Jeff Duntemann's Contrapositive Diary

It took us a few days, but we got the great room decorated, including trimming both our artificial and natural (and we hope live) tree to the nines. This may be the best real Christmas tree we’ve ever had as a couple, and our hope is that with careful watering it will keep us until Epiphany.

If we have to take it down sooner, well, the experiment was worth doing. Here’s a shot of our real tree, in the corner by the bar:

We don’t use the bar for drinking, so it presents a nice place for decorations, this year including our creche and Carol’s Plasticville Farm, complete with farm animals and a corral of giant bichons:

We’re going to set up the Lionel trains this year, including my father’s 1926 set that is now 98 years old. The venerable #250 electric loco still rips around the track as it doubtless did when my dad was a toddler. We’ll also be running Carol’s Lionel set from the late ‘50s; however, the trains will have to wait until after the cleaning service goes through and mops the tile floor.

I’ll take some pictures of the artificial tree and will post them as time permits. We’ve started Christmas a little early this year, just to see what it’s like to get all Christmas-y on November 29 instead of December 15th or so. Like I said, I’ll keep you posted.

Happy (belated) Thanksgiving! I’ve talked about Thanksgiving and the things I’m thankful for here several times, and won’t repeat it all here tonight. All that I said then still applies, though the list has gotten longer over the years. We had dinner with friends, starring a roast goose! I know I’ve had goose but it’s been years—nay, decades—since the last time it crossed my plate. Good wine, good food, good friends. That’s a lot of what I’m thankful for, right there, plus the woman sitting beside me, and her 55 years of love and devotion. I am a man much blessed, and appreciate it.

It was a good day indeed. And today, well, it’s Black Friday. People complain sometimes about Christmas starting the day after Thanksgiving. I’m of two minds about it, and Carol and I prefer not to fight the crowds at major retailers. Like it or not, the reality is that Christmas has become a sort of long-horizon holiday. The stores put out Christmas goodies the day after Halloween. Some people start shopping and celebrating on Black Friday, and others continue it until the Epiphany. This year we decided to start on Black Friday, for a reason: Christmas trees.

The Arizona desert is hard on pine trees shipped down from Minnesota or wherever. We’ve had mixed luck finding trees that lived even two weeks in the stand with plenty of water. In Colorado we had one once that lasted so long it began growing. I doubt that would happen here. But Carol and I had a plan. We knew that Whitfill’s Christmas Trees opened for business on Black Friday, so up 64th Street we went, to their usual spot between Bell Road and the Canal at 64th.

We got there about 2PM, and the joint was jumpin’. They had trees that had to be twelve feet high. Not for us. We wanted something shorter, fuller, and greener. I didn’t want something over seven feet high.

It took us approximately 90 seconds to find the tree that we bought.

It’s very green, very full, maybe not quite seven feet high, and smells ever so wonderful. Trees cost down here; I paid $200. This time I think we got our money’s worth. We think it’s the prettiest tree we’ve ever had. The reason for that is probably getting there before the crowds snapped up all the really good trees. We were there early. We got a good tree. Nay, an excellent tree.

We haven’t begun decorating it yet. We brought all our Christmas decor back from the storage unit a couple of days ago. The tree is now in its stand. Tomorrow we begin. We’ll keep you posted.

• I asked MS CoPilot a simple question—“How does menthol alleviate pain?”—and let it rip. It ripped. And ripped. And ripped, spinning its spinner for four hours before I finally closed the window without any sort of response. I’ve had tolerably good luck working with CoPilot, but this suggests it still has a long way to go.
• MIT appears to agree: They are now telling us that generative AIs do not build world-models and thus cannot be counted on to be useful in any arbitrary context. Ummm…did we really need MIT to tell us that?
• Mayo Clinic researchers have found that stem cells grown in zero-G grow faster and work better in tests than stem cells grown on Earth. The research has only begun, but I could definitely see Elon Musk establishing a stem-cell farm in orbit if that research pans out.
• Jim Strickland sent me a link to a wonderful NASA animation of Moon photos as the Moon orbits Earth, showing all the phases the Moon goes through, including libration and position angle for the full year 2025. As best I can tell, it doesn’t display lunar eclipses, but there are many other places detailing times for those.
• Alzheimer’s may not be a brain disease so much as a mitochondria disease. Other theories beyond amyloid plaques are coming up, and this piece presents a nice summary of why we may be wrong about amyloid plaques and what other mechanisms might be behind dementia.
• There is now reasonable research showing that the infrasonic (very low) sounds emitted by ginormous wind turbines can cause health problems in humans and other animals.
• I ran across Justapedia about a month ago, and so far it holds up well compared to Wikipedia. The idea is to maintain a MediaWiki-based competitor to Wikipedia, one that is deliberately non-political and less obsessed with notability and various other side issues. Take a look. I’m rooting for them, but beating a competitor as entrenched as Wikipedia is a daunting challenge.
• UTIs are very common but kidney infections—which you would think are caused by the same pathogens—are not. Here’s an explanation why.
• When I was a little kid (figure 7 or 8, maybe 9) all the boys of similar age in my neighborhood were allowed to dig a hole in their backyards big enough to sit down in and play with toy soldiers, dinosaurs, or other injection-molded fantasy icons. There’s now evidence that letting kids play in the dirt can train our immune systems to recognize and shake off many more microorganisms than kids living in low-dirt environments like city cores.
• And it’s not just dirt. A Harvard-trained nutritional psychiatrist confirmed that human brains need a diet rich in meat to support mental health. Let’s put it this way: We did not evolve eating kale—but that said, Carol and I do eat a rainbow salad most nights with our meat course. I’m pretty sure that evolution-wise, the meat came first.

