This is a fairly long blog post. In my usual fashion, I’ll break up the text blocks with photos. Some of today’s images are from a recent trip to Italy. They have (at least superficially) no connection with the text. But never forget the Surrealist principle that everything illuminates everything!

“Nine Dragons” acrylic on canvas, October, 2019, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

Like a Book Review

I recently read Annalee Newitz’s second novel, The Future of Another Timeline. It’s great. I was beguiled by the prose, fond of the characters, absorbed by the action, and intrigued by Newitz’s notions about time editing.

Men get harsh treatment in this book’s pages. Monstrous male villains from the future are trying to enslave women throughout all of history. The loss of voting rights and the denial of abortion rights aren’t enough for these goons. They’d like to see women who lack hands and who maybe don’t even have heads. Newitz’s heroines have max impact against these GOPpy creeps.

Meanwhile (if that word makes sense in a time travel novel) the younger versions of our characters are hanging out in the 1990s. I like their conversations. “We talked for a while about the stupidity of Disney World, and how it was like wanting to take a vacation inside a plastic replica of a vacation.” [Sorry, Cory!] And there’s a nice evocation of them at a rock concert, as seen by one of their future selves:

What really jolted me was the way people occupied themselves as they waited for the music to start. Nobody was texting or taking selfies. And without phones, people didn’t know what to do with their eyes. I didn’t either.

As well as going to rock shows, the younger characters are butchering sex-offenders in scenes of full-on horror gore. Not for the squeamish, but sick-funny in a Grand Guignol way. And, hey, they’re only killing men, so really it’s okay. No worse than squashing bugs.

To remove any lingering moral ambiguity, one of the women gives up serial killing—after a talking-to from her time-travelling future self. Newitz springs a fresh take on this normally mandatory time-travel-novel cliché.

I was wondering whether I’d ever see [my future self] Tess again. Would I grow up into her, and have to come back in time to visit myself? From what I’d learned in our unit on time travel, that was fake movie pseudoscience. It was more like her visit had reshuffled the timeline, generating a new history and future in its wake. Only Tess would remember the timeline that existed before her edit.

Regarding being a killer or not, at the very end of the novel this character realizes she was meant to be one all along.

Maybe that was why I belonged in the first century B.C.E. In Nabataean, there was a word for what I did best. There was actually a job that combined my skills as an academic and a murderer.
“I think I’d like to be an assassin.”
Hugayr smiled. “Great! We’ve really been needing one.”

The savage settling of scores is refreshing in these fraught times, and the book is a punk feminist anthem. We’ve seen enough bromantic sword-fighting, macho, jaw-jutting oink-fests, for sure. And the time travel scenes are enchanting.

Rain swarmed around us, full of fat hot drops and freezing bullets of hail, and we held each other in the void that meant history was still mutable. I concentrated on my friends, and how their breathing felt next to mine. We seemed to spin slowly, like a drifting asteroid or a diatom in the ocean’s water column.

The novel also features a thread of warm historical-fiction interplay involving women’s suffrage, family planning, belly dancing, and goddess worshipping. Things can be quite cozy when men aren’t around. And Newitz is wonderful at sketching scenes. Here’s old Chicago.

Wednesday night was humid. Sunset spread like a rash over the water, and the reek of rotting pig guts in the river mingled with smoke from roasting nuts.

Read The Future of Another Timeline! It’s cosmic, nasty, thoughtful fun.

Timeline Edits

My main goal today is to ponder the SF machinery in Newitz’s epic. The novel is about editing our timeline. That’s a geeky, techie concept I can wrap my monkey mind around. I realize that others have analyzed time travel, but rather than summarizing past efforts, I’ll wing this essay on my own.

This said, I’ll mention that a good recent survey is Damien Broderic, The Time Machine Hypothesis. And the Encyclopedia of Science Ficion, has many, many links.

I’ve thought about time travel a lot over the years. And this month a time travel story by Marc Laidlaw and me is appearing in Asimov’s: “Surfers at the End of Time.”

The idea behind timeline-editing is to change your past so your present is more like you want it to be. That is, people hop to past times, do things there, and hop back to the era where they started. When competing groups are editing the timeline you get what’s known as a “change war” or a “time war.” The Future of Another Timeline is about an ongoing time war.

But let’s back up for a second. As is known to all SF readers, timeline editing leads to odd situations. Suppose I’m sick of the corrupt and evil Premier Treadle. I hop back seventy years and drown him as a lad. Then I hop back to our present day. No more Treadle. Hooray!

But wait. Assuming my memories remain intact, I’ll notice that the present which I return to is not the same as the present I started from. It used to have Treadle, and now it doesn’t. How can one and the same present have two different forms?

The paradox gets particularly intense if you go back in time and depressively kill your own self as a child. If you then hop back your starting time, you’re in a world where you yourself have been dead for decades. So how can you even exist?

A separate issue is the fact that when we’re doing timeline-editing, or doing any kind of time travel at all, we get into different dimensions or levels or directions of time. That is, if I talk about the former, unedited version of my present as being in my personal “past,” that means that my life’s individual timeline is distinct from the world’s overall timeline.

