Collected Essays
Page 1
Table of Contents
Collected Essays
Introduction
Part 1: THE ART OF WRITING
A Transrealist Manifesto
What Is Cyberpunk?
Gnarly SF
Cyberpunk Lives!
The Freestyle Antifesto (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
What SF Writers Want
Against Mundane SF
Psipunk
Sex and Science Fiction
Chant to the Muse
Part 2: SILICON VALLEY
Welcome to Silicon Valley
Hacking Code
Five Flavors of Cyberspace
Cyberculture in Japan
Use Your Illusion: Kit-Bashing The Cosmic Matte
Robot Obstetric Wards
Goodbye Big Bang: Cosmologist Andrei Linde
Mr. Nanotech: Eric Drexler
Part 3: WEIRD SCREENS
Cellular Automata
Life and Artificial Life
A Note On Synthetic Biology
Mathematica: A New Golden Age of Calculation
How Flies Fly: Kappa Tau Curves
Spending Your Triangles
The Rudy Set Fractal
Part 4: FUTUROLOGY
Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel
Alien Contact (With Marc Laidlaw)
Phreak Scenes
Three Flip Answers
Edge Questions
New Futures in SF
Part 5: THE PHILOSOPHY OF COMPUTATION
A Brief History of Computers
Games, Intelligence, Enlightenment
Adventures In Gnarly Computation
Web Mind
Lifebox Immortality
Selling Your Personality
The Great Awakening
Everything Is Alive
An Incompleteness Theorem for the Natural World
Part 6: PERSONAL HISTORIES
Autobiographical Overview (2004)
Drugs and Live Sex, NYC 1980
Jerry’s Neighbors
Access To Tools
The Central Teachings of Mysticism
Memories of Arf
Bob’s Three Miracles And Me
Haunted by Phil Dick
Vision in Yosemite
The Mondo Edge
The Manual of Evasion
In Search of Bruegel
Part 7: MENTORS
Kurt Gödel
Martin Gardner
William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg
Robert Sheckley
Ivan Stang
Benoit Mandelbrot
Dialogue With Stephen Wolfram
Collected Essays
by Rudy Rucker
Transreal Books
Los Gatos, California
Collected Essays is Copyright © 2012 Rudy Rucker, with the individual pieces copyright to the authors. First edition, April, 2012, Transreal Books, Los Gatos, California.
This edition includes Rucker’s essays written from 1983-2012. The “Introduction” and the notes at the end of each essay describe the previous publications. Later editions of Collected Essays may expand to include further essays. Cover painting is “Da Nha Duc,” by Rudy Rucker.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9847585-2-4
www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbooks
Introduction
Collected Essays includes the nonfiction pieces from my two earlier collections, Transreal! (1991) and Seek! (1999). And I've added in my newer essays as well. One of the nice things about publishing ebooks is that you're not faced with the same length constraints as with printed books.
I'm grouping my collected essays into seven parts:
(1) The Art of Writing. Manifestos and talks about writing science-fiction.
(2) Silicon Valley. Cool scenes I witnessed as I rode the Silicon Valley computer wave.
(3) Weird Screens. Graphical programs that obsess me—cellular automata, artificial life, fractals, space curves, and virtual reality.
(4) Futurology. Playful raps and speculations about the coming times.
(5) The Philosophy of Computation. Where does it end? Immortality, artificial intelligence, and the birth of a universal mind?
(6) Personal Stories. At ease…stories I tell to friends.
(7) Mentors. Appreciations of great minds and wild freaks who've led me on.
Extra sources? More info on many of my topics can be found by searching Rudy's Blog.
My old software programs I mention are generally available for free download from my site.
And more of my books, such as Complete Stories, can be found on the Transreal Books page.
Part 1: THE ART OF WRITING
* * *
A Transrealist Manifesto
In this piece I would like to advocate a style of SF-writing that I call Transrealism. Transrealism is not so much a type of SF as it is a type of avant-garde literature. I feel that Transrealism is the only valid approach to literature at this point in history.
The Transrealist writes about immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. Any literature which is not about actual reality is weak and enervated. But the genre of straight realism is all burnt out. Who needs more straight novels? The tools of fantasy and SF offer a means to thicken and intensify realistic fiction. By using fantastic devices it is actually possible to manipulate subtext. The familiar tools of SF—time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc.—are in fact symbolic of archetypal modes of perception. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. This is the “Trans” aspect. The “realism” aspect has to do with the fact that a valid work of art should deal with the world the way it actually is. Transrealism tries to treat not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded.
The characters should be based on actual people. What makes standard genre fiction so insipid is that the characters are so obviously puppets of the author’s will. Actions become predictable, and in dialogue it is difficult to tell which character is supposed to be talking. In real life, the people you meet almost never say what you want or expect them to. From long and bruising contact, you carry simulations of your acquaintances around in your head. These simulations are imposed on you from without; they do not react to imagined situations as you might desire. By letting these simulations run your characters, you can avoid turning out mechanical wish-fulfillments. It is essential that the characters be in some sense out of control, as are real people—for what can anyone learn by reading about made-up people?
