Surfing the Gnarl

by Rudy Rucker

  “Silke! It’s alive! The thing in my bag is alive! Aaauuugh!”

  Silke paid a doctor two thousand dollars to come to their apartment. The doctor was a bald, dignified man with a white beard. He examined Denny’s scrotum for a long time, feeling, listening, and watching the tumor’s occasional twitches. Finally he pulled the covers back over Denny and sat down. He regarded Silke and Denny in silence for quite some time.

  “Decode!” demanded Denny. “What the kilp we got running here?”

  “You’re pregnant,” said the doctor. “Four months into it, I’d say.”

  The quickening fetus gave another kick and Denny groaned. He knew it was true. “But how?”

  The doctor steepled his fingers. “I … I saw Rapture in Space. There were certain signs to indicate that your uh partner was menstruating?”

  “Check.”

  “Menstruation, as you must know, involves the discharge of the unfertilized ovum along with some discarded uterine tissues. I would speculate that after your ejaculation the ovum became wedged in your meatus. The slit at the tip of your penis. It is conceivable that under weightless conditions the sperm’s flagella could have driven the now-fertilized ovum into your vas deferens. The ovum implanted itself in the bloodrich tissues there and developed into a fetus.”

  “I want an abortion.”

  ”No!” protested Silke. “That’s our baby, Denny. You’re already almost half done carrying it. It’ll be lovely for us … and just think of the publicity!”

  “Uh …” said Denny, reaching for his bag of dope.

  “No more drugs,” said the doctor, snatching the bag. “Except for the ones I give you.” He broke into a broad, excited smile. “This will make medical history.”

  And indeed it did. The doctor designed Denny a kind of pouch in which he could carry his pregnant scrotum, and Denny made a number of video appearances, not all of them X-rated. He spoke on the changing roles of the sexes, and he counted the days till delivery. In the public’s mind, Denny became the symbol of a new recombining of sex with life and love. In Denny’s own mind, he finally became a productive and worthwhile person. The baby was a flawless girl, delivered by a modified Caesarian section.

  Sex was never the same again.

  NOTES

  Dennis Poague, a.k.a. Sta-Hi, was the inspiration for this story; he really did spend his inheritance on a phoning machine. I wrote this story shortly after seeing the IMAX movie The Dream Is Alive, which featured pictures of the sexy astronaut Judy Resnick sleeping in zero-gee. The Challenger shuttle blew up with Judy in it a few months later, definitively deep-sixing whatever slim chance “Rapture in Space” had of getting into a normal SF magazine.

  Semiotext[e] SF was an anthology which Peter Lamborn Wilson and I coedited. Originally we’d planned to call the book Bad Brains, but Peter felt doing this would conflict with the band of the same name. At the time, Peter rented an apartment upstairs from the apartment of my friend Eddie Marritz in New York City, which is how I happened to meet him. Eddie appears in the story “Tales of Houdini,” in the memoir “Drugs and Live Sex—NYC 1980,” and in the novel Master of Space and Time.

  A funny Dennis story. When we moved to San Jose, it turned out Dennis lived here, so we started getting together a lot. I was supposed to give a reading at an annual San Jose SF convention called Bay Con in 1987, and the day before the reading I was in a bicycle accident and had a huge black eye. I didn’t want to appear in public looking so bad, so I gave Dennis my manuscript of As Above, So Below and told him to do the reading. I figured he would enjoy this free taste of fame, and I was right—remember that one of Software Sta-Hi’s big obsessions is how to become famous.

  Although I’d already made friends with the San Francisco SF writers, none of the fans knew at Bay Con knew what I looked like, so when Dennis appeared in a corduroy jacket and read my story, they assumed he was me. The funny thing was, when I came and did my own reading at Bay Con a year later, several people came up to me and said, “You know, I saw your reading last year and it was wonderful. You made the material so fresh and new … it was like you’d never even read it before!”

