I’ve been doing a lot of promo for the Lifebox

book.

There’s an interview with me in the Locus science fiction magazine, September, 2005, issue, with photos by Beth Gwinn (such as the one above).

I have Lifebox-related article called “Adventures in Gnarly Computation” in the October/November, 2005, issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine. The article's online at this link, with a slight misprint: the first letter is “W” not “T”.

And this afternoon I’ll be at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. I put up a Powerpoint for the talk, and maybe I’ll capture and post some audio.

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On another topic, I’m almost done reading the best literary book I’ve read in a long time The Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

The Cloud Atlas is actually six short novellas (or long novelettes), about 20,000 words each, arranged in this curious onion-like way. That is, five of them are cut in half and nested, so that the book’s structure is: 1a 2a 3a 4a 5a 6 5b 4b 3b 2b 1b. The author compares it to a matryoshka doll, that is, a nested Russian doll with dolls inside. Or to a music piece with six solos, each of which is interrupted by the next solo, and which then takes up when the intervening solos are done. What’s really cool is that in each successive story, a character reads or sees the first half of the preceding story, and then when a given successive story ends, the character gets to read or see or show us the second half of the preceding tale.

The fifth and sixth novellas are both science fiction. I’d been prepared to be resentful of the slumming literary mandarin, but, hell, they’re damn good. Number six, “Sloosha’s Crossing and Everything That Came After,” reminds me of Russell Hoban’s superb Riddley Walker. “Trubba not.” And the fifth is “An Orison of Sonmi-451”, which is a lovely tale. Very serious, but not humorless. Odd in good ways.

The “Orison” is about cloned slaves in a future fast food place with the “logoman” Papa Song, I guess he’s a hologram, he stands on a plinth and gives them exhortatory morning sermons and later in the day entertains the customers. He’ll, like, pretend to surf on waves of noodles, or throw holographic boomerang “fire éclairs.” What makes the style really great is that the person describing this, the “ascended” (= become intelligent) clone Sonmi has a very flat, matter-of-fact, wise tone, and doesn’t see any of this as funny. Even though the story is satirical. I guess Brave New World was like that, satirical and, if you think about it, funny, but with the events treated in all seriousness by the protagonists. Actually by the end of the tale, the satire gets so sharp and pointed that it’s more horrific than funny.

This and Charles Stross’s Accelerando do a lot to raise the SF bar. Synchronsitically enough, Charlie too talks about Matryoshka dolls. Except his are Dyson spheres.

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.]