[Art 1982 by Pedro Bell / Splank Works]

In September, 1992, I was in emotional turmoil. I’d just lost my job as a programmer at Autodesk, and our last child was leaving the nest for college. I spent a night at the Mondo 2000 house in Berkeley and experienced some disturbing hallucinations (see the end of Chapter 8 of The Hacker and the Ants).

The next day, drag-assing along Telgraph Avenue, trying to get it together, I came across a used copy of George Clinton’s 1982 record Computer Games. George’s picture on the back seemed to speak to me. He knew where I was at. He’d been there from the beginning. Everything was gonna be okay. I got into the record, especially, “Atomic Dog”. What a great song. I’d never realized all along that Zappa and the Stones were imitating the George Clinton funk style, I didn't know what real funk was.

[Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian, Marcy G. Photography]

Last night we went to see George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars at the Catalyst Club in Santa Cruz. It was so positive, such a great bouncy endless boogie. George like a shaman, like a happy tot, coaxing the maximum roar from the band (18 people strong at one point) and the crowd.

[Photo credit: Marcy Guiragossian, Marcy G. Photography]

A guy came out in a diaper and a floppy red hat made of maybe four yards of Chinese silk. He looked serious and craftsmanlike nonetheless. For a second I thought he was Bootsy Collins, but I don't think that's right, I don't think Bootsy is on this tour.

Quotes from GC and the show: “Yank my doodle, it’s a dandy.” “Harder than steel, still gettin’ harder.” “We tested positive for the P-Funk. I’ll pee in anybody’s cup. May they cup runneth over.” “We are all trying to straighten out a serious situation with faulty equipment.” (Last two quotes from the “Hiphop” entry in Mondo User's Guide, which I edited with Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius, Harper Perennial 1992).

I’m thinking I can use George as a model for Lama Jawobul in the Mirrorbrane, who has Ond Lutter imprisoned in maybe a Klein Bottle, and who’ll pass Higgs RAM to Thuy Nguyen to bring back to turn Earth into a conscious quantum computer without having to actually change anything, like, no grinding things up into nants.

Oh, I bought George's latest album at the show:

“How Late Do U Have 2BB4UR Absent?”

On stage, George said the answer to this question is

“4:21.”

I finished my “Surf Tiki” painting today, Sunday painter that I am. I started work on this about two weeks ago, when I was reading up on Easter Island.

I’m about two-thirds done with Postsingular now. The book will probably have four long chapters and a short fifth chapter, and I finished Chapter 3 last week. This week I was cleaning up the long Chapters 2 and 3; I may try and get them published as standalone novelettes. Revising took longer than I expected.

When I proof my writing, I get disturbed about how many errors I find, and anxious about whether I can blend everything into the plot. Like I’m standing at a dam I’ve built and I’m seeing thirty holes spurting water at me.

Sometimes it seems like no matter how many times I’ve proof a passage, it ends up all marked up again on each go-through. As if the process were divergent rather than convergent.

Of course one reason this all feels like less fun than usual is that I’ve had a viral flu, I start out the day feeling okay, but by the afternoon I’m in a bubble. Disease = dis + ease. But I'm getting better.

To break things up I’m doing some of the proof-reading outside. On Wednesday, May 25, in fact I went to Santa Cruz and proof-read on Four Mile Beach, which was nice.

To relax I was also reading a novel by Kris Saknussemm called Zanesville which is pretty cool, good word play, Boschian imagery, kind of reminds me of how I wrote when I was younger, it’s science fiction but got marketed as a literary novel of the “magic realism” bent. SF is the genre that dare not speak it’s name. Hell no I’m not a Communist. I’m a Magic Republican. [Note to the terminally literal-minded: I'm joking.]

Saknussemm’s website is good too, by the way, he has this funny III Ching thing that is oddly similar to the three precogs in Phil Dick's story “Majority Report”, though maybe the Sak-man hasn't studied the SF canon that closely as yet, though it bears minute attention, yes. Welcome, Kris, come on in, plenty more room for weird SF writers!

Anyway now I got all my changes keyboarded in, and I did the patches to make it all fit. Whew.

Funny how something that seems so hard to change can really just come down to altering three or four sentences. It’s there’s a feature of the story that looms very large in my mind, like an obelisk, and when I go to take it out, I realize the obelisk was just three pencil lines.

And now that I’ve fixed these chapters I can turn to worrying about the chapters to come, which is painful in a different way.

[This man is not a science fiction writer; he's a Magic Republican.]

Writing is so much work. Every part of writing a novel is hard. The planning, the sitting down and creating, the revising. I guess the most fun part is when it seems to pour out and I’m having a good day. When I’m doing that, I stop worrying for a while, I forget myself and I’m happy and proud and even exalted and amazed to see what’s coming down or going up.