Getting all lit-crit on your ass, the actions of time travelers are narrated as a (harrumph) diegesis, that as in a POV stream of experience that includes its own arrow of time. The individual’s diegetic time can be distinct from the world’s time. This is a large and stinky elephant in the living room, and it’s not often discussed.

So I’ll get back to elephant in a minute, but let’s say a bit more about the paradox issue first.

Option 1: Paradoxes Don’t Happen

One option is just to insist that the paradoxes don’t happen. You go back in time planning to kill young Treadle but, for whatever reason, you somehow don’t manage to. Or you go back and kill your earlier self, and maybe it seems like you’re successful, but guess what, your earlier self does not in fact really die, they have a miraculous recovery, accompanied by complete amnesia about nearly being killed, so there’s not paradox.

This move appears in a number of Golden Age time-travel stories.

And it’s the route that Marc Laidlaw and I recently took in our story “Surfers at the End of Time”, as I describe it in my on it post on it. I once had a chance to discuss time travel with the god-like logician Kurt Gödel, and he said, “Why not suppose that the world always arranges itself so that these paradoxes do not occur. If something is logically impossible, then it doesn’t happen. A priori logic is very powerful.”

Option 2: Multiple Timelines

The standard boilerplate time-travel-novel move is to say that, when you hop back in time, you don’t enter the the past of your own original timeline, which we’ll call timeline A. You go to the past of a parallel timeline B. And the changes you make in the past of B will be in effect in the present-day era of B, but not in the present-day era of A. You will have made timeline B into a better world than timeline B by deleting the foul Treadle. Or maybe you’ve made B into a sadder, duller timeline be deleting your fabulous and scintillating self.

Fine.

A variation on the theme of parallel timelines is to talk about branching timelines. Recently Bill Gibson integrated this move very smoothly into his wonderful novel The Peripheral, which I discussed on my blog. If you go to this page, also check out San Jose physicist Ken Wharton’s incisive comment at the end of the post.

The branching timeline idea is that I hop to the past of my timeline A and make a change (or, in Gibson’s case, make a change by opening a transtemporal communication channel to the past). And then (in which timestream is the diegetic “then” situated? ) timeline A splits off a branch or pokes out a stub that we can call timeline B. Your intervention occurs in the forked-off timeline B, but not in timeline A.

In either case, a new question arises.

When you hop forward from the past of B to the present day, what happens? Do you end up in crappy old A or in the nice new B? If you return to the present of timeline A, then you’re back in a world still addled with the vile Treadle, so your excursion has accomplished nothing in terms of improving your own life. And nobody in A will even have noticed that you were gone. You maybe disappeared for maybe a split second while you were doing your time excursion. Unsatisfying. What do you really care if some invisible timeline (or timeline-branch) B is okay, if your still in crappy timeline A?

It’s more customary to suppose that you hop from the past of B to the present of B. This feels right if you suppose that your intervention in fact produced the branch timeline B. If you hatched B, then maybe you ought to be staying in it.

On the other hand, if we’re using the Peripheral set-up, in which you don’t physically travel to the past, but you only send some signals to the past, then you yourself never really leave timeline A, so you will still be in timeline A, and the changes will be off in timeline B, which you can’t see.

[I can’t resist a joke here. Gibson says the trans-temporal communication links are made via a certain “server”—but nobody knows where it is. Might it be in…the Ukraine? Might this server have been operative in the emergence of that hideous election-gone-wrong stub that we’ve been suffering in since November, 2016?]

There are a few issues with hopping from the present of timeline A to the past of timeline B.

First of all, when you hop from the present of timeline A to the past of B, and then stay in in B, you disappear permanently from the present of A, never to be seen again in timeline A.

Second of all, if you hop from the present of A to the past of B and then to the present of B, it seems likely there will be a version of you already in the present era of timeline B there. A You-B. Do you move in with You-B? Have sex with them? Kill them? For nearly all possible versions, see the unforgettable and sexually louche time-travel extravaganza, The Man Who Folded Himself by David Gerrold.

If you want to avoid dealing with You-B, you might suppose there is in fact no You-B at all in timeline B. Maybe whenever you enter a new timeline B, it’s automatically lacking a You-B version of you. Would be handy. Like the omniscient transtemporal mulitiversal Great Spirit of the timelines has removed any copy of you from any timeline you are going to jump to. Somehow this makes me think of cleaning shrimp, and getting that dark shit-filled veins out of the shrimps’ backs. Your copies’ timelines being the shit veins, you understand.

Against Multiple Timelines

I’ve harped on this before, but basically I don’t like parallel worlds solutions to time travel. I think they’re wasteful, and I think they undermine one’s interest in the timelines involved. If all kinds of timelines are possible, then why should I care about any particular one of them? If everything happens, then nothing matters.

Even worse than multiple timelines is full multiverse worlds in which every possible world is just as real as ours. This is complete bullshit. An utter abandonment of common sense. Our world is rich and beautifully crafted, and not some random piece of crap.

