The recent issue 13.2, June, 2013 of UX User Experience: The Magazine of the User Experience Professionals Association is on the theme SF and user interfaces. It includes interviews with me and with Bruce Sterling. You can see the table of contents for free online, but you would have to pay to join the UXPA in order to read the articles online—and you may want to.

In any case I’m free to publish the interview here myself, minus the UX edits. By the way, at any time, you can find nearly all of my email interviews in my massive compilation All the Interviews, which is now up to 382 questions long.

Anyway, here’s my version of the UX interview, with thanks to Aaron Marcus for providing the questions. (I’ll leave the Q & A numbers intact from my “All the Interviews” compilation.)

Q 377. You and fellow cyberpunk SF author Bruce Sterling were featured guest speakers in my plenary panel at CHI 1992, “Sci-Fi at CHI.” We talked about computer-human-interface design ideas in science-fiction. How has the SF scene evolved over the twenty years since then?

A 377. That was a fun con, Bruce and I shared a room. You guys had a reception in the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Bruce and I were so impressed by the tanks of jellyfish that we ended up coauthoring “Big Jelly,” an SF story about giant flying jellyfish. You can find the story free online as a sample of my collection, Complete Stories, distributed via my publishing company, Transreal Books.

I see the eventual SF default as being a future in which every kind of manufactured object has been replaced by a tweaked plant or animal.

“Big Jelly” was in fact a step towards that future, in that it’s about biotweak tech rather than about silicon machinery. SF writers ought to be writing a lot of stories about biotech these days, but that hasn’t fully kicked in. There’s an atavistic drift back to space operas with giant metal ships. Like writing SF novels about chariots or wooden ships or giant cars.

A different trend is that during the last decade we saw a lot of hype about the so-called Singularity, some of it with a weirdly religious fervor. The concept is that pretty soon AI will strike it rich, and computers will be as smart as humans. And then we’ll beef up the smart computers with more memory and faster chips, and they’ll design even smarter computers—and we’ll get into one of these exponential growth things. True-believing overweight mouse-potatoes will have their arteries cleaned out by nanomachines, and they’ll upload their minds onto robot bodies—which is actually an idea that dates back to my 1982 novel, Software.

The rank and file SF writers were baffled and uneasy about the Singularity, and for awhile they were leery of writing about it. But then Charles Stross rose to the challenge in his trail-blazing novel, Accelerando, and the rest of us piled on. I even wrote a novel called Postsingular, just to leapfrog over the whole thing. The singularity is SF. We’re telling plausible lies. Postsingular is available in ebook, paperback, and a free Creative Commons edition.

Q 378. How has your own work changed in terms of user-experience issues, that is, novel ways in which computer-based communication and interaction are imagined and/or described?

Q 378. For a number of years I’ve been writing about an interface device that I call an “uvvy,” which is pronounced to rhyme with “lovey-dovey.” It’s made of piezoplastic, that is a soft computational plastic. Thomas Pynchon had a substance like this in his novel, Gravity’s Rainbow—he called it imipolex, and I use this word in, for instance, my novel Freeware, which is a part of the Ware Tetralogy, available in ebook, paperback, and in a free Creative Commons edition.

An uvvy sits on the back of your neck and interfaces with your brain via electromagnetic waves interacting with the spinal cord—most users will want to stay away from interface probes that stick into them like wires. The uvvy functions like a smart phone, but it’s activated by subvocal speech and mental commands. It sends sounds and images into your brain.

Q 379. What do you think about how SF movies and television convey user-experience innovations?

Q 379. The hoariest media cliché for user interfaces is the “face on the wall,” that is, a TV-screen-like image that’s talking to you. But even with Skype and FaceTime, people don’t really seem to very interested in videophone communication.

A rich voice signal is more intimate and expresses more. Speaking of voice, I think the greatest weakness in the current digital smartphone standard is that digital voice isn’t anywhere nearly as rich as analog voice. Often, to save channel capacity, the signal drops when you’re not talking. I feel the digital audio channel needs to be made several bytes fatter, and it needs to be a continuous connection so that you hear the stage-setting buzz of the background noise and—also very important—the sound of the other person’s breath.