More precisely, that fun part is “the narcotic moment of creative bliss.” I just heard John Malkovich deliver that phrase, playing the role of an artist/art prof in Art School Confidential. That’s very right on; the operative word is “narcotic,” it’s definitely something you get addicted to over the years. Really I go to all this trouble writing a novel day after day month after month because (bring the band down behind me boys…)

“I’m waitin’ for the man, twenty-six dollar in my hand. He’s never early, he’s always late. First thing you learn is you always gotta wait,” quoth Lou Reed. Waiting for God(ot). Waiting for the Muse to *** on my ***. Waiting for the narcotic moment of creative bliss.

We saw this family playing great bluegrass in Santa Cruz, they had an ad for “Play It By Ear” software, maybe the guy wrote it. Nodded out on the narcotic moment of creative bliss.

On Thursday I was supposed to attend the Future's Technology Horizons Spring Exchange sponsored by IFTF, the Institute for the Future.

But I’m paralyzed by a flu virus; I walk around in a bubble all day with no relief in sight. In this altered state, I’ve been listening to a lot of Frank Zappa. I’ve become obsessed with his “Helsinki Concert” as recorded on Disc 1 of You Can’t Do That On Stage Anymore, Vol. 2, particularly the last four minutes of “Pygmy Twylyte,” I creep around listening to it on my iPod, and I hear the guitar solos in my head all the time.

Be that as it may, here’s the forecast I would have shared at the Spring Exchange, had I been able to go there. And, hey, virtually I’m there right now, doing this. The following passage by the way, forms the opening to my latest fiction piece, “Visions of the Metanovel,” to appear in my collection Mad Professor (Thunder’s Mouth Press, late 2006 or early 2007).

The Singularity was brought on by some nanomachines known as orphids. The orphids used quantum computing and propelled themselves with electrostatic fields.

The self-reproducing orphids doubled their numbers every few minutes at first, fortunately they’d been designed to level out at a sustainable population of some sextillion orphids upon Earth’s surface. This meant there were one or two orphids affixed to every square millimeter of every object on the planet. Something like fifty thousand orphids blanketed, say, any given chair or any particular person’s body. The orphids were like ubiquitous smart lice, not that you could directly feel them, for an individual orphid was little more than a knotty long-chain molecule.

Thanks to the power of quantum computing, an individual orphid was roughly as smart as a talking dog, possessing a good understanding of natural language and a large amount of extra memory. Each orphid knew at all times its precise position and velocity, indeed the name “orphid” was a pun on the early 21st century technology of RFID or “Radio Frequency Identification” chips. Rather than radio waves, orphids used quantum entanglement to network themselves into their world-spanning orphidnet.

The accommodating orphids set up a human-orphidnet interface via gentle electromagnetic fields that probed though the scalps of their hosts. Two big wins: by accessing the positional meshes of the orphids, people could now effectively see anything anywhere; and by accessing the orphids’ instantaneous velocities, people could hear the sounds at any location as well. Earth’s ongoing physical reality could be as readily linked and searched as the Internet.

Like eddies in a flowing steam, artificially intelligent agents emerged within the orphidnet. In an ongoing upward cascade, still higher-level agents emerged from swarms of the lower-level ones. By and large, the agents were human-friendly; people spoke of them as beezies.

By interfacing with beezies, a person could parcel out intellectual tasks and store vast amounts of information within the extra memory space that the orphids bore. Those who did this experienced a vast effective increase in intelligence. They called themselves kiqqies, short for kilo-IQ.

New and enhanced forms of art arose among the kiqqies, among these was the multimedia metanovel.

In considering the metanovel, think of how Northwest Native American art changed when the European traders introduced steel axes. Until then, the Native American totems had been hand-held items, carved of black stone. But once the tribes had axes, they set to work making totems from whole trees. Of course with the axe came alcohol and smallpox; the era of totem poles would prove to be pitifully short.

There were also some dangers associated with the orphidnet. The overarching highest-level-of-them-all agent at the apex of the virtual world was known as the Big Pig. The Big Pig was an outrageously rich and intricate virtual mind stuffed with beautiful insights woven into ideas that linked into unifying concepts that puzzle-pieced themselves into powerful systems that were in turn aspects of a cosmic metatheory — aha! Hooking into the billion-snouted billion-nippled Big Pig could make a kiqqie feel like a genius. The down side was that kiqqies were unable to remember or implement insights obtained from a Big Pig session. The more fortunate kiqqies were able to limit their Big Pig usage in the same way that earlier people might have limited their use of powerful psychoactive drugs.

If the Big Pig was like alcohol, the analogy to smallpox was the threat of runaway, planet-eating nanomachines called nants — but I won’t get into the nants here…