Especially if you're writing a book for National Novel Writing Month, every day of forward progress is vital — and if you realize your book lurched in the wrong direction 10,000 words ago, you're going to have a hell of a time going back and restarting from where you went wrong. But it's difficult for anybody to find that wrong-turn place and start over from there.

So we asked some of our favorite authors to suggest ways to get back on course after your story has done a slingshot around the wrong star. Here's what they suggested:

Brad Meltzer (author of The Tenth Justice, The Book Of Lies and Identity Crisis):

That's just process. Mark Twain said that when you're done writing, you throw out the first half, and what you have left is what's gold. So it's fine to veer off course. As long as you have the thick skin to recognize that everything must be edited and corrected and improved. Of course, that doesn't mean it'll be easy. There is no terror like the terror of realizing that all your work is for crap. But again, if it were easy, everyone would do it.

Cherie Priest (author of Boneshaker, Fathom and Those Who Went Remain There Still):

The most egregious time I ever had a novel go off-track was with one of my more recent books, FATHOM. In fact, it happened twice with that project. I kept getting two-thirds of the way finished with a draft ... and then I'd realize that it wasn't working. The parts just weren't coming together, and my attempts to force them were creating even worse problems. Finally I did what I should've done in the first place — I turned to my editor (who is awesome). I asked for an extension on the project and kept her on the phone for a couple of hours, bouncing ideas off her; and eventually I was able to sit down and hammer out a draft that worked much better — and the finished product is vastly improved for the editorial input and subsequent reboot. If it's broken, it's broken — and for me, anyway, there's nothing else to be done but trash it and start fresh. I'd advise anyone who's stuck to find a patient, insightful friend to ask for help, and try coming at the story from another angle next time. I know a few people who can reshape something from the ground up, but I'm just not one of them ... and that's a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

Rudy Rucker (author of Postsingular, Hylozoic, Mathematicians In Love, and the Ware tetralogy):

Making a major plot change in a novel isn't always as hard as one might imagine. After all, much of a story is descriptions, or dialog, or action scenes — and these tend to stay pretty much the same. The switchpoints where the plot emerges are really rather few and rather short. So changing the plot is maybe a little like acupuncture. You may might find there's only five or six spots that you need to zap, and that the changes may in fact be quite small. This always surprises me. What happens is that my conception of the story looms in the background and seems to imbue every scene, but in fact the stage-magic-fog of the conception is really only emerging from, as I say, five or six little nozzles, and its not so hard to tweak the nozzles. This said, there will be times that a whole scene needs to go, which can be a bit painful. In these cases, I save the excised chunk into my separate "Notes" document so that it's not totally lost. And when the novel comes out, I post my notes online anyway, so the scrap gets a kind of half-life as well.

Scott Westerfeld (author of Leviathan, Pretties, Uglies, Peeps, Midnighters and So Yesterday):

When you've made a huge wrong turn, it's important to broach the subject carefully with your subconscious. Don't sit down saying to yourself, "I'm going to rewrite the last 100 pages!" You'll freak out.

Instead, pretend you're merely taking a closer look at the fateful juncture. Maybe you'll just rewrite that ONE chapter where things went wrong, just to see what happens. Tell yourself that after making a few important changes, you'll be able to salvage most of the 100 pages since. And after those first changes are made, your brain will slowly become invested in the new state of affairs. After a while, you may actually WANT to make all the changes necessary, even if that means throwing out a month's work.

It's like any bad news: Don't come out with it all at once.

Scott Westerfeld and Justine Larbalestier are also giving invaluable writing tips for NaNoWriMo on their respective blogs, on alternate days. (Click on their names for the blog links.) Well worth checking out!

These are the science-fiction universes where you can transfer your consciousness into a robot body permanently, and wave goodbye to those annoying bones and excretory organs forever. And tomorrow, we'll have a list of the ten best robot bodies you can plug your brain into, and control temporarily.

Note: To some extent, there's some overlap here with the list we did a while ago of people who died and went to cyber-heaven. So we left out a few examples from the earlier list, like Dr. Ira Graves and Juliana Soong in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Mindscan, by Robert J. Sawyer
Wealthy Jake Sullivan is dying of a rare medical condition, so he pays the Immortex corporation to scan his brain and load him into a new, immortal robot body. There, he meets a children's author, Karen, who's also gotten a robot body so she can keep her copyrights for centuries. They fall in love — but Jake's original meat body, who's still not dead yet, decides to sue to get his personhood back from the robot duplicate. And after Kate's meat body dies, her son sues to get control over her estate.

Robotrix

In this bizarre, messed-up Hong Kong movie, an evil super-rich business man loads his brain into a robot body. And a sexy crime-fighting babe gets killed trying to stop him — so two female scientists, in shiny fetishy labcoats, put her naked body on a table with an also-naked robot body, and then transfer her consciousness into the robot. So she can go out there and kick some robo-butt. (We have a couple more clips from Robotrix here.)

8th Man aka 8-Man:

In this early Japanese anime series, Special Agent Brady gets killed, but downloads his brain into a robot body and becomes the 8th Man, a robot superhero who has superior speed, strength and reflexes, and he can change his appearance at will. His alter ego is Tobor, a private detective. Watch him deal with a Godzilla-esque robot from outer space, in this awesome clip.

Stargate: SG-1, "Tin Man"
The SG-1 crew winds up on a planet where a man named Harlen copies their consciousnesses into robot bodies. In an interesting twist on the usual "minds transferred into robot bodies" concept, it turns out that the crew's original bodies are intact, and they're eventually free to go. The robot duplicates meet their original selves, and the robots are a bit jealous of the "real" crew, who get to go home. Witness this exchange between robot Jack O'Neil and the "real" Jack:

ROBOT JACK: Somebody stole my life. That's what happened.

O'NEILL: You talking about my life?

ROBOT JACK: Hey, I've got every right to it that you do. I was kind of hoping I could figure out away to undo all this, get myself back into my body, where I belong.

O'NEILL: Well it's occupied, thank you.

The "Ware" series by Rudy Rucker
Cobb Anderson is an aging computer scientist who's best known for committing treason — he gave the robots free will and liberated them from the restrictive laws of robotics. Now the robots, who are living on the Moon, have come up with a scheme for Cobb to live forever — they've created a perfect robot duplicate of his body, and they want to digitize his consciousness and load it into the new shell. The only catch: to scan Cobb's brain and duplicate it, they have to slice it up, thus destroying it in the process.

Sliders, "State Of The Art"

The dimensional travelvers visit a world where robots have taken over — and the robots' creator, James Aldohn, has found a process to transfer a human consciousness into a robot body. The only downside: it's an untested procedure, and he needs to use the visitors as guinea pigs. Weirdly, the scene where Katherine McClellan's robot body gets switched on has inspired some really odd slow-mo Youtube fetish vids.

