I'll paste in the discussion we had so far:
David Epstein wrote:
Allan, I finished reading Ivanhoe. I was curious about Robin Hood and where his legendary existence originated. Obviously in medieval England, but who was
the fistauthor to write about him? When did he appear in English literature? I noticed that Richard and John also appear in the Robin Hood fables. So it's a justifiable symmetry that RH and Friar Tuck appear in Ivanhoe.
Allan Masri wrote:
I didn't know the answers to your questions, so Ilooked up this article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/state/monarchs_leaders/robin_01.shtml
As an interesting sidelight, there is a Chinese Robin
Hood saga, called "By the Water Margin". It was
written around 1400AD. Notice, this is a case where
two events took place on different sidesof the world
that are very similar in nature but could not possibly
be related. I believe the term for this is
"synchronicity". The Chinese Robin Hood is a bit more
formal and longwinded than the English. His men were
organized into armies and his "Friar Tuck" was a
Taoist magician. I've only read a few passages from the
book which, strange to say, seems banal to western
tastes. It was translated as "All Men Are Brothers" by
Pearl Buck in 1933. I understand her book is much
shorter than the original. My son Channing went to
school at the University of Leeds in Nottinghamshire,
England. There is a "Robin Hood Oak" there, as well as
other tourist spots. Contratulations on completing
Ivanhoe. You must have the feeling of satisfaction you
can only get from reading a long and well-written book.
Keep me posted on your future progress.If you're
interested in a very different experience,I have just
started reading a book by Rudy Rucker called Frek and
the Elixir. Rucker teaches Mathematics and Computer
Science at San Jose Stateand writes science fiction /
fantasy books on the side. He puts the concepts of
mathematics and advanced physics into his works and
creates a large vocabulary of special terms appropriate
to his futuristic plots. He writes "classic" science
fiction, which attempts to predict possible futures
based on current trends and recent inventions. Also,
I'm still looking for work, so if you have
any suggestions, now is the time to make them!==a
David Epstein wrote:
Thanks for the link. IT appears he was a
legendary figure, but they can't trace his historical
roots. I wonder when he, Friar Tuck, Little John, and
the Sheriff of Nottingham first appeared in a
literary work.Yes I've heard of Rudy Rucker. I read one
of his "Ware" books some time ago (Realware).
Pretty interesting, interweaving sci-fi with
clairvoyance andoracles. A friend of mine was really
into his "4th Dimension" book. I've written some Math-Fi
which I post up on
my website:http://www.epsteinzone.com/writings/stories/index.html. Two
of the stories ("Microspace" and "Hilbert Space")are
from an unpublished novel I wrote. I really milked it
with Hilbert, and had a lot of fun with
"Quantum Minyan" and "Small Radicals". If you have any
ideas about how I can publish my novel or know of
anyone in the publishing industry, let me know. Even
though I wrote it 1996-2000, I just gave it a title:
"Manifold Destiny". It's a thriller about an adventure
into Microspace, the world of superstrings and such. I'm
keeping an eye out for you for work. I sent you the
name of a headhunter a few days ago. Wha particular
areas are you looking for?- David---
Allan Masri
wrote:
--- Allan Masri wrote:
---------------------------------
I was reading some more Rucker and recalled a
couple of items tha tmight be of interest to you.
Science Fiction is one genre where you can publish
short stories. This is very important. Most areas of
fiction you can't do this and so it is very hard to get
started. So try submitting your short stories
to magazines. Once you figure out what they publish,
you should be able tofind a publisher for your book.
All publishers are very particular about what
submissions they accept and how. So check out the
publishers (or agents) before you mailanything to
them.
Science Fiction readers are typically 12-year old
boys. That is why Rucker's protagonist is a 12-year-old
and his writing style is simplified. Since young boys
enjoy action, Rudy also inserts extra action sequences.
One of the main subjects in this book is video
games. In his future, video games and cartoon
characters are everywhere. Although Rucker is a brainy
guy, it is clear from his appendix that he has read
Sci-Fi fiction series like Bill the Galactic Hero,
which is written in a simple style and has comic-book
plots. Why did I know about Bill? Because my son was
once 12 years old!