You often see 3D hologram displays being used in movie visualizations, and these can be fun, although they don’t tend to age well. My favorite media interface scenes are in the 1995 movie Johnny Mnemonic, based on a William Gibson story of the same name. Keanu Reeves does these wonderful Japanese-theater-type hand-jive moves when he’s manipulating his cyberspace interface. I never understood why this movie wasn’t more popular.

[By the way, in his own interview in UX User Experience, Bruce Sterling mentions that there’s a similar—and better-known—use of gestural interface in the more recent film Minority Report.]

Q 380. Is there any particular aspect of current interface technology that you feel needs to be changed?

Q 380. It’s absurd to see people pecking at their tiny smartphone keyboards. This is so clearly a bad user interface. It’s unnatural, error-prone, isolating, and non-ergonomic.

If you’ve learned to touch type—and this should be a mandatory course in every middle school—then you can use a real keyboard without having to look at it. With a real keyboard, the words flow though your arms and onto the screen.

But there’s currently no good way to have a true keyboard on a smartphone. Sure, you can connect a portable full-size keyboard, but that’s kludgy. And you can, at least theoretically, have the device project a virtual keyboard onto your table top, but that’s going to have horrible ergonomics.

We need, I think, to take another step along the keyboard-virtualization route and get serious about having the device “see” the mock-keyboarding twitches of your fingers. At some point, a more ergonomic set of hand gestures could take hold. Along these lines, I think of the finger-squeezing interfaces that have been installed in the handle-grips of some experimental bicycles. Using your eight fingers gives you a byte per squeeze.

A different solution to the smartphone interface is to forget about hand gestures and go for voice recognition, and this technology seems to be maturing. One problem here is that you’re making noise in public, announcing texts that you might want to keep private. I do a lot of my writing on laptops in coffee shops, and I can’t imagine dictating my stories aloud—including all the corrections. I’d seem like a madman. Not that the people having cellphone conversations with earphones and dangling mikes don’t already seem dangerously insane. I suppose the next step might be to have the device lip read your subvocal speech, or pick up the vibrations from a throat mike.

I also need to say something about pointing devices—mice, track-balls, and touchpads. Over time, using any of these devices intensively is hideously damaging to your body—ask any author or programmer. It’s like a silent, unacknowledged industrial disease that attacks a relatively powerless underclass. Like black lung used to be for miners. We’ve seen demos where a computer camera tracks your eye movements and lets you point by looking. I don’t understand why this feature isn’t being perfected and rushed to market for every desktop, laptop, tablet and smartphone.

With all this said, I have a feeling that there’s some as-yet-unimagined solutions that we’ll be using in twenty or thirty years. Possibly we’ll get to an uvvy-style direct brain interface. But for sure we won’t be pecking at smartphone keys and ruining our bodies with computer mice.

Q 381. What kind of user interface are you using in your latest novel Turing and Burroughs?

A 381. Telepathy. For me, that’s the gold standard, the interface that we’re really working towards. At a metaphorical level, telepathy stands for the dream of being perfectly understood by your friends and lovers. And we’re always getting closer.

Even though we tend to ignore this, even print is a first step towards telepathy, but time-delayed. You read this interview and you know what I’m thinking. The phone is another step. You’re speaking and listening to someone who’s far away. Speech is very intimate, very close to the roots of the mind.

An interesting aspect of full telepathy is that you can communicate info in a hyperlink style. When I have a big image to share, I don’t email the whole image, I simply send a hyperlink to the image’s location, and let the user find the image there. With telepathy, instead of wrestling some complicated thought pattern into words, you might simply send a trusted friend a “hyperlink” to the location of this thought within your brain. And possibly they can connect to you and experience the thought as if they’re having it themselves. Note also that with this style of communication no longer need to break down an image into RGB bytes, nor need you code a thought into words.

