Happy news: day-before-yesterday Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (IASFM for short) bought my novella “Postsingular.” And yesterday I sold a short-short story “Panpsychism Proved” to the science magazine Nature to run as one of their “Futures” features. So I’ve written and sold three stories in these last three months, the third being “Chu and the Nants,” last month, also for IASFM.

Panpsychism is the idea that every object has a mind of some sort. I’ve been reading a good book about it by David Skrbina, Panpsychism in the West (MIT Press 2005). If you’re not careful, advocating panpsychism becomes simply a matter of watering down your notion of “mind” to apply to objects. But Skrbina wants to claim that it’s a real sensual mind that you’re talking about in that rock, that pen, that finger, that dust mote, that hair, that napkin torn in half (two minds now). A materialist might say there’s no content to such a claim, but I have now demonstrated the falsity of that line of attack in the definitive thought experiment described in “Panpsychism Proved”! How great to get SF into a high-brow science magazine.

I hint at one practical way to get panpsychism in my Lifebox tome, call it panpsychism-via-paracomputation. The idea is that, if a fluttering leaf is carrying out a universal computation, then it could be emulating a mind. But, again, we really are thinking of something funkier than that. Panpsychism isn’t so much about saying that a piece of matter can precisely emulate the human mind, as it is about saying that a piece of matter has that some numinous internal glow that a person does. It makes me feel high, in a good way, to think about panpsychism. Every time I hold forth on it to a class, the air gets yellow and jellied.

In my novel White Light, there’s a chapter called “Candy Hearts,” where the objects are talking to the main character, in a somewhat natural kind of way (they converse in two-word phrases like you’d see on a candy heart, like “Do Tell” or “Show Me,” like that). That chapter was, I think, inspired by a double-page drawing by R. Crumb in an early Zap Comix showing animated kitchen objects: Sneezy Pete Pepper Shaker and the like.

Once we have panpsychic paracomputation working, we also open the door to all sorts of oddball intelligences infesting the objects. Could be the toons from Frek and the Elixir, the orphidnet AIs from “Postsingular,” aliens in the form of cosmic rays as in Freeware, “angels” from the Mirrorworld, or elves from the subdimensions. The contents of your cupboards do a Thanksgiving Day parade around your kitchen, maybe the cleaver tries to attack you — and then what?

Tie up the giant yam and carry it away. Maybe I’ll work these ideas into a new story, and postpone the next novel a little more. Psychically, it’s a bit of work to keep writing stories. The big ramp-up for each one of them. The deflation of coming off the story. Like a series of one-nighters in place of a marriage. Of course if the stories are in a series, it’s not quite as hard. My guiding light remains Charles Stross’s Accelerando story cycle.

I decided to try running the Google AdSense column on the right. Two hours of HTML-wrassling later, there it is. I'll see if it brings in enough money to counteract my unease at allowing the mass media mind into my little domain. Today's pig, tomorrow's bacon.

I'm squandering time on this kind of thing because I'm not entirely sure what I want to write next. In a way, I’m enjoying not having a project. It’s like being unemployed. Or retired. I've been writing short stories of late, as a way of holding back from starting the next big one. Another Frek is a good bed; I’m rereading to get up to speed. Or, if I’m not in the mood, maybe a novel beginning a fresh ware-like series, without it actually being another ware. Or a memoir? That’s the least commercial possibility, so I slack off by thinking about it today. [The pictures were taken in Santa Cruz on December 4, 2005. This first one is a remarkable piece of non-repeating silk at Hart’s Fabrics.]

I recently read Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Vol. 1. I was struck by what he did: he picked three turning points in his life and wrote in some detail about each of these periods: (1) starting out in NY, (2) disillusionment and disgust after fame, (3) cutting a comeback album in N.O. (4) And in the fourth and last section, he goes back to the starting out in NY period. And even when he limits his accounts to these narrow zones of time, the account is still quite superficial, with very little day-to-day in it, although oddly he’ll sometimes zoom in on some period of hours when, perhaps, he was experiencing a turning point or an epiphany. The idea of limiting a memoir to a few focused periods sounds good. Otherwise you’re looking at a fractal, a lifebox, or an academic biography.