In a Transrealist novel, the author usually appears as an actual character, or his or her personality is divided among several characters. On the face of it, this sounds egotistical. But I would argue that to use oneself as a character is not really egotistical. It is a simple necessity. If, indeed, you are writing about immediate perceptions, then what point of view other than your own is possible? It is far more egotistical to use an idealized version of yourself, a fantasy-self, and have this para-self wreak its will on a pack of pliant slaves. The Transrealist protagonist is not presented as some super-person. A Transrealist protagonist is just as neurotic and ineffectual as we each know ourselves to be.
The Transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work. The Transrealist novel grows organically, like life itself. The author can only choose characters and setting, introduce this or that particular fantastic element, and aim for certain key scenes. Ideally, a Transrealist novel is written in obscurity, and without an outline. If the author knows precisely how his or her book will develop, then the reader will divine this. A predictable book is of no interest. Nevertheless, the book must be coherent. Granted, life
does not often make sense. But people will not read a book which has no plot. And a book with no readers is not a fully effective work of art. A successful novel of any sort should drag the reader through it. How is it possible to write such a book without an outline? The analogy is to the drawing of a maze. In drawing a maze, one has a start (characters and setting) and certain goals (key scenes). A good maze forces the tracer past all the goals in a coherent way. When you draw a maze, you start out with a certain path, but leave a lot a gaps where other paths can hook back in. In writing a coherent Transrealist novel, you include a number of unexplained happenings throughout the text. Things that you don’t know the reason for. Later you bend strands of the ramifying narrative back to hook into these nodes. If no node is available for a given strand-loop, you go back and write a node in (cf. erasing a piece of wall in the maze). Although reading is linear, writing is not.
Transrealism is a revolutionary art-form. A major tool in mass thought-control is the myth of consensus reality. Hand in hand with this myth goes the notion of a “normal person.”
There are no normal people—just look at your relatives, the people that you are in a position to know best. They’re all weird at some level below the surface. Yet conventional fiction very commonly shows us normal people in a normal world. As long as you labor under the feeling that you are the only weirdo, then you feel weak and apologetic. You’re eager to go along with the establishment, and a bit frightened to make waves—lest you be found out. Actual people are weird and unpredictable, this is why it is so important to use them as characters instead of the impossibly good and bad paperdolls of mass-culture.
The idea of breaking down consensus reality is even more important. This is where the tools of SF are particularly useful. Each mind is a reality unto itself. As long as people can be tricked into believing the reality of the 6:30 news, they can be herded about like sheep. The “president” threatens us with “nuclear war,” and driven frantic by the fear of “death” we rush out to “buy consumer goods.” When in fact, what really happens is that you turn off the TV, eat something, and go for a walk, with infinitely many thoughts and perceptions mingling with infinitely many inputs.
There will always be a place for the escape-literature of genre SF. But there is no reason to let this severely limited and reactionary mode condition all our writing. Transrealism is the path to a truly artistic SF.
* * *
Note on “A Transrealist Manifesto”
Written 1983.
Appeared in The Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, Winter, 1983.
“A Transrealist Manifesto” coins the word “transreal”. I thought of the word after seeing the phrase “transcendental autobiography” in a blurb on the cover of Phillip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Over the years, the word has achieved some currency in SF criticism, meriting a Wikipedia entry and a book by the writer/critic Damien Broderick, Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science (Greenwood Press, 2000).
What Is Cyberpunk?
Proximately, “cyberpunk” is a word coined by Gardner Dozois to describe the fiction of William Gibson. Gibson’s novel Neuromancer won the Science Fiction equivalent of the Triple Crown in 1985: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Phil Dick award. Obviously, a lot of SF writers would like to be doing whatever Gibson is doing right. At the 1985 National SF Convention in Austin there was a panel called “Cyberpunk.” From left to right, the panelists were me, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, a nameless “moderator,” Lew Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Bear. Gibson couldn’t make it; he was camping in Canada, and the audience was a bit disappointed to have to settle for pretenders to his crown. Sterling, author of the excellent Schismatrix, got a good laugh by announcing, “Gibson couldn’t make it today, he’s in Switzerland getting his blood changed.” Talking about cyberpunk without Gibson there made us all a little uncomfortable, and I thought of a passage in Gravity’s Rainbow, the quintessential cyberpunk masterpiece:
On Slothrop’s table is an old newspaper that appears to be in Spanish. It is open to a peculiar political cartoon of a line of middle-aged men wearing dresses and wigs, inside the police station where a cop is holding a loaf of white…no it’s a baby, with a label on its diaper sez La Revolucion…oh, they’re all claiming the infant revolution as their own, all these politicians bickering like a bunch of putative mothers…
SF convention panels normally consist of a few professional writers and editors telling old stories and deflecting serious questions with one-liners. Usually the moderator is a semi-professional, overwrought at being in public with so many SF icons, but bent on explaining his or her ideas about the panel topic which he or she has chosen. The pros try to keep the mike away from the moderator. The audience watches with the raptness of children gazing at television, and everyone has a good time. It’s a warm bath, a love-in. The cyberpunk panel was different. The panelists were crayfishing, the subnormal moderator came on like a raving jackal, and the audience, at least to my eyes, began taking on the look of a lynch mob. Here I’m finally asked to join a literary movement and everyone hates us before I can open my mouth?