The Outer Limits, "The Brain Of Colonel Barham"

Colonel Barham, a dying astronaut, volunteers to have his brain loaded into a robot body so he can go to Mars before the Soviets — although, in this case, it looks like they keep part of the meat brain alive, so it's an edge case. In any case, the arrogant Col. Barham goes nuts once he's in a robot body, and he starts trying to kill anyone who messes with him. Somehow, his robot body has the ability to control people's minds and turn them into zombies.

Caprica

We couldn't leave this Battlestar Galactica prequel out — that plucky Zoe Graystone gets killed in a terrorist bombing, but luckily she's figured out a way to back up her brain electronically first, because the human mind only takes up about 300 MB of disk space.

Skinned by Robin Wasserman

Lia Kahn is rich, young and beautiful — unfortunately she's also fatally injured in a car accident. So her dad pays for her consciousness to be transferred into a new robot body. She no longer eats or has any sense of smell, and she doesn't feel touch the same way she used to. Is she still the same person she used to be? Even she isn't sure, and her old "popular kids" clique at high school isn't sure whether to accept her either. Think you had a hard time fitting in in high school? Imagine doing it with a robot body, in a culture that's uncomfortable with uploaded humans. (Read an interview with the author here.) Another novel with a similar theme is Nightmare In Silicon by Colette Phair.

Star Trek: "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

Captain Kirk's mind gets copied perfectly into an android body, except that he's obsessed with being sick of Spock's half-breed interference, because that's what Kirk was muttering to himself when his mind got scanned. I love the spinning table with the two naked Shatners on it (at around 5:20 in this video.) Of course, they don't destroy Kirk's original fleshy body, probably just because they don't get around to it.

Runners up:

The Red Skull And Zola both transfer their brains into robot bodies in Captain America Reborn

The Creation Of The Humanoids

Osama Tezuka (creator of Astro Boy) writes a story of a dying person whose consciousness gets transferred into a robot body in the Phoenix series.

Fragile Machine

Starr Saxon, aka Machinesmith, becomes a gay robotic supervillain in issues of Daredevil and the Fantastic Four. (See top image.)

Ghost In The Shell: Innocence shows a world where cyborgs have abandoned their last bits of humanity and have become fully robotic.

Battle Angel Alita also includes some of the best cybernetic bodies — thanks to Cash907Censored for suggesting it.

In Dragonball Z movie 2, Dr. Willow dies, but he downloads his brain into a robot body.

The story "The Robot Who Came To Dinner" by Ron Goulart features a detective who's downloaded his brain into a robot body.

Jens in Galidor: Defenders Of The Outer Dimension

Doozy Bots

Standing here, in the middle of San Diego Comic Con, it's easy to feel as though the movie industry is a huge maw — sucking up every stray thought or tingle of creativity that anyone has ever had, and mashing them all into new reasons for Brad Pitt to grimace. Hollywood feels all-consuming, when you're surrounded by hype for upcoming comic-book and disaster movies.

I was actually going to do a list of "gloriously unfilmable books," but then I Googled to make sure io9 hadn't already done that post. We hadn't, but SciFiWire, Screenhead and hard-SF writer Mike Brotherton all have. And after I'd already started writing this post, Wired Magazine did one too. (And io9 contributor Jeff VanderMeer and the CrazyMonk blog have great comments on the Screenhead post.) The unfilmable novels include some literary giants, like Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami, some masterpieces of thought-provoking science fiction, including Ursula K. Le Guin, William Gibson, and Connie Willis, and some giant epics, like Gene Wolfe's Book Of The New Sun and Dan Simmons' Hyperion. I would add at least some of Iain Banks' Culture novels, some Joanna Russ, and a lot of Rudy Rucker's work.

(Incidentally, the movie of William Gibson's Neuromancer? Still definitely happening, according to inside sources I've talked to recently.)

So instead of doing a list of unfilmable novels, let's discuss the whole idea of a book being "unfilmable." First of all, is it true that there are "unfilmable" books (as opposed to books that shouldn't be filmed?). And what makes a book unfilmable? And finally, what do these supposedly unfilmable books tell us about the process of translating a book to film?

Jeff VanderMeer makes a really fascinating point in his response to the Screenhead post. He writes:

I also think this brings up a serious point: more novels should be unfilmable. Because this speaks to what about the form cannot be replicated in other art forms. When I was writing Shriek, one thing I had foremost in my head was to create something that couldn't be filmed (well, except for little excerpts of it...).

Yes, there are unfilmable books.

So is there such a thing as an unfilmable book? I'd say the answer to that is a resounding "Yes." Sure, people used to say Lord Of The Rings and Watchmen were unfilmable, and they were proved wrong. But those two examples don't disprove the existence of the unfilmable book, as a species. Some books are too abstract, too complex, too idea-driven, or too non-mainstream to become a Hollywood movie, or any kind of movie for that matter.

Take Rudy Rucker's Postsingular and its sequel, Hylozoic. They're fresh in my mind because I just read Hylozoic recently, and there's so much in those novels that you could never possibly convert into a series of sounds and visual images. You have the nano-machines, the "nants," devouring the entire world and porting everybody to a virtual Earth simulation called "Vearth." And after the nants are turned back, you have a kind of global awakening via a network of Orphids, machines which turn every object fully interactive. And soon, everybody on Earth is quasi-telepathic and able to spy on each other via the OrphidNet. And people can expand their consciousness by connecting to a kind of group mind called the Big Pig. Oh, and they create plastic self-aware robots called Shoons, and contact giants from another plane of existence (the Hibrane) who show them how to "unroll the Lazy Eight" dimension. I feel like I'm barely scraping the surface here, and any Hollywood scriptwriter would need a week in a sensory deprivation tank after trying to turn this into a screenplay.

We went to a reading and booksigning for Jacqueline Carey a while back, and she mentioned, with obvious glee, that her magnificent "Kushiel" books couldn't be made into movies. Partly, that's because of their huge scope and complexity — but mostly, it's because of the subject matter. Especially in the first three books, the main character is a sacred prostitute who can turn pain into pleasure (I'm oversimplifying a bit), and sex work and S/M are woven into the story so deeply, you can't remove them without the whole thing falling apart. Not to mention, the fact that her story takes place in alternate France that worships the bastard son of Jesus Christ, who teaches that you should "love as thou wilt," including S/M as well as homosexuality. There are many ways to make a terrible movie of Kushiel's Dart, but no way to make a good one — at least within Hollywood.

Some books just aren't visual enough to make good movies — take Le Guin's The Dispossessed. You could, I suppose, make a somewhat lifeless film about a physicist from an anarchist planet who travels to a capitalist one. But it would be missing everything that makes The Dispossessed brilliant, from its exploration of the limits and virtues of Annares' utopia, to its dead-on depiction of academic politics, to the investigation of physics and philosophy that lie at the core of the development of "simultenaeity physics." How do you make a compelling movie about someone coming up with a new way to think about space/time?

