Rendevouz with Rama

Anybody read this? Arthur C. Clarke's book...the best hard sci-fi I read, but I have not read all that much hard sci-fi and there is quite a bit. I think Niven's Ringworld qualifies, although a lot of what is lost in Ringworld is the humor, and the aliens are characterized so well the hard bits de-magnify. Which is funny to say about Ringworld isn't it?

But the point is I met a Russian agent, here in the United States, stationed, as he was clearly military and in no way interested in becoming a citizen. In Houston, which is a strategic location as its a good part of the Oil that runs a modern military.

Yet, we loved him. I'll call him Ivan. He had his blood type tattoo'd to his chest, and behaved in the way a Vet does regarding his service...when it had been expected of him to do his worst, or best.

Ivan looked less fit than I. Being in Houston I also had a friend, well a few, that worked at NASA. Dan, one of the NASA friends, spoke Russian and so when I had a party Dan and Ivan really hit it off and Dan then later related that Ivan had flown Migs.
I went to work out with Ivan. I looking quite fit for having been a Jock pretty much the first twenty years of my life (I was in my mid thirties and indeed, keeping fit...). I was always one of the weakest in strength but then I played better than most and most of team sports really is "game head" and speed, not strength.
Ivan, again, looking not all that buff or fit, proceded to do, over a brief stretch of time, 18 reps with 200 pounds. He said he hadn't been there in months, but that also, and this is worth mentioning, that he had negotiated Bally's, which did indeed have these ridiculous negotiations, to a penny a day for the rest of his life.

The point is, Rendezvous with Rama was published in 1973, long after the conception of using gravity well to swing or fling satellites about the Solar System (and beyond), thus conserving fuel. Ivan, who was making a side living writing English papers for local University of Houston graduates, and otherwise was strinkingly intelligent, did not understand gravity assist.
I was really flabbergasted, but if one looks at the Russian space program, this seems evident.

Furthermore, I dont know if it was due to too many "Boy meets Tractor" social realistic strictures in storytelling, but Ivan did not understand "Good Cop vs. Bad Cop". Both of these I had to explain, and Ivan was tolerant of me, and otherwise didn't care to listen to me.
His girlfriend, owning some substantial piece of real estate, was using me to estrange him from her, a sorta of Jules and Jim situation, and furthermore, I had suggested to him that American were manufacturing chipped guns which would malfunction when receiving a satellite transmission, which was patent mis-information. So, he didn't really want to listen to me anyway.

But this indicates to me a clear advantage in general knowledge possessed by those who care enough to be literate, ask questions beyond the education provided in State school curriculum, naturally, as per the wisdom of the founders. It confirms the natural advantage of having a first amendment, and of course, the Scientific establishment benefitting from such a habit or custom...which it is indeed now.

This stand in contract, literally, the rest of the world.
And, it figures that in this dawn of a new age, a leap forward akin in writing, such a custom serves to create a trump in speculation, critique, debate and dissemination of ideas far beyond whatever secrecy all other states have grown to customarily value, including Europe. I might exclude France or Holland, or, the wisdom of Italy in creating the conditions of the scientific genius to thrive, or indeed the German value in scholarship above all else, including Germany (at least according to Nietzche), but, not having it part of the enforced Government policy, therein, creating a vigorous culture and custom, I would have to conclude that the United States gleans from this great cloud of sound and fury signifying nothing, great advantages in technical and scientific progress.

Which is also evident insofar as the United States founded and promulgated the Computer Industry and the Digital Age. Not that Europe at large contributed nothing...one thinks of CERN's own nascent network, but, one could transfer such accomodation and careful non discriminatory micro aggression to China and conclude otherwise that more minds would contribute more knowledge.

Its highly likely I am wrong about Russian science, as they all might have figured out Gravity assist and Ivan just was not informed. One did not have a Popular Science in Russia, but instead, an ideological editorial staff imposing upon the whole of Soviet publishing a blanket of prejudice meant to provide a sense of safety in its people.

Gravity assist is rather obvious from the Einstein observation of light bending, and inherent in any curvature there is acceleration. The whole of material reality then bends and accelerates about this increasing hierarchy of material...and invites a popular consumption of the eventual dumpsite of all acceleration, the popular black hole.
Oh, how I love the Goths of my GenX!

But regardless of my sentiments for belonging in time to a smarter generation of American yet, I wanted to then address the mystery of why a Galaxy spins without twisting, but, like a fat person snug in almost ill fitting suit...requiring a bit more effort but then also more evocative spin, the answer to this mystery, which makes Spiral Galaxies look less like they are material draining into a black hole and more like stable structures.

They explain this by dark energy and dark matter, two different things. Dark energy, according to a Goth interpretation, would be issuing from Dark Matter, but lets just keep with the Science!

Dark Matter is considered a accelerent along the outer edge of the galaxies and contribute the perfect amount of extra energy to make the edge of the galaxy spin around, like a LP record on a turntable, and not spin as one would intuitively assume, faster in the middle and slow outside.

