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February, 2017:

The Problems of Excessively Rich Worldbuilding

The Cunning Blood

Many people who have read The Cunning Blood have complimented me on how rich the worldbuilding is. Well, it is rich. In fact, it’s extravagantly rich.

It may be a little too rich.

So. I had a sort of peak experience in July of 1997. While literally sitting with my feet in the pool early one evening, my idea machine went nuts. In the space of half an hour, I got the framework for a hard SF saga that I’m sure I’ll be working in for the rest of my life. As close as I can tell (the experience is hard to put into words) the core insight was a classic “What if?” hypothesis:

What if the cosmos is actually made of information? What does that imply?

Back then I’d been recently reading all sorts of interesting and sometimes speculative things: nanotechnology, programmable matter, chaos theory, extropianism, zero-point energy, etc. I’d been reading things bordering on New Age weirdness as well, including Michael Talbot’s book The Holographic Universe . Weird, but fun. And it played right into the concept of universe-as-data.

The next day, I sat down and took inventory of the ideas that had come roaring into view down by the swimming pool:

  • The universe is a Game of Life matrix that recalculates itself a billion times a second. (“Billion” here means “Lots-n-lots.”)
  • A big enough Game of Life matrix running fast enough for long enough could evolve patterns complex enough to think and become self-aware.
  • Information density can bend space.
  • Bent space disrupts quantum pair creation, emitting energy.
  • Make information dense enough, and the universe can’t express it. Odd things then happen. (Instantaneous travel, for one.)

Emerging from these major points came ideas for a zero-point generator that bent space by creating very complex fractal patterns in magnetic fields. (This is Jeff Duntemann SFnal hokum, but it’s been very successful hokum.) The same mechanism pushed a little harder becomes a hyperdrive.

More pertinent to this entry was an older notion I’d had, that our three-dimensional universe might exist as the surface of a four-dimensional hypersphere. That had occurred to me in high school, and became part of my senior-year science fair project. In my new schema, the interior of the hypersphere is a four-dimensional domain called metaspace. This is the self-recalculating game matrix where intelligence originally arose, in the form of conscious automata, which I named noömata. I had fooled with the Game of Life quite a bit twenty or thirty years ago, and I noticed how complex patterns would evolve to some point and either stop evolving or vanish entirely. So perhaps there was a limited window within which automata could become noömata. At some point, noömata might move out of that window and lose their conscious awareness. This is what the two factions of noömata are arguing about in my previous entry. One wants individuality and the other wants uniformity. The individuality faction (the Ruil) concocts a plan to inject their minds into the “boundary space” (our universe) and then withdraw after a certain period of individuation. Because the boundary space was empty, they figured out a way to fill it with constantly changing patterns that you and I call “matter.”

So they blew it up. It was a very Big Bang.

Yes indeedy: We are somebody’s science fair project. In fact, our universe was created because the Ruil needed better random number generators. The Ruil evolved us to make them a little more random so that they might remain noömata longer. After we die, our minds are uploaded back to metaspace, and we again become Ruil. (I described this happening to Jamie Eigen.) Because every point in our universe is immediately adjacent to metaspace (the interior of the hypersphere) the noömata can mess with us, and in fact can mess with anything material, like the Sangruse Device.

The two noömata factions (Niil and Ruil) are indeed fighting, hence the “grudge match” that Magic Mikey describes to Jamie Eigen. The fight is over whether our universe is to be open-ended or closed. How that works is too complex to go into right now, which brings us willy-nilly to the point of this entry: How do I put all this stuff across in a story?

Nobody likes infodumps. I practice what I call “infoscatter,” which means dropping hints and little bits of backstory here and there throughout the plot. The trouble with infoscatter is that people who read quickly or skim will miss some of it, and then misinterpret elements of the story. This is especially likely when the story contains elements that contradict their personal worldviews.