Watchmen and Lord Of The Rings, by contrast, are both action/adventure stories. They were already woven into the fabric of tons of other superhero and fantasy movies long before they came to the silver screen. Turning them into movies required a deft touch, to be sure, but there was nothing in either work that was antithetical to the needs of the movie form. (Except, possibly, Watchmen's giant alien squid.)

And novels that are even more unfilmable than the ones mentioned above also exist. Some of them aren't particularly great as books either — there are novels that are so dreadful, so dull, or so pointlessly offensive that you'd go mad trying to adapt them. I've read many of these books, so I know.

I should add a caveat: even if a book really is unfilmable, you can always make a movie with the same title and one or two character names, with nothing else in common with the original. If you include works loosely inspired by a book, then yes, anything is "filmable."

Are there books that can be filmed, but shouldn't?

As to whether a science fiction novel shouldn't be turned into a film, that's slightly more of a value judgment than the question of whether it can. Many people — myself included — argued that Watchmen shouldn't be a movie. In my case, I was groping towards the theory that a movie that was faithful to the graphic novel would be both too dark and too dull. I wrote:

I don't really doubt that we'll end up with a note-for-note mimicking of the graphic novel, transplanted to the screen. But will it be worth watching?... The Watchmen movie won't be able to duplicate the things that were awesome and juicy about the original graphic novel. And in its attempt to grasp at something that can't be captured, it may wind up being kind of boring.

Looking back at what I wrote, I'm not sure I made the case conclusively — I focused too much, in that essay, on discussing the things that Watchmen does that are unique to the graphic novel form, and discounted the possibility that the movie could do similar things in a different way. I didn't talk enough about the story itself, and the things about it that could, or could not, make for a good movie.

And then, a year ago today, I saw a bunch of footage and talked to Zack Snyder, and came around to the idea that his movie could work — it could be about the history of superhero movies, in the same way the graphic novel was about the history of comics. On the other hand, the actual movie that resulted really was a bit lifeless, as I'd originally feared — especially in the final act.

You'll find no shortage of novelists who feel their books shouldn't be movies, that too much would have to be sacrificed to the crudeness of the movie form.

But actually, thinking about it some more, I think it's a lot harder to argue that something shouldn't be filmed than that it can't be. If you're going to argue that it's possible to make a movie of your favorite book, but too much would be lost in the adaptation, you're shouldering the burden of proof. You have to identify just what elements would be lost — and make a stab at understanding how a work gets ported from "book" to "movie."

What does the process of adapting a novel to films tell us about movies and books?

Much of what Alan Moore said, in arguing that Watchmen shouldn't become a movie, is true of all printed works. You read a book at your own pace, with the ability to flip back and forth as you notice connections between things that happened in the previous chapter and things that are happening now. You do much more of the work of imagining the world in your head — even if there are illustrations. The book is frozen; the reader moves. It's the opposite of a film, in a sense.

I think people who believe that any novel that's brave, or complicated, or emotionally rich, will automatically make for an unfulfilling movie are slightly selling the medium of film short. You can do a lot in visual shorthand in movies, and there's a lot more scope to convey information in a way that will go over the heads of some viewers but resonate with others. Any film worth its photons works on multiple levels, for different audiences. A decent actor can convey a whole chapter's worth of backstory with a meaningful look.

Maybe, when adapting a book to a movie, there's something like T.S. Elliott's "objective correlative": you can put in visual cues, props and hints that stand in for complicated ideas and emotions inside a book.

My favorite book-to-film projects include Adaptation, which takes Susan Orlean's introspective work of journalism The Orchid Thief and turns it into a bizarre pomo story of two screenwriter brothers struggling with an inscrutable story. And then there's American Splendor, the film which adapts Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comics the only way you could: with a mixture of documentary and reenactment, with the two crossing over in a surreal fashion.

Of course, both of those movies experiment with the movie format to try and do justice to a quirky, unusual book. It's hard to imagine a science fiction movie doing something similar, unless it was a low-budget indie like Primer or Moon. Certainly, the kind of big-budget movie that a book like, say, Neuromancer demands is not going to support much in the way of stylistic experimentation. But maybe there are other ways of doing what those films do — bringing in some of the metatextual quirks of the books by adding a narrative voice-over, say, or a Verhoeven-esque set of fake commercials.

But really, that brings us to the biggest problem with adapting movies to books — big-budget Hollywood film genres are much more restrictive than book genres, at least right now. You have superhero films, disaster films, space-horror films and the occasional space opera. But that can always change — it was only a decade ago that you could count the number of satisfying superhero films on one hand, and now it's the "it" genre.

So maybe instead of hoping that your favorite book never becomes a movie, you should hope it does — and in the process of being filmed, it expands, just a bit, the circumference of Hollywood's narrow sphere of possibility. After all, it never hurts to be optimistic.

It's fitting that Hylozoic came out this summer, while so many people are taking part in the "infiinte summer" event, trying to read David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest in one summer. Infinite Jest, of course, is one of the best books about addiction, and the different ways in which addictions can warp your life, ever written. Hylozoic picks up that theme of addiction and compulsive behavior, and carries it in a typically transrealistic, surreal direction.

Hylozoic isn't entirely about addiction, of course — you'd be hard pressed to pin down one thing the book is "about" — but addiction does seem to be a major running theme. The book follows newlyweds JayJay and Thuy, who were major characters in the first book, as they struggle with different types of addictions and compulsions. In the first book, JayJay was addicted to the "BigPig," a sort of worldwide artificial mind that gains processing power from all the people connected to it. As one mind inside the Big Pig, you get to help solve huge world-shattering math and physics problems, and the loss of individuality and selfhood becomes a kind of joyous release. But at the end of the first book, JayJay and Thuy succeeded in opening up a kind of higher dimension called the "Lazy Eight," and as a result everything in the world is sentient in some fashion, and there's a kind of world-mind called Gaia, which is like an evolved version of the Big Pig.

So now JayJay is struggling against an addiction to connecting with Gaia, and it's a serious problem — people who spend too much time connected to Gaia tend to vanish utterly. His addiction winds up leading to him turning into the puppet of evil alien birds who want to invade Earth and turn it into alien condominiums, while enslaving humans and siphoning off all the "gnarl" (the randomness, sort of) from everything. JayJay becomes the helpless slave of the alien invaders. And then, later, once he escapes to a higher dimension where it's still the 15th century, he has other addiction issues involving wine and some kind of hallucinogenic mold in the bread.

Oh, and here's a video where Rudy Rucker explains what "gnarl" is:

Thuy, meanwhile, falls afoul of a second group of aliens with questionable motives, who visit Earth. The Hrull are sort of flying manta rays, and they need to harness the mental energy of humans and other intelligent mammals to propell their bodies through deep space. To do this, they give their mammalian workers a weird addictive gel that induces euphoria and sexual compulsiveness — and makes them utterly dependent on the Hrull. Thuy fights to avoid becoming addicted to this Hrull gel, (and she has a scene, involving this gel, halfway through the book which may squick a lot of readers, and could actually make it difficult to finish the book because it's so upsetting.)

