Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker August 11, 2003. Version 6 is a Go! So I made a nice version 5, and today Brockman’s assistant Russell Weinberger called and said they liked it fine, modulo two changes, drop the too-slobbering second paragraph from the start of the proposal, and go back to an earlier title. I had made the title Seashell Soul: Enjoying the Computational Worldview, and they had me roll it back to The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul with no subtitle. They thought Enjoying the Computational Worldview sounded “too geeky.” So I made those two small changes to have a Version 6, and now we’ll see what happens next. I wonder if they can really get me a large advance. If so, I think I’d be pretty stoked to write the book. I guess I could start on it pretty soon. Maybe I’ll begin by thinking about the history of computation once again, but this time without focusing on machines, allow things like canals to be computations as well. August 19, 2003. Meeting Brockman in NYC I met John Brockman, his son Max, and Russell Weinberger for lunch in NYC on August 19. Brockman turns out to be older than I’d expected. But, duh, he’s my age. A lively character, certainly, and I found it easy to talk with him. And he seemed to enjoy me. He sent the proposal to about ten good houses, all at once, and seemed fairly confident that one of them would give us a good advance. “I wouldn’t be having lunch with you if I didn’t think that,” he said. “Max is expensive.” His office was impressive, a penthouse in a building on Fifth Avenue across from the Plaza Hotel. He did send it to Four Walls Eight Windows, kind of an ace in the hole. Simon and Schuster has already turned my proposal down. John didn’t think we’d get any action till September, when everyone’s back from vacation. September 4, 2003. History of Technology as History of Computation Now I’m back to teaching at SJSU. While I’m waiting to hear what the publishers say, I started working on the nine between-chapters short-short stories I wanted to put in the book. I finished the first one, “The Kind Rain,” and am starting on the second. The first was a thousand words, which seems just about perfect. Even if the book doesn’t fly, I can use the stories somewhere. I need something to write in any case, with the Frek revisions all done. I feel like I’m wasting my life if I’m just teaching and not writing. I always find it hard to start a fresh story, much harder than having a novel to keep working on, so in a way it’s good to have the discipline of trying to write nine one-week stories in a row (optimistically assuming I can do one a week). Maybe to finally get the knack of the short-short story form. I always used to love Frederick Brown’s short-short SF stories. I’ve been reading a lot, too, boning up on computation stuff. I printed out three or four papers by David Deutsch and some other quantum computation characters. He seems less and less sanguine about large quantum computers being physically feasible, let alone human brains actually being quantum computers. I’m thinking I might after all do a limited modified stations-of-the-cross thing [cf. the Nixon White House Haldeman-Erlichmann conversation about considering a “limited modified hang out” on Watergate rather than a full “let it all hang out” (glorious Seventies expression, that)], like talk to Bennett, Toffoli, p. 120
Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker Margolus, all of whom I know from the old CA days, and maybe even hook up with Deutsch in England. Could of course talk to Wolfram, too. I started reading The Bit and the Pendulum, a fairly low-level book by a science journalist. He starts right in with an idea I’d been mulling over, that the computer is a popular machine whose presence has changed the mental paradigms we use. He mentions the clock and the steam engine as two earlier mind-changing machines. But I can’t go on reading this book, the man writes down too much, he over-simplifies. I’d like to do a bit more with the history of technology. The obvious move would be to say that each technology had it’s own particular concomitant world view. But I think it would be more fun to start out from a hard-core automatist stance, and say that each new technology was fundamentally an additional form of “computation” in the broadest sense of the word. I love this kind of McLuhanesque play. Last night I was thinking about it all night in my dreams. Technology agriculture spinning and weaving smelting clocks, locks, etc steam engine the dynamo radio and television atomic power computers biotechnology Computation Seed produces a plant. Animals make animals. Fibers make yarn, yarn makes fabric. Heat turns rocks into slag and metal. System of gears does the same thing over and over. A “living” or autonomous machine that eats coal. Subtle invisible energy through wires. Subtle invisible waves through air. Treating the atom like a machine. Complicated repeatable patterns made of electricity. Tinkering with the genome. September 6, 2003. Selling the Book Talked to Russell Weinberger. John Oakes of Four Walls Eight Windows has made an offer for Four Walls Eight Windows, but many have turned it down. Russell sent me some of the rejection letters, which were dishearteningly blind to what I’m planning to do. I thought of the phrase, “I went to the demonstration, to get my fair share of abuse,” as Mick Jagger puts it in “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” *** Yesterday afternoon, about two hours after thinking of Mick’s phrase “I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse,” I turned on the car radio and heard, yes, You Can’t Always Get What You Want right from the start. Synchronicity! Hearing it I realized, indeed, I can’t always get what I want, but if try sometimes, I just might find, I get what I need. How true. Also I thought about why “get my fair share of abuse” rings so true for me. My projects have always been “greeted with howls of execration” (quote from last page of Camus, The Stranger). If people didn’t question and disagree with what I want to write, then I wouldn’t be the same old Radical Ru. I’d be a sell-out. Even though I’m always imagining I’m going to sell out, I never seem to be able to figure out how. Actually, it’ll be good to work with Oakes again. He’ll be likely to give me carte blanche on the writing, which is always nice. p. 121
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Notes for the Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul - Rudy Rucker

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