I was up at Lucasfilm in the Presidio in San Francisco on Thursday, May 18, 2006, to give a talk on “Gnarly Computation.” Right outside the front door, they have a nice fountain with Yoda on top. I’ve always had mixed feelings about Yoda. I guess mainly I love him. He reminds me of D. T. Suzuki, the Zen sage.

The building is all decked out in California Craftsman style, very impressive. Mine host Darth Vader was there to greet me.

Lucasfilm is an umbrella organization which owns Industrial Light and Magic(IL+M), a special effects group, plus LucasArts, a game company. Adn of course Lucasfilm handles George's projects like Star Wars and Indiana Jones. The Industrial Light and Magic office used to be in San Rafael, and they had it hidden in a complex of buildings with the entrance door marked as “Kerner Optical.” The reason was that now and then demented fans showed up looking for Yoda and Darth. I think once one of them even got run over by a car. “Hey, I though that was a hover car, so I could lie down under it!” So it seemed better to have the company incognito. You can find them easily now, but they do have good security, and Yoda's right outside on the fountain anyway, so no prob.

I was up at the old IL+M in 1993, to write a Jurassic Park inspired article for Wired magazine. I think the model shop is still in San Rafael; it’s all electronic down at the Presidio now. This funky thing was wrapped in rubber and used as a dinosaur!

There’s a bunch of old models kicking around the building; this one’s from Ghost Busters. In a way, it’s sad that they don’t make so many physical models anymore.

I gave my talk in a big auditorium. A good crowd showed up, maybe fifty or sixty people.

Tina Mills, the Manager of Image Archives at Lucasfilm took some nice pictures of me.

Click on the icon above to get to Rudy Rucker Podcasts, and here is a PDF of the slides of my PowerPoint. It’s quite similar to the talk I gave at Fresno State a few weeks back, though the questions at the end are different, and during the talk I have some remarks on using these ideas for game and effects design.

After the talk, I went and had lunch with Kate Shaw who organizes the talks there, also John Olmstead, the IL+M engineer who had the idea of inviting me, and Brian Baird, an engineer in LucasArts working on some cool projects like self-modifying games that generate their own action scenarios.

John told me they'd been rendering water for the new Poseidon movie, and they'd needed to use all 5,000 processors on the grounds at once, and even those were lagging. Water is hard. Nature is way ahead of the beige boxes.

This is Brian and John with the Golden Gate bridge visible out the cafeteria window. By the way, I heard that LucasArts wants to double their size, so if you’re looking for a job in the game industry, this seems like a good place to check out.

Tina took a nice picture of me outside. I just got some new glasses last week.

After I was done, I walked around the grounds a little. Here’s a statue of Eadweard Muybridge, the guy who took those zoopraxiscope multiple frame pictures of people moving around. (Have you noticed that, more and more often, the best link for a topic is in the Wikipedia? Way to go Wikkers.) That’s the Palace of Fine Arts / Exploratorium in the background. When he was born, his name was Edward, but he adopted the Eadweard spelling just for kicks. I used that name in Frek and the Elixir.

I said farewell to R2D2 and C-3PO and went home. Oh, I should mention that I saw some nice demos up in the LucasArts labs. They're making, like, wood or marble out of virtual particles, so every time you smash up a crate it smashes differently. They had a really cool looking giant rubber Star Wars plant from some obscure planet I forget. This engineer kept hurling virtual R2D2's at the plant and it shook so sexy and gnarly and chaotic. Seek the Gnarl!

I feel excited about my Tor novel in progress Postsingular, and about the stories I’ve been writing with Paul DiFilippo, Terry Bisson, and Marc Laidlaw. I’m working at white heat. I’m happy when I wake up and there’s no plans or appointments, and I know I’m free to write all day.

I love to lie on my camping mat in the backyard going over my latest printouts of chapter, outline, and/or story, marking them up. And then I go inside and edit in the changes on my computer. I print that out, make a sandwich and eat at the table in the back yard, reading over the latest. Maybe later I take the printouts and the laptop the coffee shop. Everything at my own pace.

