Collected Essays

by Rucker, Rudy

  My doctoral work was in set theory, the branch of mathematical logic which deals with different levels of infinity. I delighted in studying this field as to me it felt like mathematical theology—and I still had my fascination with mysticism. This interest was brought to a head on Memorial Day in 1970, when a friend appeared at our doorstep with a dose of LSD for me. He himself had taken the drug the day before, and hadn’t enjoyed the effects. But despite his warning, I took my medicine, eager to be a true part of the Sixties. There was no evading the ego-death. My mind blew like an overamped light-bulb, and I was immersed in white light. God. The One. “I’m always here, Rudy,” a voice told me. “I’ll always love you.” I never really recovered from that experience—and I mean this in a good way. For one thing, my fear of death was greatly reduced.

  There wasn’t much point taking psychedelics again. Although I made one or two half-hearted attempts, drugs would never again get me to that same place of transcendent illumination. But I’m expecting to see the White Light again on my death bed.

  Another big Sixties thing was the politics. Our elected government was very seriously bent on sending me and my friends to die in Viet Nam. What with a student deferment, a fortunate lottery number, and a faked asthma attack, I didn’t find it terribly hard to dodge the draft. And of course that made me a traitor and a bad citizen. It broke my heart to see less-fortunate guys my age being slaughtered. Underground comics seemed perfectly to capture the doomed, drugged spirit of the day. I was a passionate devotee of Zap Comix and the work of R. Crumb. With the government out to kill us, there seemed no longer any reason to be civil or respectful towards the establishment’s values.

  The high point of my graduate studies at Rutgers had to do with the campus’s proximity to Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study, where the reclusive genius logician Kurt Gödel was in residence. All of the most fascinating and difficult results I was studying bore Gödel’s imprint, and I thought of him as a supreme guru. I was doing some interesting, although not earth-shaking, work in set theory, and I’d given a talk at Rutgers on a recent unpublished manuscript of Gödel’s that purported to solve the century old Cantor’s Continuum Problem about different degrees of infinity.

  My thesis adviser Erik Ellentuck was visiting at the Institute, and I was attending a set theory seminar there. I’d applied for a post-doctorate position at the Institute, and Gödel invited me to come in for a conversation with him. Meeting Gödel was a very big deal for me, a blessing, a stroke of good fortune—the initiate’s journey to the Master’s cave. I’ve never since been in the presence of so overwhelmingly great a mind. I wrote in some detail about our encounters in my non-fiction book Infinity and the Mind, and Gödel inspired the character G. Kurtowski in my novel Spacetime Donuts.

  Two effects of meeting Gödel were that I was emboldened to take mystical philosophy quite seriously and that I began studying Einstein’s work on relativity theory—Gödel had interests in both these fields. Gödel strongly believed that the perceived passage of time is an illusion, that we are in fact eternal patterns in spacetime. Like my vision of the White Light, this teaching also reduced my anxiety about death.

  Although Gödel enjoyed talking with me, and let me visit him again, I didn’t get a post-doc at the Institute. I was bitterly disappointed. And finding a teaching job proved difficult. My thesis work, although publishable, wasn’t compelling enough to land me a position as a high-powered logician; and for more general kinds of teaching jobs, my expertise in the rarified field of mathematical logic was not an asset. I received exactly one job offer: assistant professor of mathematics at what was then called the State University College at Geneseo, New York.

  In 1972, Sylvia and I settled into Geneseo with our two young children, and soon we were blessed with Isabel, our third child. Initially we rented a small house at 41 Oak Street, which would later be a setting for my novel White Light. The costs of living were low enough that we could live off my salary, with Sylvia spending most of her time with the kids. In some ways this was a difficult time for her—filled with isolation and chores. In other ways it was a good time; the children were wonderful to be with, and she got deeply involved in painting. Sylvia developed a special sharp-edged, cartoony style, colored in warm tones. We were proud when she had a hanging of her works in one of the local business’s windows. The college-town aspect of tiny Geneseo meant that we had a full social life, with none of our new friends living more than two or three blocks away.

  One of the courses I taught at Geneseo was called Foundations of Geometry. The standard textbooks for the course seemed boring to me, and I developed the notion of writing up my own notes on the fourth dimension to use as a text. I think that, having spent five years studying mathematical logic and the related philosophical field known as the foundations of mathematics, the word “Foundations” in the course title served like a checkered flag to me, a signal to start my engine and step on the gas.

  I’d first heard about the fourth dimension in high-school from my friend Niles, who lent me a library copy of Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. As chance would have it, Pop bought me a copy of this same book in paperback at the Swarthmore drugstore at the start of my freshman year. I’d read a number of science-fiction stories that mentioned the fourth dimension—I think particularly of the classic mathematical SF tales that appeared in the Clifton Fadiman-edited volumes Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie. Under Gödel’s influence, I’d been reading books on relativity theory. And I was wondering how to reconcile the notion of the fourth dimension as an odd unknown spatial direction with the notion of the fourth dimension as time. While at Rutgers, I’d begun trying to work out some ideas about the fourth dimension in a special notebook, mostly by means of drawings. I recall showing my 4D notes to my father. He was puzzled. “Where are you going with this?”