I mean, the spiral shape otherwise makes this a foregone conclusion. But no, there is this accelerant around the galaxy that adds spin. There are a lot of satellite galaxies and even globular clusters, orbiting probably much like moons around Jupiter.
And, I may be too much given to popular science descriptions wherein the very detail, some of the galaxy does move slower, some moves faster. I do remember something about gravititational arms spiralling out, into which stars...bright indicators not necesssarily of gravitational increases...stars then flow down into and then bottom out and flow back up out of...as if the gravity well was not a singular point but a line issuing from the sheer power of Galactic central gravitation having folded over on itself over time to create a kind of criss crossing tornadoes of invisible galactic trenches not unlike the way the Sun's Heliosphere is manifolding.

The model then might mean that large gyros, perhaps counter rotating as they spin, exist as a galactic structure that stretches not too far beyond the evidential stars..again, the stars are not like pointillist "markers", wherein, we fill in the invisible shape as in connect the dots.
That just the prejudice of the human eye.

It might be hard to describe, while a drawing easy to make it clear, but the shape might look like, edge on from outside looking, that the Galaxy, spiral in general, is composed of so many, well, substantially gigantic, counter-rotating wheels, slightly bent upward and downward, which then funnel down, twisting on axes, to connect to the small black hole at the center.
Two shallow glass plates, places back to back, seen edge on.
The distribution of gravitation energy riding a carrier wave of the Black hole.

If you built a wheeled device, setting each wheel alongside each other, these would work together...(these theoretical wheels not of rubber!) to make its neighbor spin opposite. This so doing, creates a motion of material that would reach a point of homeostasis?

One mystery is the spinning black hole moving faster at its equator than at its pole.

It seeking to build a vision of the Universe we may look at the fine distribution of all matter in equal parts, then subject to initial spins and then later spins, which apply themselves in greater power until they, well, exceed human capability to measure.

Aren't we all looking out from the gravity of a local supermassive black hole? Sure, the distribution of matter might create a kind of ordinary state of super conductivity, insofar as all matter is lining up in straighter and straighter lines as we zoom out, but then within this black coffee we see the heat and pull of black holes creating shapes...increasing Ohms and distorting light trajectories.

To continue on, what would the straightest light would be the tiniest, but even as nuetrinoes are straighter line, something makes them shift in electrical potential, something imparts charge or spin...though, in detecting this probably slow spin we might have evident of gravitational effects from more powerful sources, further away.

That is, if the line of the trajectory of a neutrino could be drawn as three colors, so we can see the spin by it twisting..and the trajectory twists less than all other trajectories, and the twisting is not uniform...its not like one end it held over there and the other over here and we turn the threads in opposite directions! But, this twist occurs here....and over there, perhaps with a periodicty that is more symmetrical that any other spin, as its slight changes in potential/spin less effects, then becomes the basis of the extra influence creating variations in the heavier particles trajectories signature spin.

Because the spin is so much less the neutrinos signature is more legible.

The last time I saw Scott Childress

Scott Childress called me. He was not really a friend but Scott was a friendly guy and I had gone to a few of his parties...though, Scott was normally more frustrated with my social idiocy, and was at least willing to call me on the carpet about it.

I had worked with him, a summer, at the Arizona Inn. I was a busboy, and he was he Maitre'd. He was okay to work with, but did not want to socialize as he meant to keep up a professional appearance.

So, he called me. He invited me over to his parents house. Which, was a apartment complex with a house on site, and there he brought me into the living room. We sat down to watch "Star Trek".
The Childresses, they had an old style console TV.
What follows is as well as I can remember:

"Well, I have AIDs, I think I got it from that party...you remember, they guy in the trunk? I think he gave it to me.."this Scott said while almost crying.
I said something back. Not enough I am sure. Something like 'I am sorry Scott. I liked you. I thought we might have been friends somehow..."
"Do you want a drink of water?"
I said, 'okay'. He brought me a drink. I took a few sips. He gave me the estimated time of his death.
But after I had drank just a couple of sips really, he said, " I just killed you, James."
"What?"
"I could have given you AIDS...why not? Someone gave it me, on purpose, murdering me. I am leaving...my life is over...and I dont really think that much of you. But I know you are not one of those people who you have been made out to be."
Or, he said something like, "tell me you aren't who they are making you out to be...I dont think you are because I could have drugged that water. Dont you know about the drugs they have now?"
I think that pretty close, but not really the main point.
And he did say for sure that he could have murdered me, that it was all meaningless to him now, and he was bitter, angry, full of rage, cheated. But that he wouldn't because he wasn't a murderer. I guess he wanted to prove to himself and considered me, an obviously oblivious target. Perhaps to wise me up, too.
Scott would think about what you said. You could see him thinking, deeply, mulling it over..and it was charming trait.
Uh, hard to remember how I responded, but I felt I should go. There might have been more conversation, I think I said something really shitty, like, "I am sorry Scott, that you are dying. I dont know what I can say. You had a lot of friends Scott. You were always warm and, honest."
I did not cry. Or feel sad.
I was more worried he had a gun and would shoot me. Silly of me, but I remember thinking that to.
I really did not understand how he could have given me AIDS. I did not understand the power of those date rape drugs then.
As I left, the hard look on his face softened. I stood, in that entry room, other side of cabinets, that room with next to the kitchen, opposite side of the living room.

The back door was there, and I had parked in the back.
I stepped out. He said he wanted me to remember him, what he did at that moment. Not for me I think he said, but that I was a writer and that I might write down someday, his last words.

