I’m not blogging much this week as our granddaughter is visiting!

Just to keep the blog alive, here’s an unused idea from my Postsingular notes.

In order to unseat the president, the Congress passes a constitutional amendment and the states ratify it. The public is a fourth arm of the government, they can make instant votes on propositions suggested by the Congress or the President, even including the recall of any political figure. Let’s suppose that, since everyone is ineluctably wired in, it now makes sense to have instant elections via the orphidnet. The Heritagist Party wants this, as they figure they are better at manipulating the public.

The Heritagist Party opressors begin having constant elections, like when a governor holds a special election for his propositions. But one every day. A daily election about flag-burning.

Voting in an election is mandatory. They drill into you and get an opinion out of you. Suppose the proposition process gets out of control. So there’s one every day, every hour, every second. Constantly decohering you by forcing you to make decisions about things you don’t care about.

Elections aren’t constitutionally guaranteed, so far as I know. The constitution leaves it up to the states to decide how to select their representatives, senators, and presidential electors; strictly speaking, the states don’t have to have elections at all, although they do have to treat everyone equally. You might almost argue that to really treat everyone equally it’s better to use the online election.

The intrepid Chris Roberson and his Monkeybrain Books are going to put out a second edtion of my novel The Hollow Earth in a couple of months.

I spent the last few days rereading it and re-editing the text. I edited the original from a manuscript I found, you understand, the book is really by Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia. I wrote a new “Editor’s Note for the Second Edition” which includes a copy I made of an 1852 drawing by Mason Reynolds that I found a few years back, thanks to a tip from my eccentric and difficult friend Frank Shook.

In viewing the sketch, understand that it depicts a cross-section of Mason’s Hollow Earth, sliced from pole to pole. The lumpy outer shapes represent the Earth’s crust, partly overlaid with seas. Mason’s Earth has Holes at both poles, and there are several additional holes passing through its seas. The creatures within the Hollow Earth are not drawn to scale.

Running clockwise from the top, features to note are:

* The maelstrom at the North Hole.

* Mason’s dog Arf beneath it.

* A black god riding a lightstreamer.

* A gap where an ocean runs through Earth’s crust, with a tiny “fried-egg ship” floating up through it—this corresponds to the hole near Chesapeake Bay.

* A ballula or giant shellsquid.

* A second ocean gap, in the vicinity of the Bermuda triangle.

* A flowerperson (Seela?) on a giant flower.

* A harpy bird above the inner jungle.

* The South Hole.

* A second lightstreamer.

* Another “blue hole” gap within the sea which is meant to lie, I believe, near Tonga and Fiji.

* A pair of koladull or shrigs.

* A third lightstreamer, which leads in towards the center where it meets the fan of a woomo or giant sea cucumber.

The center also depicts six Umpteen Seas, another woomo, and the sphere of the Central Anomaly, with MirrorSeas visible within.

I finished writing my novel Postsingular today.

I decided to refer to my chapters as “parts,” because they’re so long and there’s only four of them, and each part is in fact broken up into a number of pieces by my *** separators. And I won’t have any sections that are called chapters. The parts-and-no-chapters convention is used in, ahem, Gravity’s Rainbow. [Note: Pynchon’s 1,000 page new novel Against the Day is scheduled for November! Huzzah!]

Maybe I’ll design custom separators for Postsingular like for Mathematicians in Love. A different icon for each chapter! Here’s a list of the part titles and the name of the separator image.

1. “Nants and Orphids” (Ant)
2. “The Big Pig Posse” (My pig face logo)
3. “Thuy’s Metanovel” (A pair of lips)
4. “Lazy Eight” (The lazy eight infinity sign)

More on Thuy’s visit to the subdimensional world Subdee…. I already have two styles of telepathy: (a) the orphid-mediated electronic wireless-style telepathy of the postsingular Lobrane, (b) the Lazy Eight telepathy of the Hibrane, which is produced by an unrolled eighth dimension which projects out from every location in space and leads from each location to a single, accessible point at infinity. For Subdee, I’ll use a third style of telepathy, (c) root hair telepathy, in which the plant-like subbies send fine roots into each others’ bodies and into the brains of any unfortunate human visitors.
[Here’s a corny math joke about infinity as lazy eight.]

[End corny math joke interlude.]

I also used root hair telepathy in Frek and the Elixir, when they’re in the ship of the alien echinoderms who call themselves (with taxonomic incorrectness but Lovecraftian apropos) Radiolarians, and the aliens plug a vine-like nerve cord into the spine of each passenger.

Root hair telepathy is, I now realize, a metaphor for old-style land-line wire-based communication networks. Just as orphidnet telepathy is clearly an analogue of wireless.

