Transreal Cyberpunk

by Rudy Rucker

  Could we even imagine such a person? A placid sage who calms Krakens? Maybe the Kraken is his sidekick, an entity he can pat on the head!

  Keen to tackle this creative challenge, I envisioned a protagonist rather like the late-in-life Vaclav Havel. Not the dramatic, street-rally, revolutionary hippie Vaclav Havel of 1989, but the wise but waning, been-there-done-that narrator of the little-known Havel book “To the Castle and Back.” This is certainly the best memoir ever written by a guy who was once a nation’s President. There’s no politicized frenzy, special-pleading or moral chest-beating in Havel’s final book. It’s all about furniture, state dinners, press coverage, how to dress, scheduling problems, over-booking the state helicopter, the stuff of lived presidential experience. It’s a severely unromantic and super-convincing text. I was pretty sure I could steal a lot of it and no one would know.

  So we created a draft that was basically about a guy like the elderly Havel—he’s very hip, but he can no longer be much bothered, he just sees right through the technicolor sci-fi bluster. Giant jellyfish, huge ants, Soviet UFOs, he knows these wacky advents just come and go in the long run. However, well, that story was boring. Rudy couldn’t put up with it, the narrative was too dull. And he was right, because it was passionless, very gray ink-wash. It read like a respectful obituary.

  Something had to be done to get this monochrome text off its sickbed, so we hauled in the defibrillators and the electroshock cables. First Rudy vividly tore it up with some Burroughs cut-and-paste sampling. Then I cut all the fat and gristle out of it and violently squeezed it into a Ballard condensed novel.

  The story survived these devastating attacks, but it became mighty hectic and bedraggled. Oddly, this made the story feel very 2015 AD: it became an authentically contemporary work. “Kraken and Sage” features grinding low-level aerial warfare. Industrial and ecological catastrophes. Obvious charlatans with all the wealth and power. Scientists as a victim class. And some mud monsters, because, well, mud monsters.

  “When you cut up the present, the future leaks out.” “Earth is the only truly alien planet.” When you’re a science fiction writer, you need to pretty well throw the bread way out on the water. Once the seas rise, you never know what oozy relic will be left to a wondering mankind: floating on the slow blue waves out there, or half-buried in the dark and muddy shore.

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction by Rob Latham

  Storming the Cosmos

  Notes on “Storming the Cosmos”

  Big Jelly

  Notes on “Big Jelly”

  Junk DNA

  Notes on “Junk DNA”

  Hormiga Canyon

  Notes on “Hormiga Canyon”

  Colliding Branes

  Notes on “Colliding Branes”

  Good Night, Moon

  Notes on “Good Night, Moon”

  Loco

  Notes on “Loco”

  Totem Poles

  Notes on “Totem Poles”

  Kraken and Sage

  Notes on “Kraken and Sage”