  “LOAD ON THE MIRACLES AND KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE”

  RUDY RUCKER INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

  Your new book, Nested Scrolls, is an autobiography. Does that mean you’ve run out of ideas?

  I feel like I always have new ideas, but certainly some of them are beginning to look a little familiar. I get SF ideas by extrapolating, from speculating, and from imagining surreal juxtapositions.

  In 2008, I had a cerebral hemorrhage—a vein burst in my brain and I nearly died. Coming out of that, I decided that I’d better write my autobio while I still had time.

  One of my goals in writing Nested Scrolls was to get an idea of the story arc of my life—as if I were looking back on a novel. My conclusions? I searched for ultimate reality, and I found contentment in creativity. I tried to scale the heights of science, and I found my calling in mathematics and in science fiction. I was a loner, I found love, I became a family man. When I was a kid, I felt like an ugly duckling, and over the years I grew into grace— thanks in large measure to my dear wife, Sylvia.

  Aren’t novels a rather messy exercise for a mathematician? Do you have the whole thing in RAM when you start, or do you make it up as you go along?

  In some ways mathematics resembles novel-writing. In math you start with some oddball axioms and see what theorems you can deduce from them. You have very little control over the course that your reasoning takes. In novel-writing, you start with an outré scenario and see what kind of plot emerges from the situation. Here again, the details of your work tends to come as something of a surprise.

  In science fiction, it’s useful to be able to think logically, which is something that comes naturally for a mathematician.

  But of course SF novels are more than logical exercises, and that’s why I love writing them. I like the possibility of expressing myself at various levels—sometimes it isn’t until later that I realize something I’ve written has to do with some deep obsession of mine.

  Frek and the Elixir has been described as a YA (young adult) novel. Is this because it has a kid as a protagonist, or because only kids can understand it?

  Tor didn’t actually market this book as YA, although that might have been a good idea. When YA books catch on, they can sell very well. But in Frek, I wasn’t fully focused on teenage problems, as is usually the case in YA books. Although the thirteen-year-old Frek has some abandonment issues with his father, he’s also dealing with the social issue of many species becoming extinct.

  In order to give Frek and the Elixir a classy feel, I modeled the book on the “monomyth” template described in Joseph Campbell’s classic The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell’s archetypal myth includes seventeen stages. By combining two pairs of stages, I ended up with fifteen chapters for Frek.

  I’d like to revisit the world of Frek and write a sequel. I liked those characters, especially the flying cuttlefish called Professor Bumby. I had him as a professor in my abstract algebra course in grad school.

  Your webzine Flurb reads like a who’s who of outside-the-box SF writers. Who would you most like to get an unsolicited manuscript from, living or dead?

  I’ve had a lot of fun editing Flurb, and as a personal matter, it’s convenient to have a magazine which will always publish my stories. I sleep with the editor’s wife, as I like to say.

  I started with asking my old cyberpunk friends to contribute, but over time I’m getting more over-the-tran-som material from younger writers. Regarding your question, I’d be happy to get manuscripts from Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, or Jack Kerouac. It’s not so well known that the Beats were very interested in writing SF, and they talked about it a lot. They viewed SF as an indigenous American art form, along the lines of rock ‘n’ roll or jazz.

  If you look at it in a certain way, William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch is an SF n
ovel. But there’s a certain goody-goody nerd element among SF people that tends not to want to acknowledge that.

  What is Time? Seriously.

  Kurt Godel, the smartest man I ever met, claimed that the passage of time is an illusion, a kind of grain built into the fabric of our reality. To the extent that we can sense Eternity, it’s present in the immediate Now moment. Another point to make is that, insofar as time is real, it’s like a fluid we swim around in. As John Updike puts it, “Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”

  Okay, I’m regurgitating quotes there. A simpler answer: time is breath. Does that answer your question?

  No. You seem to have a knack for running into famous characters: Anselm Hollo, Martin Gardner, Godel, Wolfram? If you were forming a band, which would play lead guitar? Would Turing be in the band?