Once Thuy destroys the encroaching root hairs with a zong of her magic harp, she realizes that the subbies aren’t Thoth-like Egyptian figures, no, they’re lithops plants. And she fights her way free.

Should I suggest that maybe the view of Subdee as lithops in a desert is an illusion, too? Naw. That would be too “knowing,” of me, in a bogus laying-my-finger-along-my-nose kind of way.

I end the book with Jayjay playing a magical “Lost Chord” on a stolen magic harp so as to unroll the eighth dimension. I did a bit of web research and found some sites with harp music, like this one for a Russian kid named Sasha.

I like Sasha’s face; that could be Jayjay.

I also listened to some harp music online it has this long reverberation time, the notes layer on each other like sheets of water on the beach after a wave breaks.

And then I wrote my octuple reverse climax now. To wit:

Start. (+) Jayjay thinks he understands about the eighth dimension and the harp, he’s figured out the theory of it during his sixty year dream. Jayjay knows the sound of the Lost Chord, even though he’s not quite sure about how to actually play it. He takes hold of the harp and strums.

Reverse 1. (-) Performing music isn’t like knowing a theory about music, even if you know what sound you want. Nothing happens. The Pig butts in, like, “Okay, it’s not gonna work, there’s 10-to-the-hundredth ways to strum that harp, and you’ll never find the right one, even though, yes, lazy eight could work, but maybe later and meanwhile I’m gonna open the nants, I’m sick of waiting, you guys are losers.” She’s assembled her mosquito shoons into a golem; he prepares to pound the nant farm.

Reverse 2. (+) As a stop-gap Thuy does a punk buzzsaw thing on the harp and it disables the orphids in the cave, also disabling the Pig’s control over the golem, who sits down and starts idly rolling around. The playing is hurting Thuy’s fingers again. She tells Jayjay about the weak spot in the wall where she climbed out in the Hibrane. Jayjay shoots a hole with Thuy’s P90 submachine gun. Jayjay gets up onto the surface of Easter Island where the orphidnet is. He firewalls out the Pig and teleports to the U. S. and gets a backpack-style atomic bomb and brings it back.

Reverse 3. (-) When Jayjay gets back, he climbs down and still hears the harp and shoves the pack through and it gets stuck and time goes by and finally he gets in there and Thuy has stopped playing. She’s lying on her side, her fingers are bloody, she just can’t strum anymore. The golem smashes up the controls of the atomic bomb and pounds on the nant farm.

Reverse 4. (+) But the golem can’t manage to open the nant farm box for the Pig. Nantanium is tough. And Thuy destroyed all the antinantanium in Luty’s lab. So maybe the day is saved.

Reverse 5. (-) Just then a root hair from the subdimensional scarab beetle appears and exudes a tiny drop of antinantanium which dissolves the nantanium box of the nant farm. The nants swarm out. The orphids get on them, but they can’t stop the nants.

Reverse 6. (+) Quick, Jayjay and Thuy teleport out of there with the harp before the nants get to them. They go to San Francisco, to Thuy’s room over the garage. They dress Thuy’s wounds. They go downstairs to the garage, Kittie is showing Nektar her newly retrofitted SUV, decorated with a picture of Thuy’s head going through the grid. Kittie and Nektar are happy, they haven’t noticed the bad news in the orphidnet yet. Chu is there, helping to polish the car, content. Ond went to talk to Jil. Craigor is up the hill on a hot date with Lureen Morales.

Reverse 7. (-) The nants have eaten ten kilometer hole in Easter Island, it’s too late to bomb them. Kittie and Nektar and Chu realize about the nants. Chu wants to jump to the Hibrane. He can’t. Azaroth appears to tell them the Lobrane is quarantined, and Chu’s jump code won’t work anymore. He wants to take the harp back home. Chides them for not succeeding in unrolling the eighth dimension. Thuy says let us try a little more.

Reverse 8. (+) Jayjay and Thuy go upstairs and make love. And the technique for playing the Lost Chord comes to Jayjay; he jumps up and strums it, “letting the soft notes layer on each other like sheets of water on the beach after a wave breaks” The eighth dimension unfurls. The killer nanomachines are pinched out of existence by the flexing of the intelligent air world: Earth is defended by the once-digital gnomes, sylphs, undines, salamanders, and dryads that now inhabit earth, air, fire, water and trees!

As it turned out, the eight twists at the end went off nice and smooth. Like driving 60 mph up a hairpin road. And then zonggg the vista! It’s fitting aha that I end the “Lazy Eight” part with eight twists. And I didn’t even plan it to be that precise number. The muse did it for me.

So, yeah, I finished the book today. Another frikkin’ masterpiece. As it happens, I started the actual writing on this same date a year ago, that is, on September 12, 2005. So it took me precisely a year and a day (counting today) to complete the task. Like in a fairy tale.

