My wife and I went to a march in SF against Bush's war, and for kicks took BART via Merritt Lake, meeting up with our son and his woman friend.

I still can't believe that the Chimp got reelected. 3 more years. I don’t like to talk about politics much on my blog — if that’s all I think about, then the Pig has really and truly won. But politics is what yesterday was about.

As always, it felt good to be in a march, in the bosom of likeminded citizens. Safe.

Why isn’t the media asking every day why Bush never caught Osama? This poster suggests that Bush knew, and worked with Osama. Why isn’t there a day-by-day count in the corner of every TV screen, like when we had the hostages in Iran in the Carter years? Is Iran our ally now? Like in 1984. “Oceana has always been the ally of Airstrip One.”

We marched a couple of hours. “Send in the Twins.”

The usual endpoint of marches, the big lawn at the Civic center, had been perversely rented out by the city to a commercial event called the Love parade, so we ended up in Jackson Square.

In my new Lifebox book, I rhetorically ask, “Suppose that at some point you find society’s hive mind unacceptably hysterical and debased. What can you do about it?” and then I suggest, “You can emigrate internally — not to another hive, but to a subhive. The idea is simply to put less emotional involvement into the national hive mind and more into some smaller grouping. Without actually leaving the country you can emotionally leave the big hive.”

As we used to say in the Sixties:

What if they gave a war and nobody came?

The march was a nice sub-hive.

Today’s hairdo award goes to hippie-dreads in giant pigtails with infinity-symbol wrapping.

After the parade I was in Virgin megastore and they had this, like, shrine of Ramones objects for sale. “Even though you’re dead, you’re still my friends.”

Now and then aspiring screenwriters tell me they’d like to do a script of my novel Software. I encourage them, but don’t enter into agreements with them — the guys I want to make agreements with are, of course, producers. I definitely don’t want to p*ss away time collaborating on spec scripts. I prefer to p*ss away time making complicated web pages!

Here’s one of my favorite covers for Software (Avon 1987), with a classic-type robot tuning up a cute android-type robot. Not a scene that’s actually in the book, but, hey, it should be.

Software was in fact under option for the last ten years of the 20th Century, and I have eighty pages of journal notes about this experience, including three unsuccessful Software treatments I wrote during that period. And today, just for the hell of it, I decided to post this info as: Software in Hollywood (1990 – 1991).

Do note that the film rights for Software are presently available.

Like Software, Wetware won the Philip K. Dick award; I think I’m still the only person to get that award twice. This is the Japanese cover; just about all my science-fiction was translated into Japanese in the 1990s. I like this image a lot, it picks up on thing about couples soaking themselves in “love puddles” filled with a drug called merge.

Unfortunately Wetware is a little hard to find these days, I think Avon let it go out of print. This was maybe the most cyberpunk of the Wares. Some other guy wrote a book with the same title a year or two ago, not to be confused with mine. I was annoyed when that happened, and to make it worse, his publicity said something like “in tradition of writers like Philip K. Dick…” If they're gonna lift my title, what would be wrong with saying “in the tradition of Rudy Rucker…”?

I’ve had a good run in Italy lately, here’s the Italian Freeware. What seems to happen with individual countries is that someone will get hip to my work, and most of my books get translated over a period of five to ten years. Germany did me in the Eighties. France seems like it might be starting up.

The film rights to Freeware are under option to Multiversal Entertainment.

Last in the Ware tetralogy is Realware. Will I ever write another Ware? Probably not, but you never know. Right now, I wish Avon would publish the four together in a single massive volume, but I don’t think they want to bother.

Re. Hollywood, my best shot these days is that Michele Gondry wants to make a movie of Master of Space and Time, which he's optioned. I talked to him a little about it, and he's pretty encouraging. We'll see.

I did some more work on my Lifebox home page. Avalon (my publisher) sent me a PDF of half the book to post online: all of Chapters 1, 2, and 4 (out of six chapters in all).

So go to the Lifebox site and have a look. And then, buy it and/or post positive comments about it on Amazon!

The cone shells are waiting for you.

[Figure 2 of The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. See my old Micronesian blog entry for a link to Scott and Jeanette Johnson, who took these photos.]

I got my first printed copy of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. It looks great. If you want to help me out, please go on Amazon and advance-buy a copy now. The sooner they get some sales, the better off I’ll be.

WARNING. Some negatively energized individual at a place called the “Reed Business Group” (specializing in “business to business services”) wrote a horrible review of my Lifebox book for Publisher’s Weekly, and Amazon has a contractual deal with PW that they print the PW reviews first. The attack is so uninformed and inaccurate that I’m guessing there’s something about my politics that teed-off this little b-to-b drone, who takes umbrage at my having met Tim Leary. Help me out of this minicrisis by ordering the book now, lest the Pig smother my Magnum Opus in its cradle. That CA image above shows my crying towel…

There’s better comments and reviews on the Lifebox web site, which I’ve been spiffing up of late. In the process I made a nice new build of my CAPOW program with about a 100 Meg’s worth of good pattern files to load; the big *.CAS pattern files have multiple CAs in them. You can download the new build of CAPOW by using the Download Software button on the Lifebox page.

The first CA group shown today, was “The Kind Rain.CAS,” the next is “AintPaint.CAS,” and the one below is “LuckyNumber.CAS.” Each of these images goes with one of the short-short stories that separates the chapters of my Lifebox book.

One other bonus on the newly upgraded Lifebox web site: a 66,000 word PDF of my writing notes for the book!

***

My blog's not broken, I’m just distracted. I got a new IBM/Lenovo Thinkpad X40, and getting that working the way I wanted took some time. It’s a nice machine. While it was on its way, I could check its progress from Shanghai to Oakland to Los Gatos. The computer stork flying here from China.

I’ve been driving around a lot, going to Fry’s for this and that. I picked up a SONY IC recorder, it records about 2 and a half hours of stereo onto a chip that I can then, after a number of intricate computer acrobatics convert into an mp3 file.

If I took pictures of my California surroundings with the energy I bring to foreign countries would it look interesting? Gosh, look at all those cars.

I saw a cute baby in Starbucks. Kicking and rocking and reaching for his hanging toys. I’m hanging out in coffee shops more, now that I have the laptop.

I was planning to record my lecture in my philosophy course at SJSU yesterday, but of course the switch was off for the first half. But I did get a file of me reading a draft of a new SF story I’m working on, “Chu and the Nants”. I had posted the 35 Meg stereo 128 kbps MP3 of me reading a new SF story and discussing it with students here for a few days, and got some feedback from my helpful readers about how the audio sounded (not great) and how I might upgrade posting an mp3 on a RSS enabled site into a true podcast. But now (Sept 23, 2005,) having mailed off the story last week, I learn the story has been accepted by Asimov's SF Magazine (hooray!), so I don't want to muddy those waters by leaving the low-fi draft-version audio up.

By the way, “Chu and the Nants” is, in a way, an Answer Song responding to a concept in Stross’s Accelerando that really bugs me, to wit, the idea that it might be “reasonable” to grind Earth up into a Dyson sphere of nanomachines capable of running us all as agents in a virtual Earth that’s “just as nice.”