I thought he said more awful things, that his soul was diminishing so...it was more scarey than heartwarming. But I remember the softening of the look in his eyes.
So, I remembered Scott. I remembered when John Watkins finally contacted me in 2015, I remembered what you wanted me to remember...that you were facing the biggest moment, and that you did not become one of them. One of them that I bet Scott knew I had been cruelly handled by, and that he wanted to say that he didn't.
He made a point to say that he had drugged people, I guess. Something like it wasn't something he hadn't done to others.

But since he had contracted AIDS, was murdered by a nihilist really, from a revenge plot, that he wouldn't then, do that to me.
Scott if you only knew what that means to me now.
So long. Never forget you dude. A little blip of humanity in an otherwise huge panoply of cruelty and viciousness and by people with far less of a reason to vengefully seek cosmic justice on others for no good reason other than a lust to kill and rape.
You weren't one of them Scott. We loved you. He knew it.

the 50's?

I have no memory of the fifties. I have some of the sixties, but it is also a carry-over from the sixties...how kids and schools spent their money and dressed themselves up, and what shows were on tv...into the seventies. A kind of pause in the market churning. A lot of toy fads...is that a dead word now, "fads"?
Books were an invention, without any context when I was very young. I read first comic books. Going to church made a context out of a book, which was marvelous, really. Good music...choir, pipe organ, and oneself singing along. Grand and public.
However, books overcame the public and grand with the private inner worlds created in my view, time after time, author after author, setting after setting, genre after genre, historical or lit-pulp or technical.

But then books became mediums of exchange, a bit of theater with ranking, valuing...another public space, book stores...but this was at first also for others, as to me...role playing sets and characters, but soon enough ranking and valuing and means of exchange.

First in the ranks is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence...published as the New Age movement let in some of the serious Easter scholarship and Japanese cultural exchange which was from the fifties.
Soon to be taken over by the Human Potential Movement and that publishing genre..but I digress.

What I saw and remembered was images and action. I heard voices...meaning, the characters sounded different, their voices real. That took a bit of time early on to kick in...the first few novels I read, "Day of the Triffids", "A Wizard of Earthsea", "The Sentinal", "Myth of Perseus" and a spate of library books at Himmel Park, these books the voices suddenly came in...or sorta compiled in...becoming more real sometimes in leaps and jumps.

What books affected you in such transformative way early on?

The question here being how long did it take for another part of the Brain to adapt...perhaps get decoded or unlocked or activated or keyed by developing reading through constant exercise?|
There is a horizon there, where reading at first a improvisation, a leap, but that is soon overcome with a constant increasing capacity over years, reading a lot, to get more and more information out of reading.

That occurs in language, as language can be natural or programmic. Expression is now a sub-catagory of programming.
I think the old use of programming was "whats tonight's programming?", which was lingo for the schedule of shows. That sense of programming was more symbolic and political, programming aimed inward, to shape imagination and engage the viewer in easier, soothing symbolic math and logic, consuming a Public Image.

Anyway, the authors voice was just my voice.

The best voice performance I heard was Fitzgerald's Nick in the Great Gatsby. Tolkien had a voice but it was strangely and marvellously constrained in artifices of tense. Kerouac, and Finnegan's Wake, are fun to read as one' own performance. One has to have a sense of Performance to appreciate those two.

But most other voices...maybe King's being closest in sound...with a strange afterglow of the fifties...maybe that's part of the charm; King's grasp of the essential fear of the 50's.

Developing further meant listening too.

We read Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet aloud in the advanced English class in 7th grade. This was great...I also exhibited good reading aloud skills, but for the life of me I had no idea, and still have a strange gap in knowing anything about what I am reading aloud.
The focus is so strong memory is shut down. Nor is comprehension acting...just my voice.
Picking up copy for the first time, sure, I will falter, but within my memory is a vast database of accents and syntax patterns...like a chessmaster remembers chessboard configurations.
I cant 'see it'!

But soon enough, after three sentences, and probably a key clue in the title, I have got the voice down. Perhaps its my own voice coming out but the style of speech fits into what the context of the words are...sales is one voice, character is another.

Voice is a construct and a performance so it has practice and improvisational demands. One cant develop technique in a vacuum, so there needs to be a place to deploy ones voice, seriously.

I read a lot of people, authors, deploying their voices in history and text.
That voice attempts clarify and inspire authority, more than the character voice which strives to reveal faults and sin and failure.
The Drama.
Among those Goodreads books I think I am more a reader of plays than most others.
I had a friend who read more sci fi than I did...about twice as much. Probably about the same amount of Fantasy.
But Fantasy was beyond his contextualization of is. In fact he was no English major as I was, but a Computer and Electrical Engineer.
In lacking a context of Fantasy, one does not see the criss crossing continuum's between history of publishing...fantasy is fairly new as a novel, but ancient as poetry. Psychological tool (what are we suddenly not Moderns, having read at least Jung?), roots of tribal views, abstractions of form and containers of sentimental ludditism, role-playing and medieval and physics modeling.
You know, the spell lightning bolt, from the Wizards finger, should produce a sci fi idea of how would one really look.
Fantasy and Sci fi are not really usefully clumped together. It feels like the prejudice of the Bible, which also had been thought off, for awhile, by NOW FORGOTTEN MODERNS, that the Bible and Greek Myths were fantasy.
But actually a lot of it is history.
That attitude or value died in my vision of life. It was a Major removal of a value.
Also, the Giant Monster movie died in my lifetime. Sci fi horror audience shriveled in the face of True Crime and the Silver Age...when Sci fi grew up.

