“The Perfect Wave” by Marc Laidlaw and me is the cover story of the January, 2008, issue of Asimov’s SF magazine.

I’m stoked; this is my second Asimov’s cover in six months, as Bruce Sterling and I scored for “Hormiga Canyon” in August, 2007.

Marc knows the “Perfect Wave” cover artist, Jeremy Bennett, and has a bit about him on the Laidlaw blog site, also a link to a big picture of the cover painting uncropped and unobscured by textual information.

The weird waves in our story were inspired by some nonlinear waves that I discovered in my CAPOW software.

I hiked up to the ridge above Castle Rock this week, carrying my paints and a canvas on my back. It was the first time I’ve been out in the woods in nearly two months. It felt so good. The wintry air cool and fresh. My muscles happy to be alive.

Looking for something to paint, I was struck by the low afternoon sun gilding the mossy edges of this tree.

Really I’d meant to paint one of the weird tafoni rocks there, but these glowing trees felt right, also the light was good, also there was a nice place to sit.

The receding lines of hills are pretty, and fairly easy to represent, you always see Sunday painters doing pictures of these. Back layers blue, middle layers green, front layers brownish.

An alien in the form of a manzanita or madrone trunk. Would be great to see a sped-up version of one of these trees running along the ridge.

It gets dark so freaking early this time of year. It’s night by 5. So why did they move the time back an hour? In my humble opinion, the two-times-per-year discontinuity in time-keeping called “Daylight Savings” is a deliberate move by our plastic industrialist rulers to dirempt our natural connection to the rhythms of nature. “They” want us to see Gaia as a mere machine which “they” control.

Why doesn’t anyone ever run for president on an important issue like the abolition of daylight savings time? When I was a boy in Kentucky, there was vigorous debate about the pols monkeying with “God’s time,” and daylight savings time was administered on a county by county basis, with counties swinging back and forth from year to year…

Ah, soft Edenic valleys. Looking past the ridge, I could see Monterey bay. I got a first compositional layer done on my picture, “Mossy Trees,” and need to work on it some more at home.

I got a lot of paint on myself. The only other people in the park were younger people with mounds of equipment for climbing on the rocks. They looked suspicious of me in my paint-stained Army-style overcoat. Such a thin line between a painter and a bum.

This cute little mandarin orange flew off our tree and landed on our porch railing. Sunny Californee!

On Thanksgiving, we went down to Four Mile Beach in Cruz, and then we went to the Davenport Cliffs.

These days I’m torn on whether or not to put SF things into landscapes. On the one hand I want to be able to do a landscape that stands on its own, on the other, it’s kind of fun to put in a tiny monster or UFO, like I did with “Davenport Cliffs.” “Lexington Reservoir” is a different kind of compromise; the birds LOOK kind of alien without actually being science-fictional. “The Talking Pitchfork” is yet another way of merging SF and landscape, here the alien being (a pitchfork) is the main element rather than a decoration. I’m not sure what I’ll do with “Mossy Trees.”

Glen says it would be a mistake to always put in an SF icon into every picture, he says that would be “Blue Dog art,” like that guy in Santa Fe (?) who sticks a “Where’s Waldo” type Blue Dog into every canvas he paints.

Love the view down off the lip of the Davenport Cliff.

Thinking about that painting while standing here, I’m running into the downside of trying to sell pictures: worrying about what’s commercial. I figure I can make “Mossy Trees” so hallucinatory that it doesn’t need a saucer. Speaking of selling pictures, I’ll have posters of my newer pictures online soon, and I put up a price list for a limited selection of them.

Yadda, yadda, yadda. Never mind that stuff, Ru, look at the gulls and green light through the breaking wave!

I found a terrific kelp “whip” at the beach and it followed me home. It has a float at the fat end, a long tapering stalk, and at the thin tip a “holdfast” that would have held it to the bottom. When alive, there’s ribbon-like leaves branching off the top of the float. I love these things. Tentacles!

Maybe a tentacle coming in the side of the frame in “Mossy Trees”?

Last week I finished writing Chapter 6 (out of eight) of Hylozoic, and now I’m writing a “thought experiment” story about infinity for an anthology about infinity for an academic publisher.

[Note the three-eyed skull in a Mission street-poster outside Atlas Cafe for a band called “Psychedelic Horseshi*t”.]

My working title is “The Aktuals.” In German, “actual infinite” is “aktual-unendlich,” and I plan to refer to my transfinite beings as Aktuals, thus the title.