Yesterday I thought I was done, but of course I wasn’t happy with the last three pages, I felt uneasy all night with that slight flaw chafing at me. So this morning I rewrote them five or six or eight (!) times and now the book’s nice and shiny from stem to stern. Ready to launch.

Two themes of the book:

How to get rid of machines. How to escape the digital age, and still get to keep the info goodies.

How to make art. The whole deal of Jayjay trying to play the Lost Chord is an objective correlative for trying to write the perfect scene; the Lost Chord represents trying to write about the Lost Chord. Finally you just go play it. And of course Thuy’s metanovel was all about that.

Cracks me up that I had Thuy sarcastically call her metanovel Wheenk, as “wheenk” is my private word for a certain kind of popular book that I’m kind of unable to write—I’m thinking of a book like, say, Girl With Pearl Earring or House of Sand and Fog where on every page the main character (often a woman) is mentally going over her longings, her hopes, and her fears; it’s an unceasing chorus of “wheenk, wheenk, wheenk,” as if from a rabbit whose foot is caught in the jaws of a trap, the trap being, dear reader, the pain and wonder of life itself. But, I submit, one can convey that without resorting to the tedious expedient of wheenk. I prefer to make each page a fresh adventure.

Yaaar!

I remember when I was about 13 I read a horror book about a dream that you could have that would kill you. And the dream was spreading from person to person in a small town. For a few days or weeks, I was scared to dream.

I’m thinking about this because I’m considering some SF ideas relating to some possibly menacing beings who live in Subdee, the subdimensional land whence come our dreams.

Could it be that every time someone dies in their sleep of heart attack or stroke, they in fact had a special dream that offed them? Maybe there’s two different dreams, the heart attack dream and the stroke dream. This reminded me of a dream-related disease which William Burroughs described under the name “Bang-Utot” in Naked Lunch.

Searching on the web, I found two amazing articles about imaginary diseases in Wikipedia. The first was Penis Panic, which is akin to Bang-Utot. The second is Fan Death, which I myself suffer from, in the sense that being closed up around electric motors makes me feel horrible.

Compressors are even worse than fans; have you noticed how every little corner store or cafe has hulking coolers that fill the room with shuddering noise? The coolers a “gift” from the bev distributors. Purveyors of fan death!

Last week, trying to describe Lazy Eight to Rudy the Younger while on a drive down jammed freeways to get four gallons of Substance D in San Leandro, he seemed not to get it at all, neither why lazy eight nor what it is.

“Maybe I’m writing a novel that nobody can understand,” I said.

No path but onward.

I’m coming back to that scene of Thuy facing Luty and the beetle in the subdimensional Egyptian temple.

Note that some string theorists think that “the physics within the Planck length is identical to the physics outside the Planck length”.

The Subdee zone lies below the Planck length. To get down there it’s like trickling through cracks in the sidewalk of spacetime. I’ll call the interface the Planck frontier.

Let’s suppose that if you shrink to the Planck size level, it’s easy to hop from one brane to the next. Perhaps because uncertainty is so great at this size scale. I’m visualizing the branes as being, like, soft swimming-pool flotation noodles that meet down at the low scale level.

I need to think out the subdimensional world a bit. First some terminology. I’d like to call the world Subdee. Sub-D? Subdee is easier.

And I’ll call the inhabitants—what? I think I’ll go with subbie. Subber has the connotation of doing something to be that kind of being, while subbie sounds more like being in a static condition.

I’ll resist taking a fantasy/psychedelic route and calling them elves—as in DMT elves. Subelves. Delves. The Hibraners already call us gnomes, yes, but I can relate to, from our point of view, Hibraners being angels and subbers (subbies?) being elves. I already wrote a story along these lines with Paul Di Filippo for Flurb, actually.

Speaking of fantasy/SF, some guy in the latest issue of Locus was reviewing the stories in the September Asimov’s, where my “Postsingular” story appears, and he chided that my story deviated (degenerated?) into fantasy. Like, duh, doesn’t he understand that the aliens from a parallel brane will of course seem like angels, elves, gnomes? That’s why those archetypes are in place.

Subbies poke heads/tentacles/hands through the Planck frontier up into our zone and grab things. They’re like scum living on the underside of the wall and they send through root hairs to suck energy or mass or information.

They like the idea of Earth being eaten by nants because then our planet’s information is all flattened out into quantum-level patterns, that is, into the brains of the nants. Rarely do they get a macroscopic information (like Luty’s body) to chew on. Although they do get the tendrils from dreamers’ minds. But I think better to leave out dreaming for now. I don’t want to start too many hares a-runnin’.

Suppose they want to gorge on our world’s high-level information.