I have read L Ron Hubbard Battlefield Earth: straight forward old style 30 sci fi brands. One of the first big tome sci or fantasy (or modern really) publication.
Not as good as Edgar Rice Burroughs or London, who is the early realist, however action oriented as was the West too. London transformed from Western style action yarns to libertarian revolt against a variety of aggregate government schemes...from Authoritarian "The Sea Wolf" (a very well disguised allegory), to the bores of "Iron Heel" and "Martin Eden".
Hesse seems a more capable writer of the inward without the clunky use of Conradian symbolism that London practiced so well early on.

I tried reading both Eden and Hell, but apart from the Ayn Randian authoritarian, however couched more gently in symblism London, the points he was making were made better by the philosophers that influenced him: Nietczche and Mark.
I read with an open mind, The Communist Manifesto. Required reading in History in the early 80s'. Heh.
But earlier, in High School, in the Free Enterprise class, I had already put myself into the camp of the only other person raising their hand, the avowed outspoken Socialist in the classroom. Her and I believed Man was ultimately good.
Most of the class, and most of the class was participating, raised their hands in regard to man as ultimately evil, which was the preceding question.

So my sensibilities were not pre judging though I had read years of Time and US News magazines and other newspaper articles, history...
But as fun as the "Sea Wolf" retains some of the vigor of his Snow Stories, London is a storyteller who did not tell the story of "The Heart of Darnkess", which not only encompasses London, but is more generally emblematic of the early twentieth century turn of mind, from the Bible to Jack the Ripper, so, transcending London.
Still, I'd rather read the London snow adventure stories, of similar tone.


The early print culture and the modern.

Not the printing that ramped up in the late 1780's, for other comforts and luxuries were not available. Nor was that initial pairing of that old John Henry printing activity (later eclipsed by steam powered presses) that divergent from the rule of the book, the Bible...cracks were contemporaneously appearing at that time, but later they would form entire mass audiences, and a dethroning of the 'democratic truth' later on.
No I mean to focus on the late nineteenth century, the late Gilded Age time, wherein a generation of three were transformed with the two later generations having lived through the civil war as the most recent kids & adults.
This "Gilded Printing" saw poster and illustration along with printing, and photographic advertising and even its own early competitor, the Nickelodeon. The World's Fairs were more like today.
Theater was still dominant, which is a major media form set apart from the Modernism. That Modernism is what we now see ending around us, as Theater saw it back then taking away from it, to the amusements of cheap goods.

That print culture did not came to an end. Its expanded is more the generative condition than anything else, to how the digital is consumed: images, sounds, text.
In those three generations (a good rule of thumb) motion pictures rose up to take over. But that did not displace the public attention for posters and personal dressing of ones rooms otherwise, it increased with picture books becoming ubiquitous when they had once been rare.
This coincided with the beginning  focus on the mass teen market in the 50's, another amplification, so, that we may conclude graphics march to the beat of population better than most other productive arts which see fluctuations in talents.
But the real fulfillment of graphics was television, it leaped into new forms of inner vision expansion.
Psychedelic baby.
Much as the way Video stores took a share of the margin of book sales. Used bookstores did better then, no (1980-1990)?

But the larger point, in pursuit eliminating moderns and saving modernism, is that in the 50's the sci fi generation, coming of age, had these books that we...me and my generation of sci fi readers, have read. Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Herbert, Clarke, wherein, I took a few steps elsewhere and read PKDick, Gibson, Sterling, Adams. Serious books on serious themes, unlike adventure books.
This being where a common ground then diverges, the Sci fi readers fragment into other authors.
But those, are those being read anymore?

Did Kubrick really define the serious sci fi movie? No, lately there has been some serious sci fi, but the point is that the feature film has great limitations in creating sci fi, while Television really could.

Mixing of genres works better using visual means, because it simply makes sense visually, while in wordage it is difficult to make it make sense. Besides all the goofy cliches, as in the space transporting gas of Burroughs John Carter Warlord of Mars, or simply the goofy space folding, or simply turning up the volume and pitch on the hyperwarpdrivejauntingleapfolding engine...did fall as to serious sci-fi to pulp sci-fi, but the bending of time and space was still a means of serious storytelling otherwise.

These "serious" novels explored ideas at slight, more or less, sacrifice plot and characters...but not really so long as the writer threw us a bone (of character or plot). The more of such novels, ideas set in the future, the more bound to the date it was published.

Its just a kind of formatting that is, cross disciplinary, now a historical seriousness of future prediction worked as hard as Historical construction, or there, arguing values for the ensurement of the safety of humanity. And, defining what it is to be human.
This binds it to, with multiple lines, into its time of publishing.
Serious sci fi certainly displaces the Bible. But not refutes it. What clown cant do that?