As in the first book, everyone is able to see everyone else at all times, so there's no privacy. Added to which, Thuy and JayJay are part of the "cast" of a weird reality TV show, Founders, including all the people who helped usher in the Singularity. Advertisements sort of pop up around them and bob around, depending on how many people are watching them.

The other major theme of Hylozoic seems to be an extension of Postsingular's main idea: that the alternative to a kind of benign, all-embracing singularity is a singularity where most people end up being vassals and tools of the man. This time around, instead of nano-machines trying to eat everything on Earth and port all the humans to a virtual world, it's aliens who have been attracted by our new expanded consciousness and want to use it for their own ends. (And there are echoes of Postsingular, in that the bird aliens wind up gaining the support of president Dick Too Dibbs, who nearly gave away the store to the nanomachines last time. The bird aliens, the Peng, also win over a lot of right-wing Christian groups through subterfuge, in a somewhat cartoony sequence.)

As with all of Rucker's recent work, there's nothing naturalistic about Hylozoic, and yet it does feature little odd touches like a family barbecue or friends getting a burrito together. His characters talk in an unfiltered yet disjointed way, saying exactly what's on their minds with no editing, and in odd cadences. It's like they're speaking to us from their subconscious at times. Add to that the fact that two major characters in the book are a pitchfork named Groovy and his lover/opposite, a harp named Lovva, and it all starts to feel a bit like an acid-induced R. Crumb cartoon. Groovy the pitchfork is able to roam around causing mischief because he's been "Aktualized" — he's actually an alien from another world and/or dimension, and he's just chosen to appear in the form of a pitchfork. Oh, and did I mention that Thuy and JayJay hang out with Hieronymous Bosch when they travel to the 15th century dimension? They do.

The whole thing gets more and more demented, until it almost feels like you need a post-singularity brain to understand all of the eigth-dimensional drama and weirdness. But just when you think Rucker's layered on too much weirdness and nonsense for one book, it reveals itself, once again, to be the story of JayJay and Thuy's marriage, and of their battle to stay married in the face of alien birds, addictive manta-ray gel, and a personality-eating world mind. It's a fitting sequel to Postsingular, and anyone who enjoyed the earlier book will definitely find the follow-up just as fascinating and jarring. Oh, and Rucker will be reading (hopefully from this book) at Writers With Drinks, the reading series I organize and host, this Saturday in San Francisco. That's at the Make Out Room, 3225 22nd. street, from 7:30 to 9:30 on Saturday.

You'd never have enough computing resources to make it work

In Rudy Rucker's novel Postsingular (available as a free download), nanomachines (called "nants") turn the world in to a virtual simulation, called "Vearth." And it turns out that Vearth is kind of a sucky copy of the "real" Earth, because it takes up too much bandwidth to create a decent version. "The water, clouds and fire were never quite right. In any case, the nants didn't always try that hard; they often settled for shortcuts as crude as representing a tree by a cookie-cutter flat polygon."

And then the Big Pig, the super-intelligence that runs the simulation, comes up with an economy, where if you pay a monthly fee, you get rendered at a higher resolution. There's only so much room to live in Vearth's highest resolution and best-simulated zones, so most people have to live in tiny apartments or in worse areas. And then a rival programmer named Gustav rises up, offering equal computational resources for all — unfortunately, those computational resources are limited at best, so Gustav's whole world looks like an old-school arcade video game.

As virtual people are having more and more virtual "children," who were never "real" humans to begin with, overcrowding becomes a serious problem and people compete for bandwidth. "Vearth could only support so many virtual agents. With the birth rate going up, the older and weaker sims were being culled out." Eventually, there are terrorists and computer viruses that wipe out tons of people. And the Big Pig realizes that people can get along without their subconscious minds, so it takes those away.

Cut-and-paste characters

In a similar vein, Jim Munroe's classic novel Everyone In Silico (available as a free download) takes place in a near future where a corporation starts porting people to a virtual version of San Francisco, called Frisco. It's beautiful and immaculate there, but a lot of the people are just cookie-cutter copies of the same icon. One character visits a temple in Frisco:

Another monk, this one refilling the holy water, gave him an identical disapproving eyebrow. This time he didn't bother apologizing, just found a pew near the back and sat down.

You'd think that since they've bothered to make a temple for themselves, they'd make a couple of different types of monks instead of cutting and pasting....

Another cut-and-paste monk walked by, holding a small flame cupped in his hand, and Paul's ire was whipped up again. We had an infinitely varied environment on Earth, and we painted over it to draw our little stick figures....

"What do you think when you see that?" Paul said, pointing at the two monks, one at the altar and one cleaning stained glass.

"That whoever was doing skins was fucking lazy," Jeremy said, returning an eyeball back under his sunglasses. "But that's the way it is here, man. It's not just the skins," he said, spitting teeth as he said it. "It's the architecture too. And the security. That's why there's so many holes for rats like us."

Paul looked at him, expecting he'd have changed his zombie face for a rat one, but he was back to normal. "Just laziness, huh?"

"Well," Jeremy sighed. "OK," he started, wearily accepting Paul's seriousness. "It's like this. I've got a friend who does skins for environmental characters. He gets shit-all for it, and they're always on him - they want, like, 75 a day - so he can't spend time on the details. So he churns them out. He's made some wicked squidmen for an Atlantis environment, though."

It would be too predictable, with no danger or discovery

Robert J. Sawyer's paleontologist character in Calculating God learns that every intelligent species either blows itself up or decides to "transcend," uploading its consciousness into cyberspace. The idea of giving up corporeal existence doesn't appeal to him, because it would be like giving up your humanity: no more skinned knees or broken hearts. But the clincher is that it's too predictable. "Virtual reality was nothing but air guitar writ large," Sawyer writes. You could go on a simulated dig, and even discover fossils there — but they'd only be there because you wanted them to be there, and they wouldn't advance our understanding of evolution or the universe at all.

As Sawyer explains in Factoring Humanity:

The problem with virtual-reality simulations was just that: they were simulations... There was a fundamental difference between skiiing in Banff and skiing in your living room; part of the thrill was the possibility you might break a leg, part of the experience was the full bladder that couldn't be easily voided, part of the fun was the real sunburn that one got during a day on the slopes, even in the middle of winter.

It could suck if you're not middle class

Veteran editor Gardner Dozois discusses the "virtual reality" future in his "Summation" in the 1997 volume of The Year's Best Science Fiction And Fantasy:

I'm not sure that I believe in this future, although no doubt bits and pieces of it will come to pass. For one thing, it seems like a very middle-class view of the future, ignoring — as, indeed, does most science fiction — the question of what all the poor people are going to be doing while everyone is leading this Maximum Urban Cocooned existence. Are all the poor people going to have Virtual Reality cocoons too? Who's picking up the garbage? Who's sweeping the streets? Who's fixing the plumbing? It's like a future where only the Eloi are around; no Morlocks. A mistake that much science fiction makes is to assume that social change affects everyone to the same degree at the same time — which isn't the way it usually works. There are people living within fifty miles of my apartment in Philadelphia who don't have electricity or indoor plumbing; there are people living within a thousand miles or so of here, in rural Mexico, say, who are living a hand-farming subsistence not really different than the one their ancestors were living hundreds or even thousands of years back...