  I’d probably like to be lead singer, like I was in my short-lived punk band, the Dead Pigs, in 1982. In this case I’d choose Johnny Ramone as lead guitarist. If I had a better voice, I’d want to work with Frank Zappa, but in reality I don’t think Frank would let me sing. Maybe I could play kazoo. And of course I’d be happy singing with Keith Richards or Muddy Waters.

  Being in a band was one of the more enjoyable things I’ve done. Much of my career has consisted of mathematics, computer hacking, and writing. These are solitary activities, so it was fun for me to be in a band and do something in group. Come to think of it, that’s another reason I like editing my webzine Flurb.

  I don’t think Alan Turing was all that interested in music, but I’d enjoy having him as a friend. He was interested in writing science fiction, as a matter of fact, and he also had an interest in heavy philosophical trips. I’m currently writing a novel with the working title The Turing Chronicles, which centers on a love affair between Turing and William Burroughs.

  I feel like I’m getting to know Turing and Burroughs via the process of writing about them and maintaining internal emulations of them. I’ve often done this in the past—I call it “twinking” someone. I twinked the mathematician Georg Cantor in my novel White Light, Edgar Allen Poe in The Hollow Earth, and the painter Peter Bruegel in my historical novel about his life, As Above, So Below. Bruegel was the best. He’s a wonderful man.

  Do you ever write longhand? Do you own a pencil?

  In my back pocket I almost always carry a blank sheet of printing paper folded in four. I write ideas down on the paper, and when I get home, I type the notes into my computer; generally I’ve got a notes document going for whatever book I’m working on. I do write longhand on my pocket notes paper. Sometimes I can’t read the writing later on. I used to take copy-books on trips with me and write longer passages in them, but now I almost always travel with a laptop.

  Does anyone ever “own” a pencil? They’re just things you rummage for, briefly use, and immediately lose. But now and then, if I have a pencil, I might use it to draw something on my pocket square of paper. More commonly I use a Pilot P-700 pen, preferably Extra Fine. I’ve been using these for going on fifteen years now, and I worry about them going out of production. Every now and then I buy a big stash of them, like fifty or a hundred.

  You sometimes collaborate on short stories, with Paul DiFilippo, Marc Laidlaw, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Eileen Gunn, even myself. Is this laziness or ambition?

  As I already mentioned, writing is a somewhat lonely activity, so I enjoy collaborating on stories. There’s no reason not to. The thing about short stories is that they’re really hard to sell, at least for me. There’s only a very small number of story markets, and often I end up having to publish a story in Flurb. And even if I do sell a story, it pays very little, and it can take several years before the story appears. It’s not a satisfying market at all. So I might as well have some fun in the writing process by collaborating.

  When you write together, it’s something like a musical collaboration, a spontaneous give and take. I find that, in order to blend the prose, I tend to imitate the other author’s style. Like the way that actors in Woody Allen movies usually seem to talk like Woody.

  If you could spend twenty-four hours in any city on the planet, with money in your pocket, which would it be?

  First of all, I’m not going for just twenty-four hours. Why travel so far and turn right around? That’s idiocy. I’m staying for at least four days and maybe a week.

  As for destinations—I’m a huge fan of New York City. I love the noise—you hear it as soon as you get out of the airport, a filigree of sirens overlaid onto a mighty roar. The museums are great, and I know a fair number of cozy, inexpensive restaurants filled with hipsters and city slickers. I’d catch some ballet, and maybe a rock band. Just walking the streets in NYC is a great entertainment as well. And as long as you’re paying, Terry, maybe I’ll stay at the refurbished Gramercy Park Hotel.

  I’d love to spend a week in Koror, a funky town in the archipelago of Palau. I’d go diving, riding a Sam’s Tours boat out to the Blue Corner, which is perhaps the greatest dive spot in the world. I’d probably stay at the Palau Royal Resort, and I’d snorkel at the hotel beach, admiring the richly patterned mantles of the giant clams.

