THE UNIVERSE AT THE END OF THE RESTAURANT
SOME time ago, I was asked where I wrote THE EDGE OF MADNESS (Aignos 2020) by Raymond Gaynor. Notwithstanding the fact that I wrote it over several weeks (several months if you include the technical research; several years if you include defining the ambiance; several decades if you include personal experience), I penned some of it in a restaurant here San Francisco that, at the time, was reminding me of my days at University of California Berkeley. It’s the same restaurant in which I sketched out the sequel, which I tentatively called “Shadow.” I recall staring distantly beyond the far wall at what seemed to me at the time a holographic vision of the universe. Ergo, the universe at the end of the restaurant, in deference to a longtime favorite, completely irreverent, sci-fu author, Mr. Douglas Adams. Okay, call he a science fantasy author if you prefer, but I think we’ll find a number of his little less outlandish ideations waiting for us to catch up with them in the future. Sci-Fu — Science-based futuring — never got stretched so long, wide, deep and timely as in his HITCHHIKERS GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series.
I was sorely tempted to jump into the illusion of money, that all too human “game” that rewards the few at the expense of the many, and mentally travel across the restaurant to my misty galaxy spinning there, waiting for me. Telling me what to write, and to write it as fast as possible due to the likely effect of time dilation when traveling so fast across such distances. I wrote. Scribbled, really, every idea as it zipped through my head and passed, leaving behind a stack of index cards with writing on them resembling that of a stenographer attempting to record several persons “speaking in tongues.”
My work was rewarded later, when, trying to make head or tails of the indecipherable index cards, I discovered their importance wasn’t in what it was I had been trying to record, but in the exquisite challenge they presented, lying there before me, simply begging to be given meaning. Any meaning. And, I did exactly that. The results, reflected later in (a) “ah-ha” moments doing the technical research; (b) the unfolding of a plausible future embedded within a world in constant conflict; and (c) detailed using from personal experience are what you see in THE EDGE OF MADNESS.
I invite you to snuggle into an easy chair by a fireplace, open the book to any random page and begin your journey along the edge of madness to the universe at the end of the restaurant.
The Edge of Madness
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999693859
I was sorely tempted to jump into the illusion of money, that all too human “game” that rewards the few at the expense of the many, and mentally travel across the restaurant to my misty galaxy spinning there, waiting for me. Telling me what to write, and to write it as fast as possible due to the likely effect of time dilation when traveling so fast across such distances. I wrote. Scribbled, really, every idea as it zipped through my head and passed, leaving behind a stack of index cards with writing on them resembling that of a stenographer attempting to record several persons “speaking in tongues.”
My work was rewarded later, when, trying to make head or tails of the indecipherable index cards, I discovered their importance wasn’t in what it was I had been trying to record, but in the exquisite challenge they presented, lying there before me, simply begging to be given meaning. Any meaning. And, I did exactly that. The results, reflected later in (a) “ah-ha” moments doing the technical research; (b) the unfolding of a plausible future embedded within a world in constant conflict; and (c) detailed using from personal experience are what you see in THE EDGE OF MADNESS.
I invite you to snuggle into an easy chair by a fireplace, open the book to any random page and begin your journey along the edge of madness to the universe at the end of the restaurant.
The Edge of Madness
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0999693859
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