I’ll suppose they’re not very technical, so their only hope is to flatten us out is via the existing nant plot, which they can further via their zombie version of Luty.

Normally they just do a little harmless low-level pilfering of mass/energy/information by probing across the Planck frontier.

That beetle that’s about to bite Thuy, what’s up with that?

Suppose the beetle is an individual subbie that ate Luty. Actually the beetle is holding Luty, rather than Luty holding the beetle. The Luty-thing’s arm flows out of the beetle’s underside.

And the other subbies on the scene, the bird-men and jackal-women? They’re separate beings, they’re pals of the beetle. Thuy is gonna strike the harp and make the illusion disappear and we’ll see the subbies for what they are.

[Early Yves Tanguy: “The Furniture of Time,” 1939]

The whole scene is a dreamy illusion that they’re feeding Thuy. After she strums the harp the illusion peels away. She sees the real world of the subbies. It’s dusty, dull, stark, beige, parched, rusted-out, whipped-to-sh*t. Like Tonopah, Nevada. The end of a long decline. I see it resembling a Tanguy painting (I snarfed these two images from this site).

[Late Yves Tanguy: “Multiplication of the Arcs,” 1954]

Back in the late 50s and early 60s, it seemed like half the SF books I saw had ersatz Tanguy covers.

[This lithops photo is by Geoff Bailey, and can be found on the www.cactuspro.com site, Au Cactus Francophone.]

Another idea about what the subbies “really” look like is these plants I saw in the U. C. Berkeley botanical garden on Sunday: lithops, a.k.a. “living stones.” They’re a relative of the ice plant.

Perhaps the subbies try to eat or stun Thuy with a fan death approach while they’re in the temple. A horrible buzz. A locust chirp, the beetle is stridulating. And she strikes the harp to drown out the noise.

I’d like to break up the action with a fight between two of the subbies, perhaps over whether to start eating Thuy right away or to let her play the harp first.

I managed to write a thousand words on the novel yesterday. First I had to clean off my desk, which involved selling my Acura to a used car lot, and replacing my expired cell phone with a new Razr. Lots of yoga in the back yard, pondering Subdee. Napping in the hammock for inspiration. Working on these notes. It takes all these various steps to get the spring water seeping forth again.

I have one bit I love:

Thuy now saw that Luty’s forearm blended seamlessly into the beetle’s abdomen. The beetle was part of Luty’s body—or no, it was the other way around. Ugh. The Luty-thing was an appendage the beetle was using to talk.

“Gthx,” said the beetle on his own. Sensing Thuy’s attention, he swelled larger, with Luty’s mass decreasing by an equivalent amount. “Glkt grx.” The beetle brushed his antennae slowly and intimately across Thuy’s face and head, as if palpating her brain’s emanations.

If I have this, then Luty is at this point a hallucinatory image projected by the beetle, who’s also projecting the image of the Egyptian temple? So Luty is already dead.

When you teleport, what’s really happening is that you are coming loose from your scale position, shrinking to just above the Planck length, using the uncertainty principle to spread out, and the re-expanding at the described locale. It’s a bit like yunching from Frek, although it’s the other way around—in Frek you get big, take a step and shrink; in the new order, you get small, fuzz out, and get big.

How is it that you shrink, by the way? In what sense? Well, suppose you become a single coherent dark matter particle, with all your particle wave functions overlaid. Maybe you’re a Higgs (wheenk, oink, squeal) particle.

Assuming this is so, when you teleport you are close to dropping through the Planck frontier and emerging into the subdimensional world. Luty ended up in Subdee because he entered a teleportation sender after the receiver was gone, so he fell into Subdee.

I’m supposing that jumping branes involves shrinking to Planck scale size. When you cross, you’re skimming across the Planck-foam sea. The Planck frontier. And for the sake of Occam’s Razor, it seems like I might as well suppose that ordinary teleportation works this way too. I think that means I have to retweak all my teleportation scenes.

Up until now, I’ve been saying:

teleportation = remote_viewing + quantum_fuzz_out + quantum_collapse.

Having an orphidnet vision of a remote location made it possible to teleport there. I want to keep remote viewing as a prerequisite for intrabrane teleportation. But I want to put in the shrinking thing, at least for interbrane jumps. That suggests that I want to have the perhaps too baroque recipe:

teleportation = remote_viewing +( shrink_to_particle_size + quantum_fuzz_out) + (quantum_collapse + expand_to_normal_size).

Suppose I simplify this by grouping as indicated by the parentheses above.

teleportation = remote_viewing + coherence + decoherence.

I suppose here that coherence means folding yourself up into a really intricate quantum state that is in fact no bigger than a particle. And that decoherence entails both the collapse to a new location and the blooming into a full-sized person again.