  A lot of scenes in my SF novels are drawn from my dive experiences. SCUBA is really the closest thing we have to floating in outer space and to visiting alien worlds. Well, NYC is fairly alien as well. Life in the hive.

  Your film career was cut short after The Manual of Evasion. What went wrong?

  Well, you’re talking about the acting part of my film career. The Manual of Evasion movie was also called LX94, as it was made in Lisbon in 1994. Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson starred with me, and some excerpts are online, although the complete movie is hard to find. The director of that movie, Edgar Pera, is a really good guy. I went to visit him in Lisbon again in the summer of 2011.

  In terms of movies, what I’d really like is for one of my novels to be made into a film. We came close with Software. It was under option to Phoenix Pictures for a decade and they paid for about ten screenplays, none by me. Master of Space and Time was another near-miss. Michel Gondry wanted to direct, Jim Carrey and Jack Black were going to star, and Daniel Clowes wrote a script. A dream team.

  But the producers didn’t want to lay out the money. It still seems like the big-money people find my work a little too gnarly. Maybe I’m ahead of my time. That could change at some point. But it’s not a prospect I obsess on. I joke that they can’t make any of my novels into movies until they’ve made ever single one of Phillip K. Dick’s novels and short stories into a film. And that’s going to take awhile.

  You are (in my mind, at least) a “hard SF” writer in that the machinery of your work is always math and physics. What do you have against wizards?

  I don’t like it in a fantastic story when there are a large number of unexplained loose ends. In the context of TV series, I think of The X-Files or Lost, where the scriptwriters are continually piling on new complications, and none of the earlier mysteries are being solved, and the narrator just gives you these big-eyed woo-woo significant looks.

  It isn’t really that hard to devote a little effort and figure out a logical framework for the story you want to tell. For a professional SF writer, it might take a day. But for some reason, TV and movie people are literally unable to do this—and they’re unwilling to hire an SF writer as a consultant. They’ll spend a hundred million on the effects, but they won’t give some poor SF vet a hundred K so the story makes sense. I don’t understand it.

  Back to books, my feeling is that you can be just as logical in a fantasy story as in a science-fiction story. But there seems to be a convention in fantasy that you’re not expected to cash the checks that you write. You do any old thing, and then move on to something else and you never circle back. I guess I care more about logic than most people do. Must have something to do with the PhD in mathematics.

  My most recent novel, Jim and the Flims, is to some extent a fantasy story—a large part of it is set in the after-world, an
d my characters are battling with otherworldly beings who are basically demons. But I found it natural to think of some pseudoscientific explanations for the goings-on, and working the logic into the story made me feel more comfortable.

  What drew you into math, chaos or order? What drew you into literature?

  From the start I liked math’s tidiness and power— the numbers and the geometric diagrams. As for literature, I always loved reading and traveling to other worlds. I read science fiction as a boy, and Beat literature in high school. I came to appreciate the radical, countercultural aspects of literature as well.

  I wanted to major in English in college, but my father nagged me that I should major in something hard that I couldn’t learn on my own. He made the point that I could read novels without taking classes about them. So I decided to major in physics. But then I didn’t take the right courses freshman year, and only the math option was open for me. I was okay with that because I found math easy. If you understand what’s going on in math, you don’t have to memorize very much. Most of what you need to know follows logically from a few basic principles. And I like that math has a lot of gnarl—chaotic patterns that emerge from seeming order.

  When I finished college in 1967, I had the option of going to fight in Viet Nam or going to grad school, and I picked grad school. I’d been a very poor student in college, and I only had a C average. So I had some trouble getting into a PhD program. As it happened, I married my wife Sylvia the week after graduation, and Rutgers University was eager to have her enter their graduate French program. The French chairman put in a word with the math chairman, and they let me in. I ended up getting my doctorate at Rutgers, a PhD in mathematical logic. And by the time I was done, my average was more like an A than a C. I’d finally found some course material that interested me.