinite). But we can suppose that they’re not actually using such very big data bases.

I had worried that using teep requires a Zeno speed-up, as you’re sending a teep signal the infinite distance up to bounce off lazy eight. But your mind doesn’t have to make the trip with the teep signal. Perhaps theoretically it’s known that the signal does the speed-up, and the extrinsic/intrinsic distinction is known, but actually doing it in your own head by utilizing your body’s endless number of levels is a new skill that Jayjay learns when he becomes a zenohead.

In order to make Jayjay a zenohead, the pitchfork took Jayjay into Subdee. At first the path into Subdee looked like a tunnel, and Jayjay is scared. The pitchfork reversed the figure and ground, and the tunnel looked like that vine he thought he climbed. But they only go partway up.

“What came first, the chicken or the egg?”

December 20, 2007. A taped phone interview with Jason Rennie on his “Sci Phi Show” site. The topic is my novel POSTSINGULAR. Sound quality is so-so.

I’ve just about finished my latest painting, “Giant’s Head.” A couple of weeks ago, I blogged about climbing to the site in Castle Rock park. I might touch up the clinging hand one more time. Maybe the painter is falling off! I really was kind of scared on that rock.

I won’t be blogging much more till January. The holiday rush, etc. We repainted my office and I’m still rearranging and moving stuff.

In my free time, I’m revising the earlier chapters of Hylozoic. It’s incredible how much time it takes to do a revision. The rereading goes very slowly, as does the typing in of the changes I write on the printout. I have to think a lot, weighing the options.

And I still have to figure out the ending. A lot of this is subconscious. Like a chess computer playing out a very large number of possible endgames. My favorite way to work subconsciously is to get out and walk in the woods!

Meanwhile, all the best from California — have a Merry X and a Great 8!

And may all your eights be lazy!