So the dissolution of boundaries is a blow back effect on literature that issues from the transformative power of Film/TV, which combined as motion pictures, has been programming audiences for over twelves generations. When this happened, in the fifties and the baby boomer watching TV, this obscured the old methods and within there was inserted new themes addressing a post Imperial possibility for America that was more inclusive.
This melding created another current, it was furthered in youth empowerment through Cameras and presses, the meaning of what they were actually printing NOT as important as the empowerment as it would sustain the means by which to continue the counter narrative.
Underground then became above ground on the dawn of the market of Gen-X and the dusk on the market of the baby boom.
A transformation had happened from 1963 to 1980, at all levels of American consciousness, a parallel occurance of a new set of values and world view.
Its still up to debate who owns this new deal, but it is there, as a culture beyond political spin.

And THAT we will see end in our times as well. That I would call the penultimate Modern developing, vicerally, its own obselescence. We discard the Imperial as Printing presses are huge wastes of energy, time and dangerous and expensive.
Oh, they aren't gone yet!

As in, what part of the Modern is going to go away, obsolete, not just the heroism of the silver airstreamed pilot, as in a kind of anthropological start point, but instead, listening to Foucault,
start with the most immediate and simple consideration: what came out of the fifties that so influenced the sixties, and in so doing, shaped how I consumed the next forty decades?
And what did not make it out.
Like, Elvis. Did he really make it out, or did the Beatles get that slot?

Big Monster Movies.
Military Culture
Sitcoms and TV (really, the same thing).
Wonder bread diet.
Car culture.
First theater setting: Elite Corporate Military Industrial Complex Spy
Second theater setting: Animated cartoons on Saturday and Sunday Morning
Third theater setting: Church (there were no public kindergartens...even that word sound strange, when I was growing up but that changed the very next year).
Fourth theater setting: Public schools.
Fifth theater setting: Libraries
Six theater setting: House-Yard-Toy-Family
Last: House-Yard-Toy-Neighborhood.

Those are the first setting...one could call the dimensions of "Everyman's" modern phenomenology.

Into this strode the times.

Beyond the personal, what I remember that are distinct from other people's experience, is Military edifice. Huge where I grew up.
More wildlife...eventually I think the rise in the popularity of cats led to a fall in all small creatures in yards and neighborhood fields. But those small creatures of my yards and fields were not your small creatures...it was a distinctly different environment.
Which, remember when most Americans grew up in snowy winters?
Immersion in books: mom was a librarian.
Immense family pathology...attributed to the past. Mine's worst than yours.

There was Gunsmoke and Wild Wild West and all kinds of cowboy heroes. But out of there, before I could address these as a teen, there came in the other ideas.
Roots, the Alex Haley books, probably being the most resounding wake up call to issues of color of one's skin. Before that, I had no sense of it so much. Oh, I was prejudicial but just stupid and ignoranly so, with no malice.
Really, socially, I was more a kid looking to role play than anything else. Like a healthy amount of my inner life, perhaps some 90%, is merely role playing: acting or writing stories.

But the 50's really ended with the kids of the 60's and 70's attacking Imperial icons. I did not know that was what was happening because I had no idea of what Imperialism meant, I just felt they were mad at people, and then it came to me, all people were mad at white people. Or so I came to believe as a boy consuming 70's media.
But I pretty much ignored it. Got in fights with all the races at school. Risk taking...

So this was the dominant theme, racial persecution to ME, UNLIKE how others may write about it as an abstraction...a sense of argument or dispute. No, for me, its targeted aggression, because I was white and arrogant and tall.

Meanwhile all around me were books and TV shows and movies and talk and social pressure, from Church and Teachers and elementary schools and peers...not my parents, but all these other places and people, they preached Anti War.
It seemed to fit into the idea of the Establishment having become way too risky, and then some forgiveness on the panic of others vented onto me, for whether over class or race or sex...I agreed, MAD was reason to protest. By whatever political means.

But then I read Buddhism, books about peace and war in history, about Vets reactions to War (the American Heritage books has excellent photo books on every war. Large format.)
And took Christian teaching to heart, to be gentle. The Catholic kids, dressed in uniforms, would bully us public school kids. What were they teaching there, in the local Catholic school!?

But I had trouble anyway, controlling aggression. Risk taking was far too high. Also, grokking the 60's seemed important, so I immersed myself in the immediate past, and lost touch somewhat with my generation of the 80's. I would have been goth, but it wasn't around then.

So the troubling took on Casteneda, Leary, the drug culture and the alternative press of things.
Underground is dead...I think it spawned in the 60's and became a Market in the 80's.

Television was so meaningful. Now I can see its end although there are probably a increase in the number of screen to 2 or 3 powers of 10. But that is not Television.
Oddly, it does attract an audience...those that like this intimate theater that was spawned in Modernism...through the fusion of word and image to now, where its all publishing and everyone reading and watching and listening...into the device. It seems to fit in a bar, not in a home where the computer has now replaced it.
Reading has transformed and increased, more signal, more text to comprehend, and not just by sound byte and social media posting, but as a capacity of the human brain.

The digital age has unlocked a "reading" level...comprehension of simultaniety, or heterogeniety, has increased.