The point being that the present is not at a uniform level of social development, so I doubt that the future is going to be like that either. I wonder, in fact, if, in the future, we're going to see people living at a Stone Age level — or living the way most of us in the West do now, for that matter — side by side with people living such a high-tech existence, at such a level of technological sophistication, that they're nearly incomprehensible to us. But the different levels of technological sophistication will be layered throughout society, like the layers in nougat, the whole spectrum from Stone Age to Incompehensibly Advanced Singularity Folk existing side by side at the same time; it won't be all one uniform layer, Virtual Reality Cocoons all the way down.

Audrey Niffenegger is the author of The Time Traveler's Wife, soon to be a movie, and the forthcoming Her Fearful Symmetry. She's also an artist, engraver and bookmaker, part of the T3 artists and writers' collective. She teaches Interdisciplinary Book Arts at Columbia College Chicago Center for Book and Paper Arts, and has published two graphic novels: The Three Incestuous Sisters and The Adventuress.

And Niffenegger says that being a visual artist has definitely helped her to create storytelling that's more visually oriented. "I think that drawing, in particular, has trained me to observe and to be able to visualise things clearly. I teach a writing class for visual artists and I have found that they almost always excel at description, they seem to often possess the ability to organise and develop their train of thought very tangibly. I imagine this is due to constantly having to organise 2D space, it does carry over into the laying out of fictional worlds."

Rudy Rucker, meanwhile, is the author of numerous science fiction novels, including the Ware series, The Sex Sphere, Mathematicians In Love and Postsingular. He's been taking photos forever and has been doing paintings, often connected to his fiction, for several years, and has had some gallery shows recently. "All along, I've made little pen and paper drawings of my scenes before writing them, but now I enjoy the more heavy-duty process of breaking out my kit of acrylic paints. I took up painting when I was writing my historical novel about the painter Peter Bruegel, and I started using paintings for pre-visualization while I wrote Frek and the Elixir. A painting takes longer than a drawing, and I get more deeply into it. My sense is that I'm using a different part of my brain when I paint a picture­, as opposed to when I'm revising my written outline. It's like visiting a different muse."

Mary Robinette Kowal won the Campbell Award for best new SF writer, and has a story collection coming soon, called Scenting The Dark And Other Stories. She also has a novel coming out, called Shades Of Milk And Honey. And she works as a professional puppeteer, both making and operating puppets. She explains:

Performing and building puppets definitely has an impact on how I see the world and that directly influences what is important to me when I'm writing. But really, to answer this properly, I should probably back up a bit and explain what it's like to perform as a puppeteer. Puppetry is a form of acting. The main difference between an puppet actor and a "meat" actor is the tool we use to communicate with the audience. In both cases, it's about creating a believable character. A traditional actor inhabits their tool — their body — and learned to use it unconciously since the day they were born. Some might have to retrain it, but for the most part, it's so familiar, one doesn't think about the body as separate from the self. Make sense? With a puppet actor, my tool is external to my body. I had to learn to use a puppet as an adult and very consciously had to work to learn what makes something look alive. I had to learn to break body language down into pieces of discreet information so I could duplicate them with this tool. Ultimately, a puppeteer wants to learn to do all of this so naturally that it requires no more thought than a traditional actor requires to work their own body.

Here's her demo reel:

Visualizing characters, imagining plots:

And Kowal says that the biggest impact of her puppeteering experience is in how she thinks about creating believable characters, and plots that flow from their actions. That focus on "body language" has allowed her to portray lots of different characters, whether a dog, a badger, or a little boy. And one aspect of body language is that "every movement counts, because most puppets have no facial expression." That carries over to fiction, because every movement her characters make have to count as well. "If my character picks up a glass, it has to be for a reason, preferably one that expresses an emotional state as well as a plot point. "

And similarly, Rucker says that his painting has helped him figure out where a story should go next: "Painting gives me a different way of being surprised." Sometimes, when he's not sure what should happen in an upcoming scene, he'll get out the paints and "see what happens."

"If a narrative is 'storyboarded' — even in one's imagination — then the action of the plot will be more grounded," says Stephen Stanley, the only SF writer ever to place in both the Writers Of The Future and Illustrators Of The Future contests and the art director of Shimmer Magazine. "Drawings and sketches of setting, scenes, characters make excellent reference materials (non-visual writers can do the same by collecting photographs and images from magazines and web searches). Perhaps the act of personally drawing reference material makes the elements more real to me, and therefore more real when written. It doesn't hurt."

Stanley says he'll pre-visualize a character or a setting, before he writes, and one crucial question is how much visual detail to include: too much and the story gets bogged down. But not enough, and the story loses vividness.

"I've always sought to provoke the reader with a steady flow of powerful images," says Rucker. (Anyone who's read earlier works like Wetware or The Sex Sphere, or newer stuff, like the ultra-trippy Postsingular, knows this to be an understatement.) But like Stanley, he seeks a balance between strong images and story flow. "I like to keep things moving with action, dialog, and the stream of consciousness of the main character. Absorbing a story is quite different from looking at a painting. With a painting you have a synoptic view, that is, you can overview the whole scene at once. But in reading a story, you have to build the scene in your head by processing a linear sequence of descriptions. I don't like to overdo the visual description in the "fine writing" sense, which can be a pain for the reader. My goal is to put in just enough description so that when the reader looks back on the scene, they have a mental image similar to the one I started with. I don't mean that I want to be stark or minimalist, what I mean is that I like the conciseness of poetry­, where you line up exactly the right words and phrases to set off the intended response."

Niffenegger's Time Traveler's Wife is full of memorable images and telling descriptions, and she says that including a strong visual element is a good way to ground the story when you're dealing with fantastic elements like time travel or (in her new novel) ghosts. But too much visual detail can detract from the reader's imagination, she adds: "I do try to be careful about which things I render fully and which things I am vague about. I have found that letting readers fill things in for themselves can be effective. In the new book I am more spare with the visuals. I spend a lot of time inside various characters' minds, and most of these people are not especially visually aware."

Page 2: Worldbuilding Is Like Painting A Picture

"All along, I've had a visual imagination," says Rucker. "For me writing is a little like dreaming while I'm awake. That is, I see the scene in my mind's eye before I write it. Sometimes I'll nurse an image of a place or a situation for quite some time before I write about it, in fact I sometimes write a book simply to be able to mentally visit certain locales that I've dreamed up. I pretty much can't write a novel unless I have an image of a fabulous place where I want to go."

And when Rucker gets to write about those imaginary locales he's visualized, they become more real to him, and thus more compelling. It's sort of a feedback loop. "And painting is a way to layer on more details."