The other day I got such a big hunk done on Postsingular Chapter 3: “Thuy’s Metanovel,” that it’s been like a big teetering stack of plates to carry on my head as I repeatedly revise it. Lots of changes are propagating back into the earlier material as well, roots growing backwards in time from these new seeds, reverse causation is perfectly routine when you’re growing a novel.

I’m hoping today to tear off another big raw chunk of flesh from the muse, or, put differently, quarry a great rough slab of Parmenidean marble.

I was thinking yesterday, writing on my camping mat, that it was one of the happiest times I’ve ever had. It’s sunny and peaceful this week, no rain, no noisy construction projects on the block, the grass lovely and still a springy green. I’m healthy, calm, and the writing’s going so well. I’m lucky, and even if I lose it all today, I had yesterday. Thank you, God/Cosmos.

I know from experience that my state of mind won’t necessarily stay good. When I work at high intensity, I sometimes go over the edge and get frantic and uptight. When that happens I think of a harpsichord or piano where someone’s tightened the strings too much and the frame is creaking and about to snap. Highly strung indeed. Or maybe today I won’t be able to get it together to write at all, days like that, nothing is be quite right, the grass too wet to lie on, too much noise outside, the chair uncomfortable, the so-wonderful-yesterday material somehow tedious-today, you never know what the day’s emotional weather will bring. And posting a bragging entry like this probably a good way to bring on bad juju…

One thing that’s made this chapter particularly fun and heavy for me is that the character Thuy is a novelist writing about her own life (though I call her a “metanovelist”), so in some sense I’m writing about the process of writing this particular chapter, although I think I’m doing it in a sufficiently funky and tricky way that it’s neither self-aggrandizing nor lifelessly schematic — those being the Scylla and Charybdis risks of dabbling with metafictional self-reference. Stylistically, I’m doing risky things I don’t often dare try, like including Borgesian storylets, present-tense video sequences, and ranting Dada/surreal prose-poetry. (Cautionary note: My agent Susan Protter says it's a danger sign when an author thinks their work is going really well, she says it means the material is getting out of control. Hopefully I can keep it readable and together. Devo: “When a problem comes along: We must whip it!”)

I’m also excited about how deep into the SF I’m getting, and how cutting-edge the book feels, (partly because I'm following the trail that Charles Stross blazed in Accelerando). I feel like I’m way out on the edge, outdoing myself. Postsingular indeed. This week I went to a dinner for the guests at a “Singularity Summit,” at Stanford and felt kind of lofty towards some of the shopworn ideas the Summit was kicking around. I mean this stuff isn’t a casual discussion topic for me, it’s my professional work, all day long every day, and has been so for decades. This said, I had fascinating conversations with Cory Doctorow and Douglas Hofstadter. Doug has a very intriguing-sounding new book listed for July, 2006, but in fact delayed till maybe Febraury, 2007, I Am A Strange Loop.

The indefatigable Ray Kurzweil helped fund the Singularity Summit as part of his stunningly well-orchestrated promotional campaign for his much-cited The Singularity Is Near — which I personally find shallow, tendentious and unreadable, although what you're hearing could just be my envy over his big sales compared to my contemporaneous Lifebox tome and, full disclosure, I haven’t actually read much of his book, I just skim it and can never find even a whole page that I can plow through, I find it indigestible as a sand sandwich, even though the topics treated are close to my heart.

One of the main burdens of Kurzweil’s arguments in his earlier book Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever is said to be that if you stretch out your life long enough with vitamins you can survive until when, “real soon now” as the AI people always say, you can (a) put INJECTABLE OR SNORTABLE NANOMACHINES into your bod and they’ll repair you for another lifetime’s worth of years, or(b) you’ll be able to extract your software (via helpful brain-eating robots?) and upload it to the GLOBAL COMPUTER or maybe (c) copy your mental software onto a ROBOT BODY. I feel like I’ve heard this somewhere before … ah yes, it was in Software, a “crazy” novel I wrote in 1980. And you can find my more detailed discussion of the idea in my The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul,, “Section 4.6: The Mind Recipe,” get the book or check p. 274 of the online Lifebox sample.