I feel there really is some kind of underlying Logos. A secret of life. A white light. A cosmic aha. A glow. A magic mantra. Maybe there are a few alternate worlds, I’m okay with that. But not a buzzing gnat swarm of them.

The Newitz Option: Two Dimensional Time

Newitz takes an approach to the time paradoxes that’s kind of strange. She allows time travel and timeline editing. But she insists that there’s only one timeline. No parallel timelines, no branching timelines. Just our one timeline: “Our only timeline, whose natural stability emerged from perpetual revision.”

So, somehow, when you travel back in time, you alter the timeline..for everyone. But you yourself remember how it was before the change. This might be viewed as hopping to a different timestream, but Newitz doesn’t want that. She wants to have just one timestream. But the timestream is changing.

Geologists [Newitz’s word for students of time travel] agreed that the timeline was constantly in flux. Travelers exposed to edits returned with memories of lost histories, previous versions of the timeline they had witnessed.

Change means passage of time. So if the timestream is changing, that means there’s a second dimension of time which is, as it were, perpendicular to our normal direction of time. Let’s use the word meta-time for the second direction of time. As meta-time elapses, our entire universe of space time evolves. Like a twitching mollusc. At least this is how I see it, although Newitz has a slightly different image of what’s going on.

In a way, there are many timelines. But only one exists in our universe. The others are possibilities. Every time we change history, it’s as if we pull a segment from one of those other timelines into our own. The more we edit, the more our timeline becomes a patchwork. That’s why travelers remember so many different timelines. Each of us recalls the timeline before we made our changes. Every traveler has a slightly different patchwork in our memories.

When one philosopher want to harsh on another one, they’ll say the the other one’s views are “incoherent.” Is the idea of pulling in segments from other possible timelines incoherent? I wouldn’t go that far.

But if you don’t want the alternate timelines to be real, I think it’s better to stress that you’re editing our one timeline over the passage of meta-time. And that those other possible future timelines are imaginary.

Restating this, some of the other timelines are versions of our timeline that date back to early moments of meta-time. One of the timelines is our timeline as of this moment in meta-time. And the many, many other timelines are imaginary possible timelines that we might reach with the passage of meta-time. But we will in fact evolve into only a limited number of those options.

The time machines in the book are geological sites called Machines. Nobody knows where they came from. Newitz says, “the Machines are like … threads. They sew swatches together into a single quilt.”

This image is, again, close to being incoherent. I’d prefer to say that the Machines are like timestream-editing tools. The other timelines are not “out there.” As I understand it, in the context of The Future of Another Timeline, , the women characters and the evil men from the future are using the Machines to alter the timeline.

To me that’s not so much like quilting as it’s like having several people editing one and the same Photoshop image at once. Or, more to the point, like several people editing the same document at once. The document being the Great Book of Life, the Akahasic record of all time.

I used this image in my novel Mathematicians in Love, where I had a divine jellyfish fully re-editing our entire timestream once a week—where of course the week was elapsing in meta-time.

This said, the quilting image is also apt, if you think in terms of appliqué. The time travellers are editing spots of history as if inserting new fabric. And always remember that, as they do this, meta-time is passing, and the whole timestream is writing like a Santa Cruz banana slug.

Maybe the most confusing thing about the Newitz universe is that she insists that after you go back in time and make a timeline edit, you yourself will still remember how the world was before you changed it—even though nobody else in the world will remember the old world. You the timeline editor are unique. I’d like to see a nice coherent theory of how this works, and maybe, in the future of another timeline, I’ll work it out.

For now, let’s just say that, when you’re time-editing, you’re moving “sideways” in meta-time, and you’re in some way immune to the overall alteration of the timeline.

The main plot hook in the novel is kind of cool. If all the [time] Machines were destroyed, then the people in the timeline would be unable to make any further timeline edits. And the goal of those dastardly male turds from the future is in fact to edit the world into a really crappy anti-woman state—and simultaneously to destroy all the Machines so that everyone is stuck inside that one crappy world for the rest of time and for the rest of meta-time. Dead end.

We’re living in a timeline where the [time] Machines are being damaged. Soon, we could be in one where the Machines don’t work at all.

Eeek. And why does this feel so very much like the current political horror-show of our United States?

Thank you, Annalee for your call to arms! See you further down the winding road of meta-time.

My latest story with Marc Laidlaw is in the Nov-Dec, 2019, Asimov’s SF magazine. Today’s blog post is a copy of a post I put on the Asimov’s blog. And thanks to Emily Hockaday for making that happen.

“Surfers at the End of Time” is the seventh story that Marc and I have collaborated on. All but one of the tales are SF surfing stories that feature two guys called Zep and Del.

Often when I collaborate, I’ll do what I call a transreal move, that is, I’ll have the story be about two people, and one of the characters is somewhat like me, and the other is like my co-author. To some extent Zep is like me, and Del is like Marc. This said, we often ventriloquize each other’s characters, in that Marc might write Zep scenes and I might write Del.