It is possible that you don't care to focus your
writing on a potential audience. You see the paradox
here. You can get published if you write exactly what
publishers are looking for, but you only want
to communicate your own ideas -- which are the very
things that publishers don't want to see, except in
very small doses.
The market for fiction is very small and financial
rewards commensurate. First novels sell around 1,000
copies. Your royalty on that will be less than $3,000.
My publisher once told me that the publishing business
is good for publishers but not for writers. So maybe
the answer is to publish your own books, market them
locally, and build up a following that way. Publishing
on the web is cool, but it may be more expensive to
market books that way than through
traditional channels.
Incidentally, Charles Rosendahl ( who works for Mike
Dunn at AOL )wrote a program that helps people
self-publish. You wouldn't need it,of course.
Thanks again for your assistance!
==a
David Epstein wrote:
Yeah I think a dose of reality about the publishing
industry was in order! I just see it as a publishing
dominated industry, rather than artist/writer
directed. I have no illusions about publishing,
certainly not without an agent or publisher that would
insist on altering my work so that even I wouldn't
recognize it! I think you're right: self-publishing
might be the way to go.
I read Rudy Rucker's "writer's toolkit" on his web
site. I really liked what he had to suggest to
would-be writers: treat your book like a fractal. It
IS, in fact, a fractal. You must concurrently write on
different levels, from thinking about the entire book,
to the chapters, sections of chapters, sentences,
phrases in sentences, words in phrases. Each of these
should receive the same care and attention in crafting
your work.
I also was reading some of his interviews. Though it
was a few years ago and he might have changed his
thinking someone, he is decidely a determinist in his
CS, Physics, and Math. Sounds like he was a Set
Theorist by training, and they like exactitude in
their formulas, equations, theorems. So it's no
surprise that he's interested in deterministic
processes such as cellular autonoma, chaos, relativy.
He says he hates quantum mechanics (QM).
Unlike relativity where the equations are simple and
elegant (look at Einstein's General Theory of Relativy
equations: simple, yet powerful; they are loaded with
so much information), indeed, QM is messy.
Determinists like Einstein hated QM's uncertainty,
indeterminism, and most importantly, what he deemed to
be its incompleteness. But QM has been demonstrated to
be correct time and time again in laboratory
conditions. Einstein's completeness idea (exemplified
by the noted Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Effect) lost out
to the quantum interpretation of Bell's Theorem.
Yep, it's true that QM equations are messy. There are
so many displacements, uncertainties, probabilities,
dualities, complimentarities, even fudge factors to
keep the whole system together. And many
mathematicians can't stand that not only is it
unexact, but highly linear as well (that's another
story). But nobody has been able to refute it. It
appears that reality is a very sloppy business.
Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle applies to an
isolated particle. There is a tradeoff between knowing
a particle's position and momentum with precision.
This is built into nature and is not a result of
defective detection. This bugged Einstein more than
anything else. He felt this "tradeoff" led to
incomplete knowledge about the system. But Feynman
showed that the system IS complete with his Feynman
Diagrams (a group of particle position/momentum
"snapshots"). It's only incomplete if you look at one
snapshot; that's where the Uncertainty Principle takes
effect. But the displacement in position or momentum
in one particle can be transfered to a nearby
particle, which in turn passes it's displacement to
another particle, and so forth. The net displacement
in the entire (closed) system is zero!
Another problem with QM is to show convergence. If
there isn't convergence, you get infinite energy,
mass, momentum, and time interval values. That's not
good in physics. It's very difficult to show
convergence. That's where perturbation theory and
renormalization theory come into the picture. If you
look at Feynman's Diagrams (which are pictoral
representations of equations describing particle
interactions), a series of such diagrams might sum to
an infinite value (divergence). Only the "tricks" of
renormalization, moving the diagrams (or terms) around
and regrouping, will allow convergence. One has to be
pretty clever about this for it to succeed. It's
certainly unelegant.
Superstring Theory is the exception to this. It is a
quantum theory that is very mathematical and elegant.