How, or really what kind of memory does a reader use to remember...these are also coming more into focus. One reads and remembers the words, or the inner images as pictures of action, or one remembers the sounds and rhythms, or one remembers the relationships, the symbols, the otherwise larger Proustian context...all of this has fed on each other more densely that it used to.

Performance in reading is going to be more a metric, more legible, as in having multiple dimension, turning into a skill wherein, what the person remembers in greater capacity is going to be where they work.
But this will increase in subjects: not just blueprints, or melody, but some kind of new level of indexicality wherein what is now to be brought to the fore of the discussion can be heard and understood by more than the old tyme specialist audience, as that diffuses into multiple specialities and those cluster and configure in social ways.

All clicking together within a generation, easily. Its almost a done model: the social universe of America is probably a totality in color code of hues and percentages, attached to each and every person, available as a dossier, constructed by the NSA, and paid for by Corporations and Acadamia and Government.
What is social media but akin to a Detective or FBI file about a person? The resemblance is startling.















 

Earth 2150

A giant ball of steam surrounds the planet...all the oceans have boiled off, and Earth is now enshrouded like Venus and Jupiter.
On the ground the mountains have been beaten down. pulverized by swirling counter rotating cyclones each of the two fitting into either hemisphere. Whirled antipodes, two cyclopean eyes spinning either side of the globe, around and around, storms with wind speeds of over four hundred kilometers per hour.
The storms are no mere wind; salt, silicon and carbon, super heated in the storm, colluding into dagger sized streaks, twisted into shredding rope-saws, torqued, compressed, corded and stacked into bundles of more or less symmetrical jet streams into which the cyclones gather threads and shear them into sideways circulations.
Over the surface these ever shred more Earth, lifting up more silicon dust and salt.
The bare uninhabited ground vents methane and natgas, from massive lakes and springs numbering thousands, with only the deepest valleys or leeward cliffs containing silicon dunes. These dunes being mined by humans who have carved out homes into the stone.
Of all of the Earthen firmament the granite and marble remain, windblown pinnacles and grand galleries of massive and low sloped salt capped rocks. Over head the banded jets press down to engulf those remaining ridges as the Himalyas, the Andes, the Rockies, the Alps, Kilimanjaro and the Queen Alexandria Ridge in Antarctic.
In these tunnels of stone there lodges and advances man.
Even indolent man. As per Jeffries here.
What sort of man was he?
Oh, he would done the suit, swing on the wires and float on the wings, leaping out in the jet stream from howling tunnels of those highest peaks, (above 4,200). These handful, hammered anew by boulders grinding eons per minute, ever-shrouded and shuddering in the shrieking wind. As good as near the best, but never the elite. Those that did not disappear in the freak ribbons and streamers of the Great Winds. At least the ones near the surface!
Distracted so by such the odd but not uncommon physical and literate, political society was beyond him.
And other than brain injuries, there was nothing left to remark about Jeffries.
Yet, where he had settled, a transparent aluminum window set into the low arcing stone cliff side cave, to viewing the western sky as the Winds now always passes by.
"Are they Jupidorian or Neptunian?" people asked, the Jupidorian being the upper range of damage.
Though in actual effect, of gas and heat and a rain of carbon steam pressed beneath almost perfect sphere of super heated steam, was more like Venus. But so typical had the comparison been, that there laid upon the media an old venture to now colonize Venus, as they had various Moons.
Evidence of other people off the planet. In the news.
The Steam Cloud was but one, and so named. There was no pools of water (except in storage), instead, it was dunes of black sludge, methane rich mud-salts where nothing grew, except some conjectured deep sea vented mutations...also featured in Jeffries media.
Sheer stone mountains ranges remain, shrouded beneath a organic haze thick as night. Yet, Jeffries knew the Seven Super-volcano ten year Bake-off subsides, though the magma remains magma on the surface of the earth for decades it too is cooling.
Jeffries wished for slower winds someday.
All hellish except inside these lavish stone pinnacles.
Carved are the houses, galleries and gardens, of a population of 20 million humanities, some mutated, all living on freely available near infinite power.
The general swirl of humanities agonizing die off creating more mixes and round eyes, like Jeffries, were almost extinct.
Ho-Stein, the French-Caspian-Hmong-Athabaskan, stood on the other axis of Crim-tu, the Irish-Bantu-Taiwanese-Mayan in the ethnic alphabet.
More disturbing is the large percentage of humanity, clearly at least one fourth, are mutations. Some arising from genetic experiments, some from the more staid natural adaptation. Neither could claim a better method, and both produced more monsters than supermen.

A space cables was descending to the Earth, having been created above. No communication with the builders is available, yet there it is visible, descending a few meters daily, ever glimpsed by the sky, full of swarming robot and manned probes, always warring over head, gallantly against the carpet bombing level of casualities.
This, on Jeffreis media, was his reactionary politics. Anti-war, though, he too belonged in the air.
A simple politics not including the people who personally sought his downfall. To this he was ever looking away.

There is great intrigue as to "who has rockets?" that can transport up to the robot satellite, suspected as well as being a cluster of Carboniferous Asteroids.
Therein, the big cable descending, with a ever more armored Shuttle, duly robotic, testing its deeper and deeper descent, yet always to rise again un-made by energetic stones.
When it could work into the eyes of the hurricane, there was often turbulance from methane, silicon, carbon gas upwinds.
This also meant the Orbiter lowering the cable was probably adrift.