This time out, we wanted to do a time-travel story. We’d talked about this for a few years. At first we were focused on the notion of flooded cities, with the sea-level half-way up on the sky-scrapers. This theme was featured in the excellent 2001 Brian Aldiss inspired movie, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and there’s a touch of it in Tomorrowland too. Marc had imagined surf contests amid the buildings. But in 2017, just as we were ready to start, Kim Stanley Robinson pretty much used up the trope with his New York 2140. Marc and I did write some nice flooded-San-Francisco scenes, but we needed more.

Marc was enthused about the H. G. Wells novel The Time Machine—and about the 1960 movie version directed by George Pal. I watched the movie online, and I dug it. We wanted to use Wells’s classic scene where the Time Traveler goes so far into the future that the sun is bloated and the Earth is nearly lifeless. Thus our title: “Surfers at the End of Time.” I like to pronounce the last word like I’m in an echo chamber: “Tiyiyiyiyiiiiiimmmme.” You know.

Since Marc and I both know Ocean Beach in San Francisco pretty well, we decided to start our story there. A significant research element was William Finnegan’s memoir Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life. The book has a long section about Mark “Doc” Renneker surfing the intensely cold and gnarly waves at the SF beach—you can read it online in the New Yorker.

We felt the time machine should be in some sense a surfboard, and I spotted a cool-looking little “hand board” in the wee Santa Cruz Museum of Surfing which is inside a diminutive lighthouse by Steamers Lane.. Marc had the idea of having the boys activate the time machine by scribing an intricate mandala-like sigil upon the face of the sea.

We expanded on the notion of a time sigil by imagining an intricate, arabesque spacetime diagram of our boys’ worldlines. I redrew the figure ten times while we where working on the story. I’m a little surprised how complicated it turned out, but that’s where the logic leads. I kept sending the successive diagrams to Marc, but he wasn’t always that into trying to decipher them. The dude wasn’t a math major!

At least the diagram helped me a in terms of planning the complex plot of the story. Time travel is a bitch. Like, you need to be careful not to imagine that the characters can predict the abrupt and non-causal appearances of time travelers. And, as I’ll discuss below, there’s the matter of time paradoxes.

In the diagram, you’ll notice five names at the top, and these names correspond to the five worldlines below. Gother and Sally are women that Zep and Del meet, and Lars is kind of gnome called a murg. As I’ll discuss shortly, he has a closed-loop worldline.

In time travel stories you always have to deal with the issue of possible time paradoxes. There are two main types of problems.

(1) Closed Causal Loop. A creature like Lars the murg appears at time and place X with a handboard time machine. You hang out with him for awhile, making your way forward in time. And once you and Lars are in the future, he uses his time machine to hop back to the time and place X. Who produced the murg? Who invented the time machine? They produced themselves. Their worldlines are loops. Is this a problem? Not really. There’s no real contradiction in a Closed Causal Loop. It’s just odd. But we can live with odd. Especially in a Zep & Del surfin’ SF story!

(2) Yes and No. Your future self comes back in time and chops you and your friend in half with a broadsword. If you die, then your future self doesn’t exist, so he doesn’t kill you, so then your future self exists, so he does come back and kill you. A contradictory situation. A standard journeyman SF-writer solution is to say that, when you travel back in time, you don’t actually go back into your own timeline. You go into the past of a parallel world. I don’t like this solution; I think it’s facile and dull. My deeper problem is that, if there a zillion parallel worlds, then everything happens. An if everything happens, then nothing matters. And then cares what happens to your characters?

Once in awhile, sure, I’ll invoke an alternate world—like if I need a world who’s physics is wildly different from ours—like if I want a world with infinitely high mountains, or with an endlessly wide plain. But it seem cheap to invoke parallel worlds just to avoid a piddling little yes-and-no time travel paradox. Like using an H-bomb to light a joint. There’s always gonna be a tricky way out of any seeming paradox, if you think hard enough.

In “Surfers at the End of Time” our characters Zep and Del travel up and down the timeline, and they do, at times, encounter past or future versions of themselves. So how do we avoid Yes and No paradoxes without invoking alternate worlds? As the great logician Kurt Gödel once suggested to me, “Let’s suppose that the world always arranges itself so that these paradoxes do not occur. If something is logically impossible, then it doesn’t happen. A priori logic is very powerful.”

As I’ve already hinted, in the opening sections of our story, it appears as if a Viking-like Zep from the future comes back and slices both the original Zep and the original Del in half. Ye and No paradox? Well, it doesn’t have to be—if our boys don’t die. But how do they survive being chopped in half across their waists by a huge broadsword? Well, not to give too much away, let’s just suppose that the boys’ severed halves are treated with some special futuristic biomedicine… Like good old Kurt Gödel says: “The a priori is very powerful!”

By the way, I got the idea of future Zep being like a Viking when my wife and I went to our son Rudy’s family Halloween party in San Francisco. And in the kitchen I met a friend of Rudy’s named John Bowling. He was wearing a horned Viking helmet, and had his long hair partly in braids, and he had a long beard. He was wiry and lively, and he told me he’s a big wave surfer and that he lived in a condo on the Great Highway by San Francisco’s Ocean Beach—exactly where Marc and I wanted Zep and Del to live. I texted Marc a photo of the Viking surfer dude, and Marc texts back, “HE’S A TIME TRAVELLER, DUDE.” Synchronicity! Times like this I feel like I’m dancing with the Muse.