As for Kowal, she says working with puppets definitely helps her craft a scene or a locale in her mind. "The world-building is actually one of the key things that pulls me to both puppet building and SF and fantasy. Both forms are essentially the theater of the possible." At the start of a new story or a new puppet show, at first anything is possible — including defying the laws of physics.

The puppetry training also helps Kowal to visualize a new world, because her training has taught her to start a project by defining the parameters. "Since I'm creating a world from scratch, I need to make certain that the visual language I use is consistent and that the world has an internal logic. It's the same with writing."

Says Stanley:

For me, a story will evolve from a drawing (or an imagined visual) as often as a drawing comes out of a story. I'm writing about a space station. The more I pre-visualize, or draw, the interior and exterior of that station the more "real" the station becomes for me and the characters. The better I understand how certain areas look, smell, function, flow, etc., the better I can write about them. Any writer can do this (and for the most part does and should), but having trained and practiced the visualized representation of imagination, perhaps a visual artist who also writes can have an advantage. Of course, there is more to writing than describing visual experience, so it's not necessarily a "great" advantage. The processes in art/creativity tend to be similar.

Niffenegger says world-building is less of an issue for her, because she tends to set her stories in existing places. "The world is built." Where visualizing the story comes in, for her, is figuring out the best real-world location to set off something that happens in a scene.

Keeping it concrete

And perhaps the most important benefit of having access to another art form is that it helps you make the story more concrete. Kowal says that being concrete helps you think about how one little change alters everything else in the world. When she teaches about stage adaptations, she always says, "If you change one thing, you have to look at how it changes everything." And that comes back to writing SF: "Writing about the future is basically taking our world and making a change, which affects everything."

It's all very well to have crazy ideas and whiz-banging plot devices, says Rucker. But in the end, "everything has to be visual. I think I learned that from Robert Sheckley and Jorge Luis Borges. Ideas are important, but what you want in a novel is an objective correlative for the idea."

So instead of going on and on about your crazy ideas, you want to show the reader "some weird little physical device. Imagine, say, a wriggly green horseshoe with antennae on it, call it a jinker­and when you point your jinker at some object, the target object becomes weightless and the size of a matchbox and you can carry it off in your pocket. Maybe the jinker talks to you telepathically, maybe pairs of jinkers like to get together and mate, and while they're doing it, all the objects in your house are floating around and changing size. That's all much more interesting than talking about spatial metrics and gravity tensors!"

Doctorow will be reading from his new novel Little Brother, and hopefully Rucker will read from the sequel to his novel Post-Singular, called Hylozoic. Charlie Jane will be reading something brilliantly weird, and I'll be reading something about why I love piracy.

I worked for a few years at EFF as their policy analyst and media outreach geek, and I'm still their lifelong fan for all the amazing work they do with civil liberties for the digital age. They educate the public about technology policies that harm consumers; fight for privacy and free speech online; agitate for hackers' rights to innovate; and litigate to protect fair use, anonymity, bloggers' rights to be treated as journalists, and many other things related to Great Justice. I'm delighted to participate in this event and promise it will be a smashing good time.

Here are the details, according to the EFF website:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow. Cory will be reading from his novel, "Little Brother," a story of high-tech teenage rebellion set in the familiar world of San Francisco. As he currently calls the UK home, this is a rare opportunity to to hear Cory read from his work in person. He will be joined by fellow writers Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders reading from their latest works.

7pm on Monday March 23, at the 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco.

Admission is $25. No one turned away for lack of funds. Must be 21 or older to attend.

via EFF

Get to know them as individuals, rather than types. If your characters are cut off from all the present-day cultural references, like "lawyer who went to Harvard," then it's even more important to think of them as individuals, says Elizabeth Bear, Campbell- and Hugo-winning author of Carnival and Undertow. "Try very hard to know them as people," she urges. "That goes for any setting, past or present or future — or alternate reality."

In particular, you should think, "'This is a person who happens to have the following traits, and all that they imply,' rather than 'this is a nuclear physicist who grew up in Iowa.'"

Try making your characters scientists. Or at least, have them be obsessed with stuff that's relavant to your storyline, advises Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of the Mars trilogy and the Science In The Capital series. Having scientists as your characters lets you "explore the setting and the character at once." And it helps if your characters obsess about the mysteries and explanations in your story. They can also be obsessed with a planet, spaceship, new procedure or alien.

Base them on people you know. The most realistic characters are often based closely on your friends or people you've met, says Rudy Rucker, Philip K. Dick-winning author of the -Ware novels and Postsingular. That goes double for your aliens, A.I.s and robots, he adds. It's always better to copy your friends than to lift from "received ideas about how SF characters might behave. Who wants to see yet another a humorless talking head with a BBC accent? The absolute worst thing in Matrix III was when Keanu gets to the virtual office of the Big Computer Mind, and he meets, like, a tweedy professor with a white beard. Ugh! At the very least it should have been a fat hacker in a T-shirt, preferably high on pineal extract." Also: to make your characters stand out, try having them say quirky, unexpected things. "Forget your Star Trek memories, and remember your wild and crazy friends — the ones who say things that Make No Sense," Rucker advises.

Give them a thought-out world. The more carefully thought out the world you're placing your characters into, the more we'll be able to believe that they live there, says Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose. And that also makes it easier to "contrast them against this imaginary place."

Figure out what they love, and what they fear. Try to find what drives your characters, including what they want and need, Bear urges. And understand what traumatizes them. "I tell people I like to know what they'd want on their tombstone: that seems to give me a really good handle on who they are."

She adds:

Characters we can relate to have fears and damage, but moreover, for me they have to be devoted to something — an ideal, a person, whatever. Even villains become much more sympathetic when we're introduced to whatever it is that they love.

Kage Baker, author of the Company novels, agrees: "It isn't the way a person relates to his hovercar that makes him memorable; it's what's going on in his heart." No matter what planet or time you're living in, there will be "certain constants in human existence: struggle against poverty, rebellion against authority, love and desire, loneliness, curiosity. Any reader can relate to those." Make sure your character has loves and hatreds that readers can see themselves in, and the rest will take care of itself.

Don't aim for larger-than-life — and overshoot. One pitfall with science fiction characters is that authors sometimes make their characters "bigger than life, or archetypal" to let them compete with the big, brash colorful worlds they live in. A common mistake is veering past archetypal, all the way into "over the top, or maybe somewhat cliche." If you do try for archetypal characters, think of the classics from all genres, like Sherlock Holmes' quirky genius or Captain Ahab's drive.

Don't obsess too much about setting and toys. If you spend pages and pages on dense descriptions of your settings and how exactly your hovercar works, you're distracting the reader from your characters, says Baker.

It's enough to say "He climbed into his hovercar" and your reader will get the idea. You don't need to give a geography lesson: "They were sitting in the courtyard drinking fire-palm wine" or "She trudged back from the well, balancing her water jar" or "They looked out across the desert and saw the yellow mountains of Califia before them" all give brief, intense impressions of a place, without stopping the narrative in its tracks or drawing focus from the main character.