But, gee, only three periods? That’s harsh. How about a really short chapter for each year with one anecdote in it? Here’s a (probably false) start at listing some not quite randomly selected events I could conceivably expatiate upon. I’ve numbered them by the age I think I was when they occurred.

(5) Fade In. Walking through the rye field. The Keith girls on the farm near us, gathering us into their spooky dank stone spring-house, telling us a ghost story about the little … white … hands. Sitting on my mother’s lap and Muffin the dog at our side. In the silence I can hear the Earth turning.

(12) On My Own. On a hike with some fellow students at a boarding school in Germany. I imagine the pine pollen in the rain puddles in Germany to be fallout from an atomic war. I get in a fight with a boy am anxious to see him sharpening his knife. My friends promise we’ll stave him off. He doesn’t do anything.

(22) Metamorphosis. I’m a newlywed in grad school, discovering math, Zap Comix, Pynchon, hippiedom. Listening one evening alone to the Zappa record Chunga’s Revenge , I’m inspired and begin making notes for a book about the fourth dimension.

(29) Fatherhood. The last Christmas with the grandparents in Geneseo. The pleasant physicality of lying on the rug like a dogfather in his den, with the kids crawling on me, poking, wrestling.

(32) Transreal. In Heidelberg, working on White Light, I have a dream of finding wonderful polyhedral crystals in the shale on a mountain slope I’m climbing.

(40) Cyberpunk. At the end of my stay in Lynchburg, three young artists from Richmond come to see me, as if sent by Eddie Poe. One of the boys has drawn a tesseract unfolding.

(44) The Great Work. Demoing my fractal Chaos software at the Cyberthon in Silicon Valley.

(57) An Old Eye. In one of the last computer graphics classes I taught, I had a nice image of the perspective matrix changing the size of the world.

Once again it’s time for the Los Gatos Christmas Parade. I blogged it last year come to think of it.

This year was more fun than last year; we came early and saw the whole thing. Unlike last year, I don’t think there was a single float pushing evangelical religion which was nice. Let’s keep the X in Xmas, folks!

Near the head of the parade we had the standard classic cars bearing our native royalty. That reminds me, I watched “The OC” this week.

Ah, the dear twirlers, long may they wave.

The most exciting float for the last few years has been one sponsored by Jiffy Mart, where I imagine teens to hang out a lot. The float is a truck with two ramps, and kids do huge flip-in-the-air jumps over the truck.

There were blonde girls slowly circling around the Jiffy Truck on low-rider bikes. So California.

I’m thinking about going to Tahiti and Easter Island. Anyone got advice?

It's always a thrill to see the insanely hyperactive Stanford band. I've never gotten to see enough of them.

I posted a new podcast today, my second-to-last lecture to my Philosophy class. I’ll miss that gig.

Still rooting in the basement (Magic Pig that I am) I found the first-ever fan-letter that I got, mailed to me in 1981 care of Ace Books who had just published White Light with a somewhat misleading cover.

The letter was from a guy in the penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. In response to my careful melding of literature, philosophy, and the mathematics of the infinite, he’d smeared ink on his foot and stepped on a piece of paper — to show me a star-shaped wrinkle. He wanted me to fund university research on the wrinkle and to write a book on the results with him.

“Thing we could go 50 50 on Writing Book on Star and on what university Researchs Writes out on Research part.”

My welcome by the class of people who read science fiction!

Actually I was pleased. It used to be that carnivals would come to the small towns we lived in and, say, the Ferris wheel operator would have a pulp paperback tucked into the hip pocket of his jeans, and he'd periodically read a page or two while letting the Wheel do its alloted cycles. I'd begun to dream of being the author of that book.