It was fun to work with Marc again, and not be writing on my own. Collaborating takes longer than writing alone, and at times it’s a little stressful to iron out the necessary shared decisions. But a collaborator like Marc puts in all kinds of beautiful, inspired stuff that I would never have thought of. And I end up thinking about the story more deeply. And the story ends up being funnier. I’m not necessarily trying to write funny stories—I’d hate to be called an SF humorist—but I like it if a story makes people smile or even laugh out loud. And it’s even better if it’s kind of sad and tragic and romantic as well. Like life itself.

By the way, about two months before our story appeared, I saw our real-world Zep inspiration again, and he explained to me that Dorito chips are excellent models of waves with tubes.  He said he’d had a collection of about twenty really good ones, but that his wife had thrown them out.

Party on, Zep. Party on, Del.

 

Talk by Rudy Rucker for
Internet Festival 2019 in Pisa, Italy,
Friday, October 11, 2019, 15:00 - 17:00,
CENTRO CONGRESSI LE BENEDETTINE, Aula B,
With Ran Zhang and Daniele Brolli.

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Where I’m From

I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky during the 1950s and 60s. I read a lot of science fiction. And I was fascinated by the Beat writers Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. I wanted to be a novelist.

In 1963, I left Louisville, and went to college. I wanted to be a writer, but I majored in Mathematics. I didn’t like the English Lit classes. I figured I’d learn to write fiction on my own.

After Swarthmore, I married my college girlfriend, Sylvia. I got a Ph. D. in mathematics. I went on to have a fairly good career as a writer. I’ve published about forty books. I’ve written popular science books about infinity, about the fourth dimension, and and about the nature of computation. Many of my books are science fiction novels.

My best-known novel is Software, written in 1980. It was one of the earliest cyberpunk novels.

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What is cyberpunk?

Simple answer: Cyberpunk = Cyber + Punk.

The cyber idea behind Software seems simple now.

• You can make a software copy of your mind and load it onto a robot.

You’ve seen this scenario in a hundred movies and TV shows. But I was the first one to write about it. In 1980, “soul as software” was an unheard of thought. Hardly anyone even knew the word “software.”

To make my Software punk, I made the brain-to-software transfer gnarly. A gang of scary-funny hillbillies extracted people’s mental software by slicing off the tops of their skulls and eating their brains with cheap steel spoons. One of the hillbillies was a robot in disguise, and his stomach analyzed the brain tissue. Did I mention that I grew up in Kentucky?

I went on to write three sequels: Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware. They’re collected in my Ware Tetralogy. And you can read my Complete Stories for free online. Read one of my stories before you go to sleep tonight. You’ll have interesting dreams.

 

Early in my career I began collaborating with the “almost Italian” writer, Bruce Sterling. We recently published a book called Transreal Cyberpunk with nine stories that we wrote over the last thirty years.

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Back to my life story. In grad school I was a hippie, in the Eighties I was a punk, and after that I settled down to being a cyberpunk. Even so, I’m a reliable family man, with three children, and five grandchildren.

A photo of my cyberpunk children in the early 1980s.

Being a respected writer doesn’t necessarily pay very well, so for most of my life I had a day job. I was a math professor until I was forty, and then we moved to California, and I became a computer science professor at San Jose State, in Silicon Valley.

I let the chip into my heart. As well as teaching CS, I did some work as a software engineer at Autodesk. I published several programs involving cellular automata, chaos, videogames, and artificial life. You can get these for free online.

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Cyber

Cyberpunk is about computers merging into our reality. Cyberpunk explores the dancing boundaries among humans, daily life, and computers. The real world is blending with the computer world.

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Software → People. Programs imitate us.

• Software bots emulate partial human functions, taking over our jobs.
• Hand-coding a full human-level AI is literally impossible, (proved by Alan Turing).
• But we can evolve human-level AI…using neural nets…but we won’t know how they work.

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People → Software. We augment ourselves with bots and robots.

• People enhance themselves with apps on devices.
• Apps can move to biocomputing symbiotes…to wear like leeches, like the “uvvy” discussed below.
• The goal is digital immortality. Uploading into the cloud, or into an android bot, or into an animal.

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Software ↔ Reality. The cloud merges with daily life.

• Our daily world is saturated with the ubiquitous internet. Like damp sand is wet with water.
• Face to face conversations are replaced by messaging, video, and social.
• . We shop online with e-commerce.
• We use VR to emulate the world, for entertainment, for training, and for predictions.

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Punk

Punk is about maintaining our individuality, our independence, and our attitude.

Computers aren’t everything. Behaving like a robot is unpleasant. It’s more fun to be human.

The VR worlds of videogames are too clean. Even their scuff marks are clean. As Bruce Sterling once said, “We cyberpunks need to get in there with our spray cans.”