Kurzweil seems all sincere about these topics, evincing an excessive or even pathological fear of death, it’s like cryonics all over again. My advice to Ray: “Dude — sounds like you forgot to take acid in the 1970s. You never got the word that All Is One and that Death Doesn’t Matter. But it’s not too late! Drop a tab now, see God and be mellow for the rest of your life … without having to snarf down those two hundred nasty-tasting vitamin pills a day! My bet is that you’ll live longer if you let go of your fear.”

Actually, having indulged my venom in these somewhat sour three last paragraphs, it occurs to me that maybe I'm the one who needs to let go — of my envy and my resentments. There's enough room for all of us, Rudy. You don't have to be the only author. And you've gotten plenty of rewards. And there's always fresh breaks to surf.

Reset. Trying now to get back to those good vibes I came into this entry with. As I’m working as a side-project on a surfing SF story with Marc Laidlaw, I'm thinking of surfing analogies to writing. Now that I’m blessedly retired from my day job, I’m like a guy who does nothing but surf every day. I feel that my skill is rising because of the constant practice. I’m out there in it all the time. I live in a tent on the beach. Maybe I’ll drop dead tomorrow. So what? I’ve lived. And I was lucky. I got to be a writer.

Oh, one last thing, my short story “Chu and the Nants” is in the June, 2006, issue of Asimov's SF, and they've actually put part of the Chu story online for now. As it happens, this story also serves as the opener of the first chapter of Postsingular, so if you check it out, you'll have an idea of what I'm actually writing about these days — that is, when I am writing, as opposed to avoiding writing by working on my blog…

[Photogrpher Rob Lewine, film critic Kenneth Turan, and artist Barry Feldman. I believe Rob Lewine took these two pix on my camera by using autotimer.]

I get occasional email from a group of my old classmates at Swarthmore College, where I spent the golden years of 1962-1967. Recently one of our number brought up the “We’ll Work It In Jug Band” which some of the gang formed, and asked, “Who were the band members and what instruments, I use the word loosely, did they play? I only remember Roger and his guitar.”

[Roger Shatzkin and his guitar.]

Rob Lewine answered the question better than I could (by the way Rob is a professional photographer; you can see hundreds of his images on the commercial stock photo site Corbis; (you may have to Search for “Rob Lewine”). His Smiling Man is used in a lot of ads for Microsoft Office 2007!):

“Loosely is indeed how we played.

“It was Roger Shatzkin on guitar, banjo, harmonica and Bennett Lorber on guitar (they were our ringers). Then Greg Gibson playing jug; Barry Feldman on washboard (and responding to audience requests with “We'll work it in!”; when in fact we never did because we didn't know any tunes other than what we played); myself on kazoo, amplified by an enormous paper cone; Andy Cook on washtub bass (which I think I took over at some point); and Terry Livingston doing something [playing a fake trumpet through his hands]. There may have been others. Tom [Wolfe] was too accomplished to participate; we had our standards.

[Rob playing the washboard.]

“I have pictures somewhere, I think, of us rehearsing in a Wharton dorm breezeway.

[I dug out my own pictures of those times. This one shows bookdealer and author Greg Gibson playing the jug.]

“There was a concert, at Bond Hall, I think, which was taped (reel-to-reel), and which some of us listened to over and over, with overdone appreciation. There was a contest at a local high school; we lost to some girl wearing a black wig and lip-synching to Joan Baez. (That was bitter.) There was a performance at a high-school graduation dance, where we mystified the crowd by our very existence.”

Many of the songs came from The Jim Kweskin Jug Band. I gotta get some of those records again, the ones I have from college are whipped. Over forty years ago. But inside I'm still in my 20s, and always will be.

Working on Postsingular again, trying to finish big Chapter Three. Here’s some of what I wrote the last couple of days.