Find out who's hurting. If your story involves a new situation or technological breakthrough, figure out who suffers as a result — maybe that should be your main character, says Robinson, quoting from Damon Knight (who was quoting James Blish in turn.)

Keep your characters grounded. The stranger the setting, the more ordinary your characters should be, says Terry Bisson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of Bears Discover Fire. "For example, in my most recent story, the narrator 'had a job and an apartment, but that was all.' The story wasn't about the setting but about the character."

Your characters should be "totally convinced they live in the present, rather than the future. Because, of course, it IS the present to them," says David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens. Make sure your world, and your characters, both have a believable past, that anchors their present. "As Gibson said, the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed. Same is true for the past: it's always with us, but sometimes beneath the surface. How one handles that is the key to character."

The stories in Flurb #6 are generally pretty awesome. I especially love Madeline Ashby's "Fitting A New Suit," set in a future dystopian Japan that's at war with Korea, where thousands of people choose to stay in their tiny homes all the time, exercising on special machines to generate electricity for their neighbors. And Michael Blumlein's "The Big One" is a wonderfully poetic and unsettling look at male-bonding in the wilderness that goes somewhat askew when some unexpected wildlife shows up. There's also Bruce Sterling's wonderfully weird and postmodern look ahead, "Computer Entertainment 35 Years From Today."

But my favorite story in the new Flurb is probably Rucker's own "Qlone," about a man who's stuck in gloomy Rochester, New York. Zach-5 is the fourth quantum-duplicate, or "Qlone," of the original Zach, and the Zach-qlones are in demand as CEOs and business leaders. Unfortunately, Zach-5 gets the short end of the stick and has to run a startup called Qodoq, which markets "real-world search engines" via quantum computing, so you never lose your car keys or cellphone again. It's sort of the way objects get tagged in Rucker's brilliant novel Postsingular. It just gets weirder and weirder, as Rucker spins out more bizarre inventions and business ideas.

I feel like I should add an obligatory disclaimer: Rucker has published a few of my own stories in past issues of Flurb, which may influence my judgement. But I don't think so. [Flurb]

Rucker's ideas include "magic doors," gateways to alternate dimensions, that swarm around people and provide portals they can jump through any time they want to escape this particular space-time continuum. He also suggests that writers could do a lot more with "dreams and memories" and how they can become real. My favorite idea is that memories could actually be a form of time travel, and some people might learn how to jump through them into the past — or pull people from the past into the present. (This reminds me a little bit of Scarlett Thomas' frustrating but brilliant novel The End of Mr. Y.)

He also suggests tackling "the afterworld," but from a scientific perspective. Or you could write about "quantum computational viruses . . . something like a computer virus might infect matter, perhaps changing the laws of physics to make our world more congenial to some other kinds of beings." Along those lines, he instructs people to write about "the subdimensions," and "the holographic universe."

After lobbying for people to write about humans developing "new senses," unlike the boring old telepathy or sensitivity to radio waves, Rucker suggests an idea he's explored himself: a flat Earth. Except what he wants to see that's different is "an infinite flat Earth," where you can keep going and going and the flatness doesn't end. He says it would be the perfect setting for a road trip, kind of like On the Road for aliens.

Check out more of Rucker's ideas on his blog, and invent some of your own while you're at it. Photograph by Rudy Rucker.

That's a sex sphere alright.

Rucker will be offering his novel Spacetime Donuts as a print-on-demand book too. Both should be out this summer. We'll let you know as soon as the URLs exist.

The Sex Sphere, etc. [Rudy's Blog]

Rucker, a retired mathematics professor, says, "We tend to very seriously undervalue quotidian reality." He then goes on to scold the starry-eyed futurists who predict smashing up the real world to make way for a virtual world as varied and granular as the one we live in now:

I might ask why someone would passionately want to believe that we can be translated from flesh into bits? There's something ascetic and life-hating about the notion. It's a bit like a religious belief; one thinks of the old "work now, get rewarded in heaven" routine.

We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don't fully match the richness of the real world. What's not so well known is that computer science provides strong evidence that no feasible VR can ever match nature.

This is because there are no shortcuts for nature's computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the "principle of natural unpredictability," fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don't allow for drastic shortcuts . . . Natural unpredictability means that if you build a computer sim world that's smaller than the physical world, the sim cuts corners and makes compromises, such as using bitmapped wood-grain and cartoon-style repeating backgrounds. Smallish sim worlds are doomed to be dippy Las Vegas/Disneyland/Second Life environments . . .

Come on, if you want to smoothly transform a blade of grass into some nanomachines simulating a blade of grass, then why bother pulverizing the blade of grass at all? After all, any object at all can be viewed as a quantum computation! The blade of grass already is an assemblage of nanomachines emulating a blade of grass. To the extent that you can realize an accurate VR world, the exercise becomes pointless.

In Postsingular, a maniac named Jeff Luty creates self-aware nanomachines called "nants," which are programmed to strip the world of all organic matter to reproduce themselves. But the nants don't just kill everyone, they "scan" you and put you into a virtual world, called "Vearth." The nants nearly succeed in absorbing the whole planet, but a rogue engineer, Ond Lutter, manages to plant a code that makes them reverse their actions, by making his autistic son memorize it before the nants absorb him. So the nants unravel all of their actions, back to the beginning, and restore everything on Earth to the way it was.

But Ond fears that Luty, or someone else, will try again to create nants that absorb the whole world. So he creates self-replicating nanites called "Orphids," which quickly cover everything in the world, tagging objects and turning them self-aware. Everybody becomes connected to each other via a kind of nano-internet called the Orphidnet. The Orphids guard against another nant incursion. But the Orphids also "tag" some techno-phobic giants from a higher dimension who have been visiting Earth secretly for decades, and these giants are willing to do anything to protect their dimension from our science. And the Orphidnet quickly gets overrun with spam and malware, just like the real Internet.

That summary barely scratches the surface of all the wild ideas Rucker throws out in Postsingular, which has enough inventiveness for ten good-sized science fiction novels.

Both versions of the Singularity suck in some ways, which feels much more realistic than the candy-floss vision some futurists want to feed us.

The first version, with the nants eating everything, leads to a virtual world that we learn would totally suck, late in the novel, thanks to a simulation one character experiences. The suckiness is partly because only certain people, who belong to the right political party, will actually get uploaded as consciousnesses in the new Vearth — everybody else is just an A.I. simulation. But it's also because there's not enough processing resources to simulate everything, and trees and other features become just crude pixellated shapes. People start "having children," meaning they merge their programs to create a new simulated person, who never existed in the real world. And these "newborns" take more and more processing power away from "real" people. Class divisions in the "Vearth" turn out to be worse than the ones in the "real" Earth, with some people stuck in crappy low-res living situations.