The physical world is grungy and gnarly. Wherever I am, I always look for the chaos, the natural gnarl, and when I find it I feel safer.

Punk is about turning your back on conventional top-down rules. Cyberpunk film and literature breaks free of the boring old plastic, white-bread visions of the future. And folding in more of our actual, daily world.

Punk is for countercultural, decentralized politics. Like, “You’re not my boss. I’m not listening. I’m doing it my way.” In a nutshell?

Punk means give the finger and walk away.

We want to be invisible, to have privacy, and to evade central control.

Don’t get permission, just do it.

Lifebox

I have a preliminary model for full human emulation. This is called a lifebox, and I wrote about it in my tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. In the next few years we’ll see lifeboxes as consumer products

A lifebox has three layers.

• Data. A large and rich data base with a person’s writings, plus videos of them, and recorded interviews.
• Search. An interactive search engine. You ask the lifebox a question, it does a search on the data, and it comes up with a relevant answer. Like Googling a website.
• AI. A veneer of AI. An evolving neural net.

You can “talk” to a dead person if you have access to an online copy of their lifebox. The lifebox remembers each user’s search history and inputs—and pieces together a semblance of a continuing conversation

When you talk to an online lifebox, it might show an animated model of the lifebox creator. Or it might just be a little talking box with no screen. Here’s two kids talking to their dead Grandpa’s lifebox. They ask rude questions.

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A person’s flow of thought is captured by links among the lifebox items. The links express the author’s sensibility, that is, the person’s characteristic way of jumping from one thought to the next.

How do you create your lifebox? First you can input your writings, your emails, your social media posts, your photos, and the like.

Beyond this the lifebox can interview you, prompting you to tell it stories. The lifebox links your anecdotes via the words and phrases you use. To clarify the data structure, the lifebox asks follow-up questions.

Note that humans build mental lifeboxes of their lovers and friends. In an intimate verbal conversation, language feels as effortless as singing or dancing. The ideas flow and the minds merge. Your internal lifebox models draw on a clear sense of your partner’s history and core consciousness.

By way of enhancing traditional text and image communications, people might use lifeboxes to introduce themselves to each other. Like studying someone’s home page before meeting them.

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Telepathy

Our words act as instructions for assembling thoughts. But telepathy could work differently. By way of analogy, think about three different ways you might tell a person about something you saw.

Like this cool image from San Francisco. How to share it?

• Text. Give a verbal description of the image, via voice or via message.
• Image. Show them a photo.
• Link. Give them a link to the photo on your webpage.

In showing you this post, I’m using words and bitmaps to get you to emulate my thoughts. But what if we had telepathy? I like to use the word teep for telepathy. I don’t think commercial, tech-based telepathy is very far off.

Let’s imagine a brain-wave-based cell phone. I call such a device an uvvy. An uvvy might instead be like a removable piezoplastic leech that perches on the back of a user’s neck. Or it might be a biocomputing leech.

An uvvy can read your brainwaves. and transmit the patterns to someone else.

And an uvvy can receive brainwave patterns and etch them into your own brain. You are directly experiencing each other’s thoughts.

The most obvious use of an uvvy would be to use it like a videophone which also includes emotions and physical sensations. We’d use it for teep.

A possible problem with brain-link teep is that you might have trouble deciphering the intricate structures of someone else’s thoughts—seen from the inside.

Sharing lifeboxes could help make sense of another person’s internal brain links.

That is, as well as using ethereal brain-wave-type signals, you’ll want to use hyperlinks into the other user’s lifebox . The combination of the two channels can make the teep comprehensible.

Immortality

A lifebox is a software model of a person. If you have a lifebox, are you immortal?

Preserve your software, the rest is meat?

Two problems.

• Software doesn’t seem to be conscious and self-aware.
• We want to be embedded in the physical, natural world. We want sensations, and we want to be able to touch things.

It seems possible to develop a strong AI that it enjoys self-awareness. The essence may be to model one’s sense of “watching yourself watch yourself”

We might call self-conscious lifebox a ghost.

Where does the ghost live? You don’t want Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook or Lifebox, Inc., to own your ghost. You want your ghost to be a free agent.

So okay, store your lifebox ghost in a rock, let’s say it’s your tombstone.

Rocks have a lot of computational power….given that they contain an octillion particles joined in a parallel quantum computation.

That’s fine, but you also want to be running a body that can walk around and feel things. You might embody yourself as some kind of machine—an android, a drone, or even a bulldozer.

But natural bodies are where it’s at. They’re gnarly and dirty and interesting. Where there’s filth, there’s life!

If you’re pushy, you might want to take over another person’s body, or share it with them. Or you might use a fresh, tank-grown human body. Or use an animal!

Put your tombstone mind inside a dog.

I use the expression juicy ghost for a lifebox model-ghost that’s running in the body of an animal, like a human, or a dog, a bird, or an insect.

I recently wrote a subversive political story about this called “Juicy Ghost.” You can read it online in a zine called Big Echo.

What if your juicy ghost body dies? Well, you’ve stored your lifebox within the quantum computations of the rock that is your tombstone, so now you can download yourself into any fresh human or animal body that passes by.

