My favorite SF writer Robert Sheckley died last week.

I posted some memories of him a couple of months ago when he got sick.

A few more notes.

In the mid-1980s I co-edited with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson an edgy SF anthology called Semiotext(e) SF (AK Press, Edinburgh 1989). I got Bob to mail me Xeroxed pages from his journals, which we included as a piece called “Amsterdam Diary.” Let me quote three good bits here.

“How much reading of other fiction writers must I do to convince myself that the finest work done is woven out of the author’s own experience, his own and no others, no matter how much he chooses to disguise or exploit the fact.”

“Good fiction is never preachy. It tells its truth only by inference and analogy. It uses the specific detail as its building block rather than the vague generalization. In my case it’s usually humorous — no mistaking my stuff for the Platform Talk of the 6th Patriarch. But I do not try to be funny, I merely write as I write. In the meantime I trust the voice I can never lose — my own. The directions of its interest may change, even by morning. But what does that mater if I simply follow them, along for the trip rather than the payoff (always disappointing), enjoying writing my story rather than looking forward to its completion. Wise-sounding words which I hope describe where I’m really at.”

“Two weeks until my 50 birthday. The thought, the mood, of impending doom. Fifty is well enough — but what about 60, what about 70? What about death, a second away or 20 more years, but looming up faster every year. They go by faster & faster as one grows older. What happened to the golden inexhaustible summers of my youth? Maybe they weren’t always golden, but they did seem to stretch on forever. I thought I’d never grow up.”

Robert did me the signal honor of writing a very warm and hilarious preface for my collection Transreal (WCS Books, Englewood CO 1991). He initially protests, “What is Rucker trying to do to me? Why did he select me for this job? Why is he seeking to undermine me with his mind-experiment, why does he want to invade my mind with the contents of his trashy situations, with the faecid droppings of his clever simian mind?” But then he relents. “This is SF rigorously following crazy rules. My mind of science fiction. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. This is what Rucker does. Among other things. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. Excuse me, shall I extrapolate that for you? Won’t take a jiffy. And so we have it. Rudy the crazed mathematician, like a poet hidden in the light of thought singing songs unbidden ‘til the world is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not…”

In return, I got the opportunity to write a preface for Sheckley’s Minotaur Maze (Pulphouse, Eugene OR 1990). I said, “The paramount quality of Sheckley’s writing is the purity of his language. The timing of his cadenced phrases is exquisite. His richly charged clarity arises, I would say, from the excellent moral qualities which Sheckley as a writer exemplifies — he is a man in love with writing and with the simple sweetness of life.”

One final quote from the Sheck-man himself in Minotaur Maze, one to bring tears to the eyes: “The premise could be seen wavering, there were repercussions of a rhetorical nature, and the author could be glimpsed, a ghostly figure of unbelievable beauty and intelligence, trying desperately, despite his many personal problems, to put things together again.”

Hey, I decided I didn't like seeing the Google AdSense ads on my page, so I'm taking them off. I was feeling like those unfaithful public servants who name stadiums after a different company every year. For $10 a month? Reading up on the topic, I came across this new slobbering greed-word, “monetize.” I decided to demonetize my site. Now if I had a clickstream like boing boing, maybe it'd be another story, but for me the decision's easy.

My big brother Embry got a tattoo in August and I just found out. He says his kids did doubletakes like never before. He got it in California; he told his wife he was gonna go look at the tattoo parlor, and she said, “Oh, you're always looking but you never get one.” But this time he did. It's a seahorse to symbolize his love of diving, with wings relating to the fact that he’s a pilot. The old objection, “You’ll have that thing for the rest of your life,” doesn’t have much force at our age!

I like his expression in the picture. A real pheezer. Blank Reg from Max Headroom. We are from Kentucky, you know.

Anyone messes with me, my big brother’ll kick their butt!

Mild-mannered dreamer prof that I am, I obviously need protecting.

I gave my my final lecture in Philosophy 115 at SJSU yesterday, based on Chapter 6 of my tome. Includes discussion of my ambivalence about how to end the book, panpsychism, ontolgies, unsolvability, computational equivalence, unpredictability, undecidability, and my six principles on how to be happy. I posted the podcast today.

I also posted some sample questions for the final exam.

Here's a little monetization (my style): give the Good Book for Christmas; in stores now!

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.