Jefferies had a methane recycling jet rocket, just so designed to leap up quickly into orbit. This was a family secret.
Yet he thought he alone possessed this knowledge, one other knew.
As Jefferies research into the personnel, the personnel plus cargo, he planned to take, was in the make, and regardless to a coup that was planned to take his place.
A coup had begun to play, the first move successful blackmail, depicting Jeffries as sub-human.

And this social wound matched his own real physical mutation, his so far matchless reflexes.
Doubled down now even as the gossip too, of his being the one possessing a rocket ship capable of 'flying to the boom'.

Jeffries was not oblvious to this however inevitable confrontation, and built in and out of his pink granite karst canyon low keyhole view, spanning as a gallery the tunnels between the two peaks Pitt and Babo. From the keyhole of stone that range for three hundred meters looked out below to bubbling a methane lake, named Rope.
Rope, for whipped into full on, the column of methane expanded up and out of the keyhole like a funnel.

Alongside and sometimes consumed in these convection cells of scouring methane, Jeffries rock palace gallery, kilometers long transparent aluminium windows strips, glowed in the friction of the maisma of howling orange. This dim green filled the corridors flashing a netting of lightning shimmering and overlapping for minutes.
A coruscating swelling tornado methane orange, coal-black streaks super heated red, and flicking out in fire-streaks.
Within which the atmosphere and sound pressures pumped and levitated lightning soaked magnetic blocks and blobs and sometimes even power stations, of iron. This was Jeffries job, to maintain these engines lasting since the earlier 21st century.

Jeffries low arc gallery view connected to interior of stacked single rooms, two columnar nests inside the neighboorly peaks, shielded by the four thousand meter high range looming over it, its Eastern side ramping the wind born stone storm cloud columns mostly up and over.
The earlier, huge blocks of mountains sides also lay, somewhat disintegrated, on the East side.
Those more vigorous typhoons of old the methane pool acceleration reached up and nicked, scouring even more organic and inorganic yields off thousand kilometer per hour boulders, rocks and soil. Smashed, and pulverized into the mists of silicon. Superheated, to rise and then arrange into globe encircling clouds, heavier faster and sharper than cloud of Venus or the rings of Saturn.

Two gigantic "Whorls", north and south, were super hurricanes that maintained spinning like the great red spot of Jupiter. The mothers of counter-spinning storms offspringing, of dizzying range of size, power, and number constantly from the counter-circulating "Eyes". E\

But even during the Venusian morphs of down drafting Jet streams of dense scouring crystalline, Jeffries granite remains of Pitt Peaks still endured, an outcropping island in the leeward shadow of a massive 5.000 meter mountain high cradle. These two other peaks housed thousands, and yet cradled Jeffries unique real estate. Its singular pod station a minute nearby, 400 kilometers east.
The massive gorge between was the typical terrain now of Earth, wrought with a thousand Grand Canyons, appeared within the first twenty years of the carbon heating.

Digging old Mines and Caves preceded lavish massive underground and in rock complexes. Most about the same span. Many limestone escarpments housing tens of thousands, the loopy holes sealed by aluminum, steel and carbon sheets.

Robotic tunnelers dug on, even as Jeffries visits those owned by his Mom.
She lived behind one of the thousand of windows scattered across the low saddle pass between Sarina and Greencorn, the two peaks of Beatridge Keep.
Its too had massive windowed faces, atriums of many a public place.
Below, they accessed the ribbon of a gold lake wavering in the deepest sink of the rift between the ranges.
This vein beneath had long smelt and floated at bottom of silicon bereft stone rift, worn and torn into stone ridges descending in rows to meter wide cracks kilometers deep, the nadir of broken rock bottom lands, scoured into wind torn shapes of scythes and razor sharp crystal ridges of metal salt rings, beneath which wavered puddles and ponds of many glittering alloy soups.

Salt deserts, granite and marble edifices, with human settlement glowing out in the night nearest, looming and glimmering over bowlike reseviors of alloys, accessed from the likewise alloy-made robots, who still yet dig their own precipice steep tunnels.

Lifts were of the rage in massive city underground.

And that is where Jeffries was, now with his Uncle Floyd and Beedee, his bodyguard.
Well, all Uncle Floyd was was a black box that rolled about and had sense enough to tell Jeffries what to do, which was increasing more desperate effort to keep his brain decaying anymore.

Assassins, Uncles in black boxes, a quick trip to visit the Mines. This was Jeffries fate.

Jeffries shuttered the Power Generator Keep, anti pressure seals the u shaped keep.
Meanwhile Jeffries (and Uncle Box, well, okay, Uncle Floyd....though it seemed his real Uncle Floyd was long gone) fast shuttered along, out the mega kilogram Krell doors, inside the antique wind powered tube pod, over the rift of gold, to the Po-Barq central station.

Antique, for mounted forward is fifty caliber gun, belted with live ammo.
An antique that yet announced to the strangers in town Jeffries had formidable resources here in this ancient tech, preserved even during the great recycling.
Only a mad man would have done that.