I’ve put telepathy into any number of my novels, using all sorts of SFictional gimmicks to make it work. In Turing and Burroughs, my characters experience a communicable biological mutation that makes them sensitive to a certain type of brain-generated wave. Also they can shapeshift into giant slugs and have great beatnik orgies.

As with many of my books, Turing and Burroughs is available in paperback, ebook, and free CC editions. Putting out my content. Building my brand.

[Photo by Sylvia Rucker]

Q 382. In the movie The Graduate (1967), the young hero is urged to focus on the future based on one word: plastics. If you were to guide newcomers to the world of the future, what would that one word be?

A 382. One word? Telepathy. Or a reasonable facsimile thereof. At least in terms of user interfaces.

In the tech realm, the answer is surely biotech.

And for a creative person trying to make a living, the key word might be disintermediation, that is providing your creative content directly to consumers. Self publishing, in other words. When you’re distributing things on the web, you want to avoid the various parasitic entities that might leech onto your slim income.

So, regarding the future, I’m suggesting that you be a creative content provider, and that you manage the distribution yourself. DIY, as the punks used to say.

I finished a new painting called “Gubs and Wormholes” this weekend, and I’m currently planning to use it on the cover of my novel The Big Aha. If I manage to raise a little more money, I’ll try and organize an art show and a launch party.

Draft Cover for The Big Aha based on “Gubs and Wormholes,” oil on canvas, July, 2013, 22” x 22”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

On Friday I got started on the final “Mother and Father” chapter of The Big Aha. The mother/father pair is:
(a) My married-couple characters Jane & Zad,
(b) My character Zad’s Mom & Dad,
(c) The green gub & the spotted gub shown in the cover image.

All three options at the same time. Plus the transreal echoes into my own life. It’s coming together very heavy and strange.

Just a few more scenes to write. And I know, more or less, what’s going to happen—although, as I always say, I never fully know until I’ve written the scenes. A novel-in-progress has its own hidden life.

I was influenced last week by Stephen King’s excellent novel 11/22/63, which has a lot of synchronicities and overlays. It’s a 340,000-word time-travel novel, and the hero keeps running into heavy harmonies. Here’s a nice passage where the narrator reacts to an intense coincidence:

“…when that happens you see that the world is barely there at all. Don’t we all secretly know this? It’s a perfectly balanced mechanism of shouts and echoes pretending to be wheels and cogs, a dreamclock chiming beneath a mystery-glass we call life. Behind it? Below it and around it? … A universe … surrounding a single lighted stage where mortals dance in defiance of the dark.”

Dancing with who? Your loved ones and your muse—but look out for the dragon.

I’m on the home stretch of my novel The Big Aha. Getting great support from my Kickstarter backers. Very stoked.

I’ve been averaging 300 words a day for about a year, which means I’m up to 95,000 words, with the final target probably 100,000 words. I track these things, like a miser counting his coins. The 300 word average means that, on good days, I write 1,000 words, but there’s plenty of days when I don’t write at all.

Just a few more scenes to write. And I know, more or less, what’s going to happen—although I never fully know until I’ve written the scenes. The book has its own life.

I like to print out my latest draft and then maybe lie on a camping mat in a shady spot in the backyard marking it up and scribbling out a new scene. Then type that in, maybe on my laptop on the couch, print it out, and repeat the cycle.

I just finished Chapter 14: Churchill Downs. Featuring that giant “myoor” creature I painted last week. I did about ten or fifteen type/print/mark-up cycles on that chapter. Scribbled & typed papers accumulating like drifts of snow. When I totally can’t face the stress/joy of writing anymore, I get into a painting, go biking, go to SF, or go to Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz, photo above.

It’s full-on summer here in Silicon Valley. July. The very heart of it. I love this month. The yottawatt sun! Lurking inside in the afternoons, with the attic fan drawing up air from the cool basement.

On the over-98-degree days, we crank up the central AC for a couple of hours. But I don’t like AC. Makes me feel like I’m riding in an airplane. Or deaf. In Robotic Mode instead of Cosmic Mode—as the qrude characters say in The Big Aha.

