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

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, by Rudy Rucker
worldview?
On the other hand, I don’t really have anything more pressing to do. And I’ve always
wanted to try this. So soldier on, Ru, soldier on. Make it your book, do it your way, tell a
story that interests you, and you’ll have something worth doing.
October 4, 2003. Getting going.
So now I’m working slowly on Chapter One. Lots of distractions with my four-daya-week
teaching schedule and the need for entertainment on the weekends.
But last night I recalled how ahead-of-the-pack I felt at the NKS 2003 conference. I
think nobody is better equipped than me to write this book. I’m at the edge, which is why
it’s hard.
Working on Chapter 1, the lead section, “What is a Computation?”, and trying to get
up the chutzpah to tackle the messy problems of analog computation.
November 1, 2003. Back Into It.
I’ve been away from the book for the last few weeks. First I had midterms and a lot
of homework to grade, and then I got the copy-edited manuscript for Frek and the Elixir, and
worked on that for a week.
I had seriously decided to change the title to Geek Philosophy, partly at my friend
Marc Laidlaw’s urging, but John Oakes begged me to stick with The Lifebox, the Seashell
and the Soul. He says it doesn’t matter that it’s complicated to explain the title, what counts
is that it’s intriguing. And, hey, he’s the guy giving me the money, and Laidlaw hasn’t sold
a book in a number of years, so who are you gonna listen to?
November 18, 2003. Moving Right Along.
So now I’ve got 20,000 words done, whoah, and I’m only 2/3 through the first
chapter, so it’ll be like 30,000 words in Chapter One. I beat the table of contents down to
five chapters, and I hope some of the later chapters will be shorter. I’d prefer not to go over
100,000 words. Maybe I better get it down to four chapters. So it might be 120,000 words.
Okay, I just revised my working outline down to four chapters. That means, wow, I’m
already a fourth done!
This mamma is writing itself. Just like Spaceland. It’s like all I have to do is type it
down while the voices in my head tell it to me. They don’t tell me a whole lot at once, just a
little every day, but it’s accumulating as fast as snow on the ground in a blizzard. I have so
much to say about all this stuff. The nice thing is that with so much material compared to the
space I have to fill, I don’t have to write about stuff that I don’t really care about. Toss the
history of programming languages overboard! Good-bye to the worries about biotechnology!
So long, Moore’s Law! Sob! Well, maybe I can still talk about those things.
I think, though I should go ahead and try and finish topics off as they come up, and
not be mentally planning to really do it right later on. I might not get back to some of the
topics at all.
December 8, 2003. Done with section 1.3, The Physical World.
I’m finally done writing the little survey of physics. I’d been worried about the
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