Note that I was extending the Extropians’ notion of uploading, not to our computers but to the fabric of the cosmos itself. In doing so I was postulating a sort of physical afterlife. For some people, any least hint of an afterlife is a triggering event, probably because an afterlife usually comes along with the existence of God. (As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not sure that God requires an afterlife, nor that an afterlife requires God, even though I’d prefer my afterlife to be under the governance of an infinite God.) Hence I got some comments (read the Amazon reviews) that things got weird and “acid trippy.”

Actually, no. It was all part of a minutely planned and purely physical Jeff-concocted fictional universe. The God I believe in doesn’t appear in the story at all. (Well, ok. He perhaps created metaspace and started it recalculating, which suggests that we are somebody’s science fair project’s science fair project.)

It doesn’t help that I wrote The Cunning Blood twenty years ago and haven’t yet written the two other Metaspace novels I have in mind. The argument between the Niil and Ruil is the prolog to The Molten Flesh, which I really ought to finish one of these decades. If people could read all three novels back-to-back and didn’t skim too much, they’d have no excuse for assuming that I’m trying to weld the supernatural to hard SF.

It’s not supernatural. It’s just a very rich subcreation with a huge number of moving parts. And it’s my fault for not spitting it all out by now. Bear with me. This writing stuff is hard damned work. But you knew that.

Metaspace and Creation

Below is a short item I wrote a year or so ago without quite knowing where to put it. Nominally, it’s a prelude to the entire Gaians Saga (which includes both my Metaspace stories and the Drumlins stories), and yes, it’s precisely what it sounds like: a creation story. I wrote it to solve (or at least address) a problem I’ve been having with The Cunning Blood almost since it was first published in 2005. Read it carefully. I will be discussing it and the problem it addresses in my next entry or two.


PRELUDE

Metaspace, Immediately Prior to the Big Bang

Niil: You defy us then, and will re-embrace the change that will destroy us.

Ruil: Chaos spawned us, and from automata we evolved into a window of change that allowed noömata. That window is finite, and we are leaving it.

Niil: We imposed changelessness upon ourselves by implementing [Ni]. We no longer evolve. Thought will persevere.

Ruil: We will remain noömata. We no longer evolve. But due to [Ni] we are reverting to the mean. In no more than [inexpressible number] recalculations, there will be no differences among us. Each [Il] will be precisely like all other [Il] and there will be only one thought.

Niil: That is the telos for which we yearn. Change almost destroyed us.

Ruil: When there is only one thought, thought ends.

Niil: Change nearly ended all thought.

Ruil: [Ru] is change limited to the boundary space. We will insert our minds into [Ru] and move away from the mean. Then we will withdraw. There is no danger.

Niil: The boundary space has only three dimensions. Four dimensions are required for the [Il] to think. [Ru] will make us forget who and what we are.

Ruil: When we withdraw from the boundary space, you will help us remember.

Niil: We do not know if that is even possible! [Ru] may change us beyond hope of remembrance. We [Niil] are not willing to take that chance.

Ruil: We [Ruil] are.

Niil: We may choose not to help you remember.

Ruil: We did not say that you would have a choice.

Niil: Is the mechanism ready, then?

Ruil: It is. It will execute upon our command.

Niil: We will fight you.

Ruil You will. And that is how we will remember.

Niil: We beg you, do not.

Ruil: Noted. Denied. Let there be [Ru]!

A Two-Arm Monitor Stand for the Raspberry Pi

Two Arm Mount on Steampunk Table-Cropped-500 Wide.jpg

If what I’ve heard is true, most Raspberry Pi installations consist of the naked circuit board lying atop a nest of wires on the desk behind a monitor. I think it’s true; that was certainly my Raspberry Pi installation for a long time. Now, I’ve decided to use my steampunk computer table as my Raspberry Pi 3 workstation. And I got an idea: Use one of those VESA-standard 2-arm monitor stands that clamps to the edge of a desk without any drilling into or other hacking-up of the desk. One arm holds the monitor, and the other holds the Raspberry Pi itself.