I’d like the story that does for infinity what Flatland does for the fourth dimension. My story will begin with the discovery that we share our world with transfinite beings, followed by the realization that we ourselves are transfinite (or can become transfinite) and a dramatic exfoliation of the consequences.

I’m right at the tricky part that comes after the gerneralized B. S. and before the actual writing — the hard-to-explain transition where the muse comes to see me and I get an actual story.

Looking for input from the world right now. We spent the night in Berkeley after the concert, then killed the day in Berkeley and the Mission, going to a friend’s wedding Sat eve near Borderlands Books. My fans out, seining for visions.

The curry and coconut udon with grilled chicken soup at Noodle Theory.

I did my concert with Roy Whelden’s group last night, the music was lovely, and the projector was strong.

I served as the transducer crystal, connecting the sound to the video. It was a little tricky for me, keeping up with the changes. Like skiing steeply downhill in an unfamiliar videogame. And of course CAPOW, which never crashes, crashed a few times due to “demo effect,” but I was able to recover quickly each time.

I got to meet Karen Clark in the flesh, taller than expected, the woman who sang my words, “Oh man, we are in heaven, for sure, for sure.” Great to see her.

Combing the images of the weekend. The Asian students’ food court in the night off Telegraph Ave; the Bekeley bums screaming curses at me.

Looking out the window of the Durant Hotel this morning, pondering the odd twitching motions of the lower limbs that humans use to move themselves through space (they call it “walking.”)

The sunlight on the pastel walls near the Atlas Cafe in the Mission.

Sat in Ritual Roasters Coffee Shop later on. Some of the framed art on display consists of memoir-fragments hand-written black on white and framed. The closest talks about padding out on a surfboard at Ocean Beach for the first time in a long time. “I almost cried it felt so good.” And I’m like, yeah, I understand. And I’m thinking that in Kyoto I wouldn’t be able to read the writing, and if I could read it, the spot mentioned would mean nothing to me. It’s nice to be where I know what’s going on.

In Modern Times Books on Valencia street, I read a comic by the amazing Jim Woodring comic, “The Lute String, Part I,” in the latest issue of Mome, that shifts POV into a higher world with an elephant god (Ganesh?), and the elephant dances through starry space, leaving a multi-layer trail. One layer of the trail is our ordinary reality, Mom and Dad and the kids; another is a cloud of Hindu deities. Equally unlikely and strange.

Closing the book and looking up I see a guy, his head, he’s behind a bookcase, and I’m thinking how remarkable to be incarnated here, among the humans. I bought this issue of Mome for further study; above is the frame I’m talkin’ about. (In case you don’t know, “mome” means “far from home,” as in “the mome raths did outgrabe,” meaning, “the lost animals-somewhat-like-pigs made a noise like a bellow and a sneeze” —see Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass). I had raths in my novel Freeware, too.

I can think like a mome rath and outgrabe my infinity story now. Joy. I’m glad to be off the road and done with the PR push for Postsingular. My legs hurt. Out of the marketplace and back in the cave.

My writer pal John Shirley sent me a link to an article about mathematical physicist, A. Garrett Lisi, who’s written an exciting paper called, “An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything”. Some physicists are attacking the paper—and I’m not enough of physicist to judge who’s right. But as a mathematician, I like the idea of finding a simple mathy pattern underlying the messy heap that the physicists have made of their theories.

According to Lisi, all the known particles and forces can be regarded as nodes within a complex mathematical object called E8, a symmetric higher-dimensional polyhedron consisting of 248 vertices in eight-dimensional space, first discovered in 1887. I’ll show three different views of E8 taken from Lisi’s paper.

Since E8 is an eight-dimensional object, you can rotate in various ways to pop out new symmetries.

Lovely, huh?

Although E8 has been around for 130 years, it was just in March, 2007, that these funky mathematicians depicted above figured out the full details of it. They were funded by none other than Silicon Valley’s leading retail purveyor of computer hardware and software, Fry’s Electronics, who’ve founded AIM, the American Institute for Mathematics, which has a very nice E8 page.

Something cool about Garrett Lisi is that he spends a lot of time in Hawaii surfing.

This image is by Jeremy Bennett of New Zealand, and will appear on the cover of the January issue of Asimov’s SF for “The Perfect Wave” by Marc Laidlaw and me. The surf looks weird because it’s running a non-linear wave equation, just like CAPOW.