So into town Jeffries and Uncle Floyd ended their battered and rumbling ride, first down into the crevise and then up, all near seizure speed of 3 g's.
Yet rolled out they did, more annoyed than adversely stimulated by the over speeding tube dip...the deck fit perfect with the tube and the platform familiarity relieved the disorienting fling.
Jeffries electrically stalled the storage of the Pod. He reversed the magnet lock on the gun, and hoisted the gun and belt, atop off Uncle Floyd. This was done with skeleton assist, a suit he wore wherein in otherwise remained obscure.
While the shaft rocking subsided, Jeffries reset the magnet lock, and transferred the rest of the belt load.
Immediately. almost as if in bureaucratic offense, the Antique Power Plant Pod skipped away, in a right angle, to be shuttered in a chamber, an array of Pod bays serving the subwayesque platform.

No windows existed in the most public places of Po-Barq.

Jeffries and Floyd walked past the few sitters, who turned back to their tablets and unpaused their shows. The few looks up and down said nothing.

"Expect Death!" Floyd said. He always said that, that Uncle Floyd...now he played music.

"Ur gonna die, die, die, you fly, fly, fly
and who will cry, cry, me? Your momma and I
said goodbye so long ago
and you know, I never show for your sake
its a lonely hate, a bitter plate,
you serve it up so well I wished hate
wasn't so hard baked in how you take
the rocks and winds
your great grandfathers of green Earth
now this stinking orange curse.

What we merit, a mere demon fart
drenching machines and mutants,
a super-powered electrified utopian face
faked, instead feeding the grim monsters
who to soon are to be astronauts,
evolved in vicious shadows, to replace
the silent aristocrats in the heavens
of outer space. Are they oblivious
or just hiding, withholding their medicine
of eternal vitality."

Sang Floyd, as they sat on the train, scuttling along on rubber wheels through long tunnels of darkness, looping out into a windowed mezzanine, the one on the other side of the rock mounded Mountains, looking right into a cacophony and chaos of collisions.
Sound was counter waved and damped. Yet it was quieter on the looping backing inward.

Somewhere deep within there opened the view down into the cracks, into which a gigantic frame had installed, a honeycomb of tunnels numbering millions of rooftops over an infinite view of descending balconies, windows and elevators. The whole vast establishment, automatically installed by construction bots, was tragically empty due to rampant viral and bacterial blooms.
Yet, infested they were too with mutants and handful of humans, families and tribes, those immune.

Vast internal infinite vistas from within which emerged now fifteen named monsterously atavistic and mutant, former humans. Who knows how many more down there were now groomed in the wretched emptiness?

Drones hovering mere meters below the roof suspended tomb, fire laser occasions so deep down that the beam went beyond the range of Jeffries vision. Once he saw a split second of yellow flicker, but on the train trundled, its rubber wheeling over parallaxing vistas, which left Jeffries with no other chance to see anything alive crawling, flying or moving, this well policed cavern the size of lake snapped closed as Jeffries Pod cloaked in darkness, and approached the enclosure of Zimzum Mining, incorporated.

Royal Twins

When did the Royals begin engineering the birth of twins, even triplets?

It led to a alternate world in which the twins could be safe, not known publically as a twin, and of course, never allowed out of the alternate world without schedule. It could all be closed down by a staged death, or real one. But the Royals lived two hundreds years...the last one hundred a bit loony on cloned organs, brain meds and stem cell injections.

Even then, when the willfull royal would revolt and disregard the rule, the other twi outside, was notified, and never have they failed to drop quickly out, by way of a sudden plane flight even.

Furthermore the control of photographic access, the restrictions of press, enhanced the practice of twin birth, while announcing a single child as born to the public. At least, how the story goes.

So, this alternate world created was ever a curiousity to me, in so being severed from public understanding, those technologies, exotic, advanced, powerful...drugs, vehicles, architectural playgrounds, privileges and privacies, not all deployed in great decadent expenditures?
This only to them, those beyond public, beyond private, locked in gilded cages and subjected to scientific study? Or, in fact, sprawling across the Solar system in various styled moon colonies around various planets.

Lets consider Hans.

Hans owned a restaurant. That is how I knew him. Well, Hans twin was there when Hans twin was in wonderland.
The real Hans was found dead, though, killed by inhaling Poison Ivy.
Urisol.
Of which I am afflicted myself, a common weed around here. Horrible way to die, by the way.

I also have a double. However, this double has never left Wonderland.
He writes me letters, describing it, in the name of Dave Wilson. Should I believe him? He sends me pictures of myself doing things I have never done. And, those pictures...look like they are from moon colonies.
Dave wanted to know what happened to Hans, and so I went by and found out.

Sometimes we twins know each other, sometimes we don't. Sometimes a double never leaves Wonderland, and the royal on Earth never knows it exists. Some twins are evil, and mine, in Wonderland, I am beginning to think, is in fact profiting from the destruction of my life.
Or, maybe I am just paranoid.
I just figured it, and in answering my twin, I learned in our case, the case where the twin doesn't ever leave Wonderland, is extremely rare, and also, it is even more rare that the other Twin, me in this case, finds out. In fact, Dave told me there is only four of us, two in China and one in India.
Otherwise I guess the ground Twin is kept too busy.
Nose to the grindstone.