It’s done. The first draft of The Everything Machine. I had a lot of trouble with Chapter 57, but a bit of focus and a couple of false starts got it where I knew it had to go. The first draft is now complete. It came in at 131,000 words, which is more than Dreamhealer but less than The Cunning Blood. I’ll most likely carve a couple thousand words out of it, though I paid more attention than usual to dead end scenes and promises early in the manuscript that the later chapters could not fulfill. There just won’t be as much scrap as there usually is.

The Everything Machine Is set in the same universe as The Cunning Blood. just elsewhere in the galaxy. A starship carrying 872 people plus gene-pool plants and animals for the Erewhon colony does a black fold and instead ends up…somewhere. Part of the mystery of the Metaspace stories is that everywhere there is a Sun-like star there is an Earth-like planet. The black fold destroyed the starship’s Hilbert drive, so there’s no going back. Starship Origen’s people and cargo shuttle down to the Earthlike planet’s surface and struggle to survive.

But…there are these alien…things. Clearly artificial, each consists of a 2-meter wide bowl half-filled with silver-gray dust. Beside the bowl is a low platform and two pillars, all made of some indestructible black stone. A teenage boy discovers that if you tap out a 256-bit binary pattern on the two pillars (one pillar for 0, the other for 1) something will coalesce and surface in the bowl. These (early) artifacts are all composed of a silver-gray metal that doesn’t scratch, bend, melt, or allow itself to be pounded flat in a forge. Some are familiar, like axes and shovels. Some are twisted lumps of silver-gray metal that don’t look like anything humans have ever seen.

The inhabitants of a world the inadvertent colonists eventually dub Valeron initially refer to the items produced by the alien machines as “thingies.” As people get used to tapping on the pillars (which respond with a sound for each tap, one pillar high, the other pillar low) they begin calling the artifacts “drumlins” because you drum on the pillars and drumlins appear in the bowl. Yes, I know that a drumlin is a glacial landform, but I repurposed the word because 95% of humanity have never heard it and it worked well in the story.

Planet Valeron is found to have hundreds of thousands of these machines (which are soon dubbed “thingmakers” because that’s what they do) scattered across the planet’s one big continent. Across over 250 years the population survives and grows, largely with the help of the thingmakers and the drumlins they produce. 261 years in, people ride horses and steam locomotives, but clever folk find a lot of useful things in the thingmakers, and begin compiling an index. Five minutes tapping on the pillars with that index in front of you, and you get a new (and indestructible) something. Shovels, hammers, pipe fittings, lengths of pipe, and much, much more.

Drumlins are peculiar in a number of ways. Besides being indestructible, drumlins will not hurt you. Take a drumlin knife to your dinner and it cuts your lamb chop just fine. Force the point of the same knife against the palm of your hand and the blade flattens out into a disk. Pull it back from your hand and it slowly returns to the form of a knife. How does the damned thing know?

That’s only one mystery of many surrounding the thingmakers. Remember Magic Mikey’s “players” from The Cunning Blood? They’re here. If they want to talk to you, they insert words into your consciousness. Talking back to them is tricky but it can be done, especially by peculiar teen girls.

I introduced the Drumlins World in a novelette called “Drumlin Boiler,” which appeared in IASFM for April 2002 and is in my collection Cold Hands and Other Stories. Jim Strickland and I wrote a double novel about the Drumlins World back in 2011. I adapted “Drumlin Boiler” as the first part of The Everything Machine, because it introduces the thingmakers, drumlins, and several characters who play a major role in the story.

There are truckloads of Jeff Duntemann ideas in the novel, but I took extra care to create characters who made sense and could be understood as human beings who could well be friends and loved ones, facing a phenomenon both mysterious and wonderful. I tossed in a couple of low-key love stories. There are fights, explosions, 6-shooters (and 11-shooters) hydrogen airships, sheriffs, starships built by humans and also by, well, whoever created the thingmakers.