“Wonda’s right,” chimed in Azaroth. “Remember, she and I been drifting into the ExaExa labs and checking out the scene. They don’t like it, but, hey, we’re big ghosts, what can they do? Jil’s connection is your pal Andrew Topping, Thuy. We’ve seen Jil meeting him inside a quantum-mirrored delivery dock at the back of ExaExa. The sudocoke he’s pushing is laced with these special controller nanomachines that Luty’s cooked up. They tell the users what to do. Like Nektar’s beetles, yeah.”

“Oh Jil,” said Thuy, overcome by sympathy for the other woman. Anyone who loved Jayjay couldn’t be all bad. “I wish I could fix her.”

“Ask the Big Pig how,” suggested Jayjay. “The Pig knows everything.”

The Pig graced Thuy with a vision of language as a network, of words as many-faceted gems, of phrases as incantatory program codes, which is not to say magic spells. In a flash, Thuy knew how to heal Jil — although she also knew she wouldn’t remember this newly won secret.

“Azaroth,” she muttered, her lips feeling as distant as a pair of tube worms deep in the abyssal trench off Easter Island. But Azaroth heard, and he was with her. He cast something insubstantial around Thuy’s head — a fine iridescent mesh, a dream net that refined Thuy’s current state of mind into a memory he could store in the dreamcatcher organ at the center of his head.

Thuy’s head ached. She probed her memories, trying to reconstruct her big insight about how to fix Jil. Incantatory programming. But the details weren’t happening. And Thuy’s vision of the Big Pig’s face was fading too. Off to one side, the sheep was cropping the grass as if nothing had happened.

“Ask Azaroth,” said Jayjay, guessing Thuy’s train of thought.

“I got it,” said Azaroth bringing his big, insubstantial head down near Thuy’s. “The mind state I caught for you. Feel me.” He opened his mouth and a bight of shimmering mesh bulged out like a tongue. The mesh did some odd, higher-dimensional jiggle, and then it was wrapped around Thuy’s head.

“Ready?” asked Azaroth.

“It’s okay,” murmured Jayjay. “Don’t be afraid.”

“Go ahead,” said Thuy.

All those thoughts about the language web came back to Thuy, percolating into her brain from the outside in. Decoupled from the Pig, she was able to assess and package the ideas, able to butcher the whale of inspiration into manageable packets. She knew how to deprogram Jil; now she knew how to undo the controller nanomachines her friend had snorted up with her sudocoke.

Even if the Pig was helping Luty, there was hope, as she was helping Thuy, too. And that was — why again? Azaroth hadn’t captured Thuy’s second vision; the only solid memory that remained was a single phrase: “I want a gnarly show.”

Even as she continued firming up her plans about how to heal Jil and steal the Ark, Thuy was thinking about how to finish Wheenk. Yes, yes, she could just about see what to do. She felt she had a richer control of language than ever before. All she needed to finish the Great Work was a little bit of pain, to make it profound.

The four of them teleported to the Merz Boat and found Jil sitting in the sun, looking sour, bedraggled and hung over. Now that Thuy knew the truth, she realized the sparkles that the orphidnet showed within Jil’s head were nanomachines, infecting Jil and filling her head with things like Nektar’s beetles.

“Love cycles useless rain in the tea,” said Thuy to Jil. “Stun rays squeeze the claws of Flippy-Flop the goose mouse. Caterwaul hello, dark drooping centaur dicks. Are you good to go-go, gooey goob? Able elbow boogie brew for two in anxious battered porches of thine ears, Jungle Jil. Comb out and pray. Pug sniff the cretin hop on lollipop pain of me and you, meow and moo.” Thuy rambled on like this for a minute or two, freestyling a seemingly random flow of Dada apothegms, but all the while she was guided by the precise and logical incantatory programming principles that Azaroth had helped her bring back from the Big Pig.

One by one, the evil bright sparks in Jil’s brain were winking out. And then Thuy was done, and Jil was joyful, tearful, her old self.