Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 68

Clarion West. Reading in Seattle.

I'm heading off to be the instructor for the final week of the Clarion West science-fiction writing workshop in Seattle.

To get ready, I reworked and expanded the "Writer's Toolkit" document that I use when I talk about writing.

I'll be doing a reading at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, July 28, 2009, at the University of Washington Book Store in Seattle. More info here.

The Afterworld as a Monad with an Infinite Center

I'm about two-thirds done with an Escher-inspired painting that I'm calling "Topology of the Afterlife." I probably won't get around to finishing it until mid-August.

I mentioned my motivations for this painting in a post the other day. In a nutshell, the painting has to do with my ideas about the afterworld, Flimsy, that appears in my novel-in-progress, Jim and the Flims. I see Flimsy as being tiny, down at the lowest level of space scale. I think of it as being what Leibniz calls a monad

Norway 6. Ålesund. Jugendstil.

July 1, 2009.

[ The following is the final installment from my perhaps-too-lengthy notes on a recent trip to Scandinavia.]

I'm sitting on a stoop in sunny Ålesund near a canal. The buildings in this neighborhood are in Scandinavian takes on the Art Nouveau style, more commonly called Jugendstil here. The style happened to be in fashion in 1904, when the town burnt to the ground and was rebuilt over just a few years.

Nothing much on the agenda for our final two days—just wander around this pretty

Norway 5. Geiranger. Cliff Hike. Kvak!

[ The following is the second-to-last installment from my notes on a recent trip to Scandinavia.]

June 30, 2009.

We took a regular bus from Fjaerland to Hellesylt, and then a ferry from Hellesylt to Geiranger. I was anxious about catching the bus, but it was on time to the second, and very comfortable inside. Great views as we labored over the ridges separating one fjord from the next. In many stretched the road was what we'd call one-lane, although it had traffic in both directions. The bus

Norway 4. Fjaerland. Twilight Zone.

[ The following is another installment from my notes on a recent trip to Scandinavia.]

June 29, 2009.

Today we got a boat from Balestrand to Fjaerland, a sweet, quiet hamlet between the Fjaerland fjord and the Jostalbreen glacier, which is the largest in Europe.

When Sylvia and I got off the ferry to Fjaerland, it felt like an episode of the Twilight Zone. The other passengers on our boat all got into a tour bus that had ridden in the ferry. They drove off, leaving us alone, in this utterly sile

Towards a Topology of the Afterworld

I've been painting for the last couple of days, and speaking of painting, last night we saw a good French movie about a painter, Séraphine. Quite beautiful and inspiring, if a bit slow in spots. It made me want to paint more!

This is "Fjord at Balestrand," acrylic on canvas, 20″ by 16″. I based it on this photograph that I took on our trip to Norway, photo that I already blogged a few days ago, but I'll put it here for comparison.

I like the theatrical way that the mountains on either side of

What is a Soul?

Recently I've been blogging about a trip I took to Denmark and Norway. Today I'll still be using some pictures from that trip, but today's subject is going to be something different. I've been thinking about science-fictional ways to provide for an afterlife in my novel-in-progress, Jim and the Flims. I thought about it quite a bit, and it was useful to read the "Eschatology" entry in the second edition of Clute and Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction .

My question today is simple.

Norway 3. Balestrand, Norway. Dreamscape.

[ The following is another installment from my travel journals, written during a recent trip to Norway.:]

June 26-27. 2009.

This morning we took a boat from Flåm to Balestrand, a slightly larger resort spot. The boat left at 6 a.m., but, in a way, this didn't feel that early, as by then the sun had been up for hours and hours.

Riding the boat up the Sognefjord, I was sitting in a plastic chair on the back deck, still sleepy, and I closed my eyes to rest. I became aware of all the air currents ar

Norway 2. Flåm. Biking. The Narrow Fjord.

June 24-25, 2009.

Today we rode the train to Flåm—you say that funny letter like "oh". On the ride down into the valley we passed an immense waterfall. The train stopped and a woman appeared, dancing in the distance with wavy arms, the troll-woman of the falls, I guess.

The hotels were full, but we found a stark room at the Heimly Pension, every surface covered by linoleum, a kind B&B with boarding-house food, but with an exhilarating view of the tip-ass end of the fjord. Great steep wooded cl

Two New Podcasts of My Readings

This weekend I taped a couple of performances. Charlie Jane Anders introduced me for a short reading at her monthly live show, Writers With Drinks, at the Make Out Room bar near Valencia Street—a visually lovely place.

Among the other writers whose readings impressed me there was the young Chelsea Martin, reading bad-attitude thoughts in a flat voice.

The crowd at Writers With Drinks isn't at all like the usual science-fiction crowd, it's more like a hipster literary salon.

I also read at Dark C