The equations are beautiful, particular string field
theory, and they converge! It's a brilliant theory,
but complicated. One has to have knowledge of such
areas as algebraic topology and advanced number theory
to truly understand it. Unfortunately, it has no
physical principle to speak of. It hasn't been shown
to apply to physical reality in any shape or form, not
yet anyway. The main reason is we don't have nearly
the energy levels available on Earth to probe to such
miniscule levels (10^-33 of a cm to be exact). Here's
an example of limitations in our technology that makes
it impossible to corroborate or disprove the theory:
there aren't large enough particle accelerators to
create the massive energy levels needed to probe a
possible 10 dimensional superstring (actually 11
dimensions due to renormalization theory).
Rucker speaks about "those crappy little string
dimensions". Rucker's very interested in higher
dimensional spaces. He should be fascinated with 10
and 26 dimensional string spaces. But he's perturbed
with the rolled-up spatial manifold. In superstring
theory cosmology, the original 10 dimension universe
was split into the 4D universe we know and love, the
expanding space-time continuum; and the 6D contraction
we don't know and probably would hate! That 6D
universe is known as the Calabi-Yao manifold. And each
dimension is precisely the same length of a
superstring (10^-33 cm). Rucker also spoke about that
maybe someday, someone will discover a transform that
would allow us to enter the superstring world. Well,
that's what my novel deals with. My short story
"Microspace" is essential a user's guide to do that!
I like Rucker's science fiction ideas like aliens
travelling in cosmic rays, and earthly beings
decrypting them to "decompress" them into reality.
Very clever. But I don't like how he poo-poos QM. Oh
well. I could get into areas like quantum relativity
(invented by Paul Dirac) or the quantum theory of
gravity. And even how quantum constructs like
Schrodinger's Equation (which describes the
probabilistic nature of a group of particles) is
applied to the entire universe (see Hawking's theory
about this). But this is a lot to discuss. The point
here is that these areas show that determinism and
indeterminism are weak descriptors in describing these
realities. Something more intriguing is going on here!
Sorry for the long dissertation. I really got into
this! Maybe we can transfer this discussion to my
blog. What do you think?
- David
Allan Masri continues the discussion:
Whew. That's way over my head.
I read quite a bit of Rucker's "Frek and the Elixir". It's hard for me to tell whether he's deterministic or not. The space travel in this book is handled by expanding and contracting superstrings ( yunching ), and the whole text is filled with references to quantum theory. In the last chapter, one of the characters died by springing a "quantum leak". One of the locales is "Planck brane" which is inhabited by "branecasters". But I think he is just playing with these concepts, not making any comments about them. I should mention that this book, I believe, is his longest work of fiction to date and is crammed with unusual images, newly minted words, and oblique references to sci-fi/fantasy literature as well as math and physics.
On the subject of self-publication, the important part is marketing. Since your books would appeal to a small scientifically savvy readership, you should be able to target your audience by making appearances at Universities and/or Sci-Fi conventions. Eli Goldberg was successful in placing his CD of songs about space into gift shops associated with space-related attractions, like the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the Smithsonian in DC ( not sure about the details there ). I also made some sales, some years ago, through the Oakland History museum gift shop.
About treating chapters as fractals: Well, that's an interesting way of thinking about it. I prefer to think of writing as an activity whose function is communication of ideas between the writer and his audience, which may be as small as one person. The larger audience you want, the more general the ideas must be and the more abstract the means of communication -- this last because your audience will not understand mathematical concepts, let alone formulae. I just purchased Brian Greene's discussion of superstring theory, The Elegant Universe. In the preface, Greene notes that he wrote the book,
"to make the remarkable insights emerging from the forefront of physics research accessible to a broad spectrum of readers, especially those with no training in mathematics or physics."
Greene's book is currently #296 on Amazon's sales list; Frek and the Elixir is #394,006. In general, non-fiction sells much better than fiction. I attribute this to a human survival mechanism where humans are fascinated with things they consider may help them survive, even if they have no hope of understanding them.
I've gone on too long already.