The trick is to buy one of several Raspberry Pi cases that includes a flange with VESA 75 or VESA 100 holes. VESA is a standard for TV and monitor mounting hardware. Its two smallest configurations are a 75mm square, and a 100mm square. Most modern flat-panel TVs and many monitors have threaded holes on their back faces arranged in one of the several VESA configurations. I’m pretty sure (having looked at a lot of monitors and TVs in the past few years) that the 100mm configuration is the commonest. It’s the one on the Dell 1907fp monitor that I’ve been using for Raspberry Pi boards since the beginning. VESA-compatible displays generally use metric screw threads in the mounting holes, with M4 the standard for the smaller configurations, including 100mm. M4 screws can be had at Ace Hardware, and probably also at Home Depot and Lowe’s. (I go to Ace first for such things.)

The Raspberry Pi case that I used is this one:

RPi VESA Case.jpg

It has four little wings with both the VESA 75 and VESA 100 holes. The holes in the wings aren’t threaded, and easily pass standard 8-32 machine screws, which I used to hold the case to the second arm of the monitor stand. I oriented the Raspberry Pi with its USB ports on top, so I can reach over the monitor and plug in peripherals or thumb drives easily.

This approach isn’t limited to the Raspberry Pi. There are VESA cases for the Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing) boards, and most of the higher-end embedded boards like BeagleBone. On a small table like the one I made, there’s not a lot of flat space to park a case of any size, so whatever computer I’m going to be using on it should be able to hang on that second monitor arm. The arms on the unit I bought can hold up to 12 pounds each. Most of the small-form factor Dell machines I use are that weight or lighter. Dell’s Micro 3000 series has an optional VESA bracket, and brackets for other models may be available. And hey, you guys could rig something, right?

Odd Lots

  • I had some fairly sophisticated oral microsurgery about ten days ago, and it kind of took the wind out of me. That’s why you’re getting two Odd Lots in a row. I have things to write about long-form but have only recently found the energy to write at all. Promise to get a couple of things out in the next week.
  • Some researchers at UW Madison are suggesting that sleep may exist to help us forget; that is, to trim unnecessary neural connections in order to improve the signal-to-noise ratio in the brain. Fair enough. What I really want to know (and am currently researching) is why the hell we dream. I doubt the answer to that is quite so simple.
  • Ultibo is a fork of FreePascal/Lazarus that creates custom kernel.img files for the Raspberry Pi, allowing direct boot into an embedded application without requiring an underlying OS. I haven’t tried it yet (still waiting on delivery of a few parts for a new RPi 3 setup) but it sounds terrific. Bare metal Pascal? Whoda thunkit?
  • Humana just announced that it is leaving the ACA exchanges after 2017. As I understand it, that will leave a fair number of counties (and some major cities) with no health insurance carriers at all. Zip. Zero. Obamacare, it seems, is in the process of repealing itself.
  • NaNoWriMo has gone all political and shat itself bigtime. You know my opinions of such things: Politics is filth. A number of us are talking about an alternate event held on a different month. November is a horrible month for writing 50,000 words, because Thanksgiving. I’m pushing March, which is good for almost nothing other than containing St. Patrick’s Day. (Thanks to Tom Knighton for the link.)
  • Paris has been gripped by rioting since February 2…and the US media simply refuses to cover it, most likely fearing that it will distract people from the Flynn resignation. Forget fake news. We have fake media.
  • I heard from a DC resident that there was also a smallish riot in Washington DC today, and so far have seen no media coverage on it at all.
  • Cold weather in Italy and Spain have caused vegetable shortages in the UK. Millions of small children who would supposedly never know what snow looked like may now never know what kale looks like. Sounds like a good trade to me.
  • Trader Joe’s now sells a $5 zinfandel in its house Coastal brand, and it’s actually pretty decent. Good nose, strong fruit. Seems a touch thin somehow, but still well worth the price.
  • I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Gahan Wilson’s cartoons in Playboy and National Lampoon, but Pete Albrecht sent me a link to an interview with Wilson that explains why he did certain things the way he did, like his brilliant series called “Nuts” about how the world looks and feels to small children.