And thus you become immortal as a series of juicy ghosts, a series of living avatars, each with sense organs, mobility, and an ability to act in the world.

And all these wonders are thanks to cyberpunk!

References

I discussed the lifebox in my futurological novel, Saucer Wisdom.

I write about the lifebox in more technical detail in my popular science book,The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul>.

See also my Complete Stories , especially the stories “Soft Death” and “Juicy Ghost.”

My novel Software is part of the Ware Tetralogy.

I have a rudimentary lifebox for myself online as, “Search Rudy’s Lifebox,” at www.rudyrucker.com/blog/rudys-lifebox

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Today I’ve got a bunch of photos with captions.  Each caption is above the corresponding photo, as opposed to below the image, which is where I often put them.

Sylvia and I saw the Stones concert at Levi Stadium in San Jose. I got StubHub tickets on the last day, and the seats were pretty close to the stage, and at a decent price. Sylvia was glad. We’ve seen them about five or six times over the years, going back to 1972, when we went to Madison Square Garden with our pals Fran and Jim Carrig. Jim’s dead, but I always think of him when I see the Stones.

The “Sympathy for the Devil” performance lasted about fifteen minutes, we got lost in it, and it took me away, which is one of the things I really want from music. That’s good old Mick there. Back from the valley of the shadow of Death. He didn’t whip the stage with his belt like he did in 1972. Jim Carrig and I used to do that with our own belts after we saw the 72 performance, merry, callow youths that we were..

These days I worship Keith even more. The blues. They had really great video screens on the stage. By the way I recently watched Scorsese’s Shine a Light, which is about the best Stones movie out there.

Rudy Jr.’s company Monkeybrains.net has bought an immense warehouse in the Oakland flats for their operations in the East Bay. A really big room with a concrete floor and a timber ceiling. He’s still figuring out how to divide it up. Mainly they want to have their Oakland office there, and storage for a stash of the antennas that Monkeybrains delivers to their customers’ houses.

V. Vale and I did a reading in the very chapel of Beat, the upstairs room at City Lights Books in North Beach. He’s promoting a book of his photos, Underground Living. I happened to write the intro for Vale’s book. And ‘m promoting Million Mile Road Trip and my nine new Night Shade Books reprints.

For the show I read most of my subversive story, “Juicy Ghost.”

Our friends Lee and Susie Poague visited…we know them from our days in Geneseo, NY, where I had a job in the State University math department. Lee was in the English department, teaching Film and Journalsm classes. He’d get these huge rolls of film mailed into to show his classes — pre-video — and sometimes we’d watch those in his living-room, which was great. That was 45 years ago.

Before that, Lee and Susie went to San Jose State and actually got married in the campus chapel on the SJSU quad—50 years ago. Below is a shot of them by the chapel.

At Geneseo, Lee and I both knew we were going to be fired—the state university was in a “retrenchment” mode, which basically meant laying off faculty and hiring more administrators. Lee and I were constantly obsessing on the dangling carrot of “tenure”—our wives got tired of hearing about it.

In the end, of course, it was good for us that we left—in the wider world, things worked out pretty well.  And I got tenure at SJSU when I was fifty. In Geneseo, I never imagined I’d end up being a computer scientist in California. Moral? Hang in there. You never know.

Califor-ni-yay. I love all the palms here, and their shadows. This is by the Fairmont in downtown San Ho where, as usual, the sidewalks are so empty you could fire a cannon down one without hitting anyone.

The other day I went out to Three Mile Beach north of Cruz with my friend Jon Pearce. Totally deserted, but in nature that’s a good thing. I think I once read that in Yellowstone park, 95% of the tourists never get more than twenty feet from their car. It’s really nice how deeply into wild nature you can get in the SF Bay Area if you drive about half an hour and walk for fifteen minutes.

Below is a good clear view of one of our state’s numerous faults. I recently read John McPhee’s book Assembling California. Talk about big picture.  Our state piled up from ocean bottom sliding east and mountain range sliding west…about a hundred million years ago.

And meanwhile I’m obsessed with global warming over the next twenty years.  A bit of a disproportion there.  Not that I want to minimize the current crisis.  But the scope of geological deep-time history is kind of staggering. Compared to ten million years, one year is the last millimeter of a timeline that’s ten kilometers long.

Two old men on the beach, that is, Jon and me. Last week, Sylvia and I went to Jon’s seventieth birthday party in a park in Santa Cruz. My friends and I  never imagined we’d get this old—although staying alive has its rewards. Jon was my office-mate when I was teaching Computer Science at San Jose State. I was there eighteen years, and now it’s been fifteen years since I retired. The older I get, the faster time goes, which is exactly the opposite of what I’d want.

I haven’t been shooting as many photos as usual of late. I think it’s partly because I’ve been focused on writing short stories. First I did “Juicy Ghost” this spring, and I wrote two more in the last two months, “Everything is Everything,” and “The Mean Carrot.” I’m sending them out to magazines, and if all else fails I’ll post them online.