The second version, with the Orphids covering everything with a layer of intelligence, is sucky in a different way. Political candidates launch pop-up ads in the middle of your reality, bugging you while you're trying to take a walk. (Sort of like a Philip K. Dick story I read years ago.) Viruses cover you with "bugs" that prevent you from doing anything and make your Orphidnet access crash. And because everybody can see everybody else all the time through the Orphidnet, there's no more privacy. Everybody knows what you look like naked. (The wife and friends of Ond, the Orphids' creator, become stars of their own private soap opera, which zillions of people "tune into" via the Orphidnet.The soap opera's "stars" know more people are watching when the ads floating around them get bigger.) And people get addicted to "the big pig," a giant A.I. that forms in the Orphidnet and uses people's brains for extra processing power, which gives you a sort of high.

The novel's other main plot, about the giants from the higher dimension Earth (the "hibrane,") is a bit less fleshed out than the Orphids vs. nants stuff. It does make sense, because the Orphids "tag" the "hibrane" people, but I never quite got a complete sense of what the hibraners' world was like. We really only see it at the start and end of the novel. (And the hibrane people provide the solution, in the end, to Luty's second attempt to overrun the world with nants and create a new Vearth.) The alternate version of San Francisco that we glimpse, in the technophobic hibrane, feels a bit like it's still the 1960s, which may be part of the point. (The Orphidnet is a kind of turbo Internet, and so it uncovers a weird subculture that nobody knew about, just as the Internet has uncovered lots of previously obscure subcultures for us.) In the end, the hibrane feels like just another bizarre idea-spike in a novel that's spiked with tons of them.

But in general, Postsingular actually pulls off the ambitious multilayered story it sets out to tell. Along the way, we discover a new form of meta-storytelling, thanks to the Orphidnet, and that in turn leads to a new way of looking at reality. (One of Rucker's main characters, Thuy, is writing a meta-novel using the Orphidnet to assemble all her experiences. This turns out to unlock the hidden means of travel to the "hibrane" higher dimension.) After reading a novel about a meta-novel, in which everything gains significance from its connection to everything else, you're left feeling as though the Singularity is a lot more complex than you'd previously guessed. And, maybe, just a tad closer than you'd expected.

You can read the novel for free on Rucker's site, but you'll probably want to break down and get a hard copy at some point, so you can dog-ear pages and skip back and forth. [Postsingular]

It's in your toothpaste!! "Highly evolved nanostructures" such as Bucky balls are already being used in toothpaste and face cream, among other household products. What if your exfoliating, revitalizing beauty cream suddenly turned eeeevil? The possibilities are as infinite as the spaces between molecules. Maybe the nano-structures aren't just passive, but actually contain tiny nanites that start eating your face? You could have a rash (so to speak) of corpses with melty faces, and our heroes have to figure out why, before...

...the awful countdown. There has to be some horrendous clock ticking down to N-day, the day the rogue nanites bust out and consume everything. Maybe the melty-face people are just the first wave, or maybe some evil nanomachines got activated prematurely by mistake. (Or maybe it's just an excuse to have some smooshy faces, which who doesn't love?) But there's a monster computer that plans to release all of the nanites at the same time, which isn't just immediately for some reason. (Or the nanites just get released by accident — but an evil AI is more fun.) Our heroes have to rush to stop it, but... they're too late.

The gray goo is consuming everything. It expands exponentially, so the more it consumes, the faster it spreads. In Wil McCarthy's Bloom, it only takes a few hours for gray goo to swallow up Earth's ecosystem. Similarly, in Rudy Rucker's Postsingular, the "nants" manage to swallow up the entire Earth within about a day. So the gray goo starting to be released should probably be the "break" between the second and third acts of the movie or TV show. (At the same time, our heroes should have an important personal realization, and confront something or other about themselves, blah blah blah.)

The nano-ooze should have a catchphrase. Nobody is ever going to care about nano-gunk that doesn't have a swagger in its voice. Maybe the nan-ooze speaks through your computer speakers, or grows a giant mouth, which says something like, "You Are Our Raw Material." Or something catchier, like "Your Biosphere Will Be Disassembled." (We'll save the truly dumb catchphrase, like "The Goo Will Be You," for the movie poster.)

So there's a program that can deactivate the gray goo, or maybe a firewall that it can't pass for some reason. But in order to deploy this magic-bullet code, our main character has to face his/her greatest fear. Or confront a mistake he/she made long ago. Or maybe our heroes discover that another batch of nanomachines can neutralize the first batch by altering their function.

We see the face of god in the heart of the goo. Once our heroes come face to face with the wall of goo, there really ought to be some sort of 2001/Sunshine-y moment of confronting the vastness of the micro-world and maybe coming up against the divine in everything. Maybe the nano-machines teach us an important lesson about what it means to be human, or the soul, or something. Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica, who always turn into spiritual guides when you least expect it. Everything gets all rhapsodic and we break out the wobbly lens so the gray goo can teach us some important lesson before it vanishes into a haze of mystification. That's your awesome gray goo movie right there. And they said it would never work.

The best part is that Rucker, a mathematics professor, opens the book with a whole introduction on the fourth dimension and how it works. The aliens, you see, are trying to return to this dimension and so the reader needs a bit of grounding in theoretical physics before delving into the sex. It's quite possible that Rucker designed the entire book to seduce horny teenagers into learning some math.

If you like your science fiction to contain hard science mixed with bizarro humor, don't miss The Sex Sphere. Painting by Rudy Rucker.

There's a great moment after nanomachines have covered every single object on Earth, tagging everything with information but also connecting it to the network. Rucker's protagonist Ond is coming up with soaring calculations and theorizing in his head. But then he disconnects from the Orphidnet and finds he can't remember what he was just thinking about. Those thoughts are like web links when you're not on the Internet. Without even realizing it, his mind has been using the Orphidnet's extended capabilities.

And soon afterwards, the nanomachine start tagging extradimensional beings that have been sneaking into our world for centuries without being detected.

Some people call the Singularity "the rapture for nerds," but that's "a defensive move," Rucker argues:

[It's] saying: "These maladjusted loser posthumanists are so desperate for the world to change and fit them in that they worship this singularity just like outsider fundamentalists hoping for the End Times to come and give them a chance at success." Some people feel a little hostility towards the notion of the Singularity. Like something that's being forced on you. And it's a little annoying to see a middle-brow popularizer like Ray Kurzweil writing a best-seller about the Singularity, and to see organized Singularity conferences.

Rucker used to agree with those Singularity-haters. But Charles Stross' novel Accelerando changed his mind and made him see the story possibilities of a post-Singularity world. Some science fiction writers kept insisting they couldn't write about such a strange future. But that's what science fiction is for, Rucker argues, and Stross was already doing it.

Hence Postsingular, Rucker's attempt to go past the "heavily touristed landmarks" of the Singularity into what happens next. Now he's working on the sequel, Hylozoic, which includes talking rocks and telepathic atoms. "Keepin' it weird," he says.