That’s as much as I can tell you right now without getting into spoilers. Note well that I still have a huge amount of work to do. I have to do a continuity pass, and either do or hire someone to do an edit pass. Oh, and a cover. That may be the toughest challenge of all.

There are several finish lines in the craft of writing novels. I just got past the first. Plenty others are waiting in the wings, itching for me to cross them.

I’ll keep you posted on how the game is going.

Whew. That was work. Earlier today, I finished the epilogue to The Everything Machine, the big drumlins novel, which I have worked on in fits and starts (and slogs) since 2006.

The first draft is now structurally complete. It isn’t finished, exactly. I’m still rewriting much of Chapter 57, which just didn’t turn out right. And there is a lot of other work to do. The first draft now stands at 128,000 words. I’m hoping to get it down to 125,000 and probably will. That edit pass is still to come.

The idea dates back to 1997, when I got the ideas for both The Everything Machine and The Cunning Blood in one bizarre evening. I was sitting on the edge of our pool with Carol when my brain just suddenly boiled over with ideas. I was days taking notes. What I had was a whole new universe to write in and about. I had a little more concept on The Cunning Blood, so I began that novel first, under the original title No Way in Hell. A publishing colleague warned me that bookstores might not shelve a book with “hell” in the title, so I thought of The Cunning Blood and went with it. Not long thereafter, I was in our local Bookstar store (RIP) and while browsing stumbled across a book called F—k Yes! (minus the hyphens) by the unlikely Wing F. Fing. Face-out, already. So much for bookstores being afraid of the word “hell.”

That was ok; I quickly decided I liked “The Cunning Blood” as a title a whole lot more. I finished it in 1999 and tried to shop it to the big NY SF imprints, without any serious luck. (The editor of one press said, “I came real close on this” which at the time made me feel a little better.) While shopping it I wrote a novelette on the other concept called “Drumlin Boiler.” I sold that to Asimov’s SF in 2000, and it was published in April 2002.

That was about the time that Coriolis went under. I was depressed for a couple of years and didn’t write much fiction. I finally sold The Cunning Blood to a small press in 2005, and it reviewed well in several places, including Analog and Instapundit. In 2006 I started some conceptual work on a novel I called The Anything Machine. I wrote concept scenes and tried to get some momentum going, to no avail. I started Ten Gentle Opportunities about that time, which sucked up most of my creative energy for a couple of years. In 2011 I got together with my friend Jim Strickland and we did a tete-beche double novel with two short novels set on the drumlins planet, as a tribute to the legendary Ace Doubles I had grown up on in the 1960s.

I tried to get a novel-length plot together here and there in the teens, without much success. I published Ten Gentle Opprtunities in 2016, and Dreamhealer in 2020. Finally, on January 5, 2021, I created a new document and got underway. I changed the title from The Anything Machine to The Everything Machine for reasons you’ll understand once you read it. (Keep in mind that I took a year off the project to rewrite my assembly book for X64.)

I used an edited and slightly enlarged version of “Drumlin Boiiler” as the first part of the novel. It introduces the concept of the thingmakers and the drumlins they create, plus several key characters. I drew on the background work I did in Drumlin Circus in 2011, particularly the Bitspace Institute and its three ruling consuls. One consul died in Drumlin Circus, so I was left with Alvah McKinnon and David Orsi. That was enough to light a fire under the main conflict of the book, in which David Orsi goes savagely insane to the point of murdering his own people. Oh, and I threw in airships, because airships are dramatic—and burn spectacularly.

The Everything Machine is by all measure the most complex story I’ve ever told. I had had some faint hopes of writing a whole series of novels about the drumlins world, which I originally named Valinor and later changed to Valeron. (The Tolkien estate has lawyers; Doc Smith (as best I can tell) does not.) But toward the end I got a feeling I didn’t expect: Good as it was, I was getting a little tired of the drumlins concept. I’m 72 and healthy, but I’m also a realist. I don’t necessarily have another 15 or 20 years to slowly reveal the mystery of the thingmakers. So I tossed everything into the pot and across the book explain the whole shebang, with maybe just a couple of minor exceptions that might serve as hooks into future sequels, should I choose to (and are able to) write them.

Today was only the first hurdle of many. I still need to finish rewriting Chapter 57. I then need to do an intensive “continuity pass” to make sure un-shadowed foreshadowings are deleted, names of things don’t change along the way (I spelled McKinnon as MacKinnon here and there) and then timeline problems, yikes. Covers, double yikes. I know what I have to do. I’ve done it before. It will be done.

So the adventure continues. In the meantime, meditate on the number 2E256. That’s roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe. It’s also the number of things that the thingmakers can produce, given a 256-bit binary code tapped on two pillars. That’s a lot of things to make. Where do all those designs come from?

You’ll be surprised. Promise.