Seems like all of my stories these days are relating to commercial telepathy tech, and to storing backups of your personality in the cloud. This pair of themes feels like an SF trope that’s opening up, with a lot of possible angles. I might stay with it and write more stories in this vein over the coming months.

The photo below is in a parking garage in Santa Cruz. I was attracted by the pattern of light and shadow in that triangle at the bottom. But there’s so much else to look at that I didn’t crop it down. Going for more of a wide-angle Winogrand thing, although minus the people. Of course if you’re a hylozoist, like I am, you think that everything is alive, so there’s quite a chatty cround in this pic.

I always feel it’s too obvious to photograph signs, but I liked the light on this truck by that parking arage. Also, as I say, I’ve been away from photography, and if I have my good little Fujifilm X100-T along, it’s like everything I see starts looking like a potential photo. Something I like about carrying a camera: it opens my eyes. “Seeing photos” is a special mental process I’ve learned.

This next photo is more of a trophy than anything else, although I do like the pattern. I have a cloth hammock in the corner of the back yard, with one end tied to a tree, and the other end tied to this 4 x 4 that I embedded in a bag of concrete in a posthole-digger-dug hole twenty years ago.

Slowly it rotted, and recently it expired with a huge crack, the last time Rudy Jr. was in it, not that he’s portly. So I managed to root out the remains of the broken stub and put in a new 4 x 4. For me, accomplishing this kind of home improvement task is a triumph. For me, even knowin the phrase “4 x 4” is quite an accomplishment.

Note that Sylvia and I have a metal R and S from the kids in the underbrush there, but you can’t see the S.

But you can see an S below, a post of a post in Rudy’s new warehouse. I love planes of color, and architectural meshes of posts.

Another abstraction from the warehouse below. That’s a puddle on the floor reflecting the ceiling.

Sylvia and I took the grandkids to the Ed Hardy tattoo show downstairs the DeYoung museum in Golden Gate park. The show was a lot more interesting that I’d expected—the highlight was a 500-foot long by 4-foot high continuous scroll of Tyvek material decorated with two thousand dragons painted on by Ed, in a varying freestyle style, int the year 2000, on this 2000 squae foot scroll. Ed did scads of little dragons as well as the big ones, in order to get the population up. That’s a big one below, near the end of the scroll.

And here’s Pig Elder with one of the larger dragons.

Hardy’s scroll painting was inspired by a 13th Century scroll by Chen Rong called “Nine Dragons.” I have a little section of it below, but I also have a big, zoomable image of the whole scroll online. It’s kind of like that timeline thing. We think we’ve come so far in art in modern times…but look where Chen Rong was nine centuries ago.

And here’s a tiny cute dragon with polka dots.

Somehow Rudy got hold of an old non-electric pachinko machine, where you fire little balls up into a grid. A little like a vertical pinball machine, and a little like a slot machine. They’re very big in Japan. If you end up with a large number of balls, you can get money for them, even though cash rewards at pachinko parlors are “illegal.”

The way it works is that in the parlor, when you return your balls, if you have more than you started with, they give you a package of Zippo lighter flints. And then you go down a tiny alley behind the pachinko parlor to a window in the wall, and the woman there exchanges your lighter flints for yen cash. My grandson Calder plays pachinko with his foot. Clever lad.

The city finished building a new arena for the Warriors to play b-ball in, it’s called the Chase Center—and why oh why can’t we have permanent and non-commercial names for the monumental urban structures that we subsidize with our taxes and our attendance fees?

Anyway, there’s very cool sculpture installation by the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. It’s on the Bay side of the building, consisting of 5 (as in 5 players) spheres (as in basketballs), and each sphere has one side shaved off to make a mirrored plane, and they’re arranged in a pentagon, mirrors facing the center, and you get awesome multiple reflections.

You can see the back of my head (wearing a pale straw hat) five levels in. And to top it off, there’s always ships parked there in the Bay…they have, like, a ship-repair spot there. Note that the sign is mirror-reversed…because I’m pointing my camera into a mirror. Fabuloso.

And here’s a traffic mirror in the Monkeybrains warehouse, from when the earlier owners—who provisioned ships—had little fork-lift trucks rolling around. I wear a new striped T-shirt from Gap. I’ve always liked striped T-shirts, first of all because I had a drawer full of them when I was about seven, and also because the holy Saint Andy W. wore them.

I drew the figure below for a story “Surfers at the End of Time” that I wrote with Marc Laidlaw about a year ago, featuring our recurrent transreal characters, the surfers Zep and Del. Time travel can get complicated. I redrew the diagram ten times while Mar and I were working on the story. I was a little surprised how complicated it turned out, but that’s where the logic led.

In the diagram, you’ll notice five names at the top, and these names correspond to the five worldlines below. Gother and Sally are women that Zep and Del meet, and Lars is kind of gnome called a murg. As you can kind of see, Lars has a closed-loop worldline. Just now, I won’t get into explaining any more than, but I will say more when the story comes out, in the Nov-Dec, 2019 issue of Asimov’s SF.

I’m hoping to start another story soon, but today I’ll go out in the back yard and paint.