I’ll go out for walks in the dizzy heat, just for the intensity of it.

Talking to the plants and digging the gnarl. Clouds—can you imagine how excited people would be about clouds if for some reason they were rare and hard to see? All the things Nature gives us for free. If I can remember to see them.

Still happy about our blessed week in Hawaii. North Shore of Oahu. I’ve been emailing with my old Surfing-SF-story collaborator Marc Laidlaw. Maybe I’ll have time for more “Tales of the Tube” after The Big Aha.

Back at Santa Cruz’s Four Mile Beach here in this picture. I often think of this spot as being where my muse lives. It’s near a stone tower at the south end of the beach. I always like to go here and write EADEM MUTATA RESURGO in the sand, which means “The same, yet changed, I arise again.” That’s an inscription on the gravestone of a mathematician, Jakob Bernoulli, who studied a famous type of spiral curve (the logarithmic spiral seen on seashells such as the nautilus, or the humble snails). It also appears in my novel Frek and the Elixir. For me, it’s an encouragement for writing yet another novel. Since Frek, I tend to write in the wet sand at a beach pretty much every time I’m working on a novel. Good luck…or an invocation of the muse.

In good old California it always cools off at night. Love it when I’m out at Santa Cruz in the evening. If I’m at home, I’ll often do one or two more mark-up/type/print cycles on a lounge chair in back. Obsessive cycles of work…you kind of need to get that way to actually finish a book.

Obsessive or not, I’m really having a good time with my characters and my settings and my aliens these days. I love the things they say. And—oh those gubs! I’ll miss the whole gang when I’m done. On the other hand, it’s been a long haul, and I’ll be glad to sail my whaling ship into port. Laden with gub oil, scrimshaw and ambergris.

I finished another painting for my novel today, more info here: The Big Aha project. The new picture’s title is The Mr. Normals vs. The Myoor.

“The Mr. Normals vs. the Myoor,” oil on canvas, July, 2013, 24” x 18”. Click for a larger version of the image.

The picture has to do with a scene in the closing chapters of The Big Aha. My character Zad has created some creatures called Mr. Normals whom Zad has now sicced upon a sinister giant alien slug called a myoor. The myoor looks scared of them, which is good.

I made the Mr. Normals look like Gyro Gearloose’s Little Bulb in the old Donald Duck comics.

The other day I watched this very heavy Mexican SF movie called Sleep Dealer, which the cool Tucson artist Daniel Martin Diaz turned me onto recently. (Check out Diaz’s amazingly cyberdelic forthcoming book Soul of Science.)

The Sleep Dealer film’s is partly about the US taking advantage of Mexican workers. And the myoor is kind of flowing down across a border, and my Zad character looks kind of Latino in this painting, and I was also thinking about cross-border ethnic conflict here, so at another level the picture is a political parable…not that I would have a clear idea of what the Mr. Normal / Little Bulb figures would stand for under that interpretation.

But primarily the painting is about the events in The Big Aha. The way I painted Zad relates to two earlier paintings of him which I’ll reprint below, Louisville Artist and Night of Telepathy.

“Louisville Artist,” oil on canvas, October, 2012, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the image.

The way I painted the Louisville artist is kind of a self-deprecating joke about my personal self-image, or about the public’s image of artists or writers.

I mention Louisville because I was born there and lived there till I was 17, at which point my parents moved away and I went off to college. The Big Aha novel is in fact set in Louisville. Those tall things in the background are “house trees” that people inhabit in the biotech future.

What about the woman? She’s the girlfriend, Loulou, whom Zad takes up with during a period of separation from his wife. I had fun giving Loulou a really odd hair-do. Kind of Princess Leia thing.

“Night of Telepathy,” oil on canvas, November, 2012, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the image.

In this painting we see Zad and Loulou spending a night together in telepathic contact. What about those rats? Well, there happen to be a lot of intelligent rats in The Big Aha, thanks to “quantum wetware.”

And it’ll all seem perfectly logical in the end…