What is it about punk?
Back in the ‘60s—now safe and cozy under a twenty-year blanket of consensus history—the basic social division was straight vs. hip, right vs. left, pigs ‘n’ freaks, feds ‘n’ heads. Spiro Agnew vs. Timothy Leary. It was a clear, simple gap that sparked and sputtered like a high-voltage carbon arc. The country was as close to civil war as it’s been in modern times. News commentators sometimes speak of this as a negative thing—burning cities, correct revolutionary actions, police riots—but there was a lot of energy there. ‘60s people think of the old tension as “good” in somewhat the same way that ‘40s people look back on the energy of WWII as “good.”
A simple dichotomy. But during the ‘70s times got tough, and all the ‘60s people got older. Madison Avenue turned hip into product. Businessmen got hot-tubs; and they weren’t necessarily faking—I know a number of present-day businessmen who are regular old-time acidheads, but…you’ve got to get the bread to send your kids to college, right? The gap between hip and straight is still there, but it’s faded, the jags have rubbed off.
If you’re young, you want to come up with something new—that’s how the race grows. Some ‘80s youngsters may want to be straights—our country will always need sports fans and prison guards—but the smart ones, the ones who ask hard questions, the same kids who would have been hippies in the ‘60s—these people needed some kind of stance that would bug all old people. Thus punk.
I used to live in the boonies, and LP records were my contact to what was happening. The only good music in the ‘70s was Zappa, and even he was getting old. I’ll never forget the excitement of the first punk records—the New York Dolls, Lou Reed, Patti Smith, Elvis Costello, and then…the Clash. Of course that was all eight years ago (which, these exponential days, is a long time). It keeps mutating. Now I listen to the Ramones, Detox, and the Butthole Surfers. “Yes, the Butthole Surfers.” Doesn’t that tell you more than, “Yes, the New Yorker?”
The real charm of punk is that stupid hippies dislike it as much as do stupid rednecks. “What’s the matter with them? What do they want?” Anyone who was ever a hippie for the right reasons—a hatred of conformity and a desire to break through to higher realities—is likely to appreciate and enjoy the punks. But a lot of basically conventional people slid through the ‘70s thinking of themselves as avant-garde, when in fact they were brain-dead. What’s good about punk is that it makes all of us question our comfortable assumptions and attitudes. Wait…look at that last sentence, and you can see I’m forty. How complacently I slip the “us” in there—trying to co-opt the revolution. How Life magazine of me, how plastic, how bullshit. What’s good about punk is that it’s fast and dense. It has a lot of information. Which brings us to “cyber.”
What is Cybernetics?
It’s the title of an incomprehensible book by Norbert Weine
r, mainly. Claude Shannon, the Bell Labs inventor of information theory, encouraged Weiner to use the word “cybernetics” because “No one knows what it means, Norbert, which will always put you at an advantage in an argument.” More seriously, if I talk about “cyber,” I really want to talk about the modern concept of information.
Mathematics can be thought of as based on five concepts: Number, Space, Logic, Infinity, and Information. The age of Number was the Middle Ages, with their nitpicking lists of sins and layers of heaven. Space was the Renaissance, with perspective and the printing press spreading copies out. Logic was the Industrial Revolution, with great steam engines chugging away like syllogistic inferences. Infinity was Modern Times, with quantum mechanics and LSD. Now we’re starting on Information. The computers are here, the cybernetic revolution is over.
What is information? Shannon measured information in “bits.” If someone answers a single yes-or-no question, they are giving you one bit of information. Two yes/no questions are two bits. Two bits is enough to distinguish among four possibilities: 00, 01, 10, and 11. The game of Twenty Questions is based on the asker being able to get twenty bits of information out of the answerer. Twenty bits distinguishes among 220 possibilities—about a million. For Shannon, the more possible answers there are, the greater is the information. He estimated written English as carrying about seven bits per word, meaning that if a random word is excised from a text, you can usually guess it by asking seven yes-or-no questions. “Is it a noun?” “Does it begin with one of the letters A through L?” “Is it used elsewhere on this page?” “Is it cat?” In a crap genre book, generated by a low-complexity intelligence with a very short runtime, the information per word is going to be low, maybe as low as three or four bits. In a high-complexity work the information per word will be higher.
Two mathematicians named Chaitin (IBM) and Kolmogorov (USSR) improved Shannon’s notion of information to this: the information in a pattern P is equal to the length of the shortest computer program that can generate P. This quantity, also known as algorithmic complexity, can be defined quite precisely and rigorously. If I find that a certain SF novel about cats in outer space stupid and boring, it may not just be that I don’t like cats. It may be that the book really is stupid and boring, as can be witnessed by the fact that the book has a very low information-theoretic complexity.