  In the period 1973 to 1976, I expanded and rewrote my 4D notes to use as handouts for the Foundations of Geometry course, under the working title, Geometry and Reality. At first I mimeographed the notes for the students, and then, as I got more organized, I had the Geneseo bookstore photo-offset the notes and sell them as a text. The students seemed to enjoy my little volume, so I showed it to some of the textbook salesmen who haunt a professor’s office.

  Their companies deemed my book too quirky, too popularized, too untextbooklike. But now I’d gotten the publishing blood-lust. I hit on the idea of sending my book off to the publisher that was keeping in print so many of the esoteric mathematical and philosophical books that I enjoyed: Dover Books. Back in Louisville, Mom had regularly ordered Dover books for me on all sorts of obscure topics.

  Dover quickly agreed to publish my book, suggesting only that I give it a title more indicative of the contents. So it became Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension. Eager to cloak my shaggy young self with academic respectability, I identified myself to my unseen editors as “Professor Rudolf v. B. Rucker.” They paid me, I believe, a thousand dollars for perpetual rights to publish the book. This struck me as real money. Although I was also getting a couple of my set theory papers in print, academic publishing was slow going, with no sense of there being an actual readership, and with no checks in the mail. The idea of being paid to write popular science books seemed very good to me.

  Shortly after Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension was published, a woman editor from Dover turned up at my door. She was in Geneseo to deliver one of her children to the college. She was surprised how young I was; the “Rudolf v. B. Rucker” ruse had convinced the Dover editors that I must be an aging, German-accented scholar. We had a good laugh, and she remarked that mine was one of the few non-public-domain books that Dover was publishing. “We have a saying at Dover,” she said. “The only good author is a dead author.”

  I’d never lost sight of my dream of being a literary author, and all the while in Geneseo I was writing poems, my way of wading into the field. David Kelly, a poet-in-residence at SUNY Geneseo was an encouraging
influence. We often partied together in traditional bohemian style. Another influence during this period was the poetry of Anselm Hollo, whom Greg had told me about. I never bothered sending my poems out to magazines, but I’d join in the periodic faculty poetry readings, handing out my works in mimeographed form.

  In 1976, Sylvia and I went to see the Rolling Stones play outdoors at the Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York. It was the Stones’s Bicentennial Tour. Given that the Stones have been touring ever since, it’s a little hard to remember how important they seemed back then, how of-the-moment, how radical. I almost wept to see Mick and Keith in person—two leaders I was willing to follow, two public figures in whom I could believe. The day after the concert I was so energized that I sat down at my red IBM Selectric typewriter and started writing a beatnik science fiction novel: Spacetime Donuts.

  I composed the book in the style of my father telling a story after a meal: I made it up as I went along. But I had a particular science idea to present, and this guided my journey. The idea was that if you shrank to a small enough size, you’d end up being bigger than our galaxy. The notion of finding galaxies within our atoms is of course something of a cliché. But my notion of bending the size scale into a circle was more unexpected. I hesitate to say that I was the first to suggest the notion of circular scale as, over the years, I’ve found that essentially every possible idea can be found somewhere in a pre-existing piece of genre science fiction—the corpus of SF is our own homegrown Library of Babel.

  Spacetime Donuts included another element, the notion of a cadre of people able to plug their minds directly into their society’s Big Computer. This in some ways prefigured William Gibson’s epochal novel Neuromancer, in which console cowboys jack their brains into a planetary computer net called cyberspace. Another overlap with what came to be called cyberpunk SF was that the characters of Spacetime Donuts took drugs, had sex, listened to rock and roll, and were enemies of the establishment. The early sections of Spacetime Donuts were loosely based on my experiences in graduate school, and the hero’s love interest was modeled on Sylvia.

  I was initially unable to sell Spacetime Donuts as a book, but there was a new SF magazine called Unearth which was willing to serialize it. And so I was off and running as a real science fiction writer. It was an incredible rush to see my name on the lurid cover of a digest-sized pulp magazine.

  The economy was in a recession at this time, and Geneseo was eager to eliminate faculty positions. Some of the senior math faculty disliked me—I probably had the longest hair of any professor on campus; I’d allied myself with our chairman, who was embroiled in a losing departmental power struggle; and I had a bad habit of too openly speaking my mind. The fact that my Geometry course notes were being published as a book gained me no traction, and my fledgling science-fiction success was but a provocation. In 1978, I was out of my first job.

  Providentially, I was offered a visiting position at the Mathematics Institute at the University of Heidelberg, funded by a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. I was perpetually applying for grants in those days, and this one happened to score. My research was to be on the same Cantor’s Continuum Problem that I’d discussed with Kurt Gödel.

  Age 33, in Zermatt with Sylvia, son Rudy and daughter Georgia.

  So Sylvia, Georgia, Rudy, Isabel and I decamped to Germany. We were anxious; I remember Georgia asking me, “Do they have Halloween in Germany?” and I told her, “Every day is Halloween in Germany.” In a kidding way, of course, not in a mean way. I liked pretending to trick the kids, and letting them figure out the joke. For instance, later, when we lived in Lynchburg, I told them that Jerry Lewis and Jerry Falwell were the same man, only wearing different makeup and clothes. I loved hanging around with the kids, talking with them, sharing in their wonderfully fresh view of things, getting down on their level. To me, they were better company than grown-ups.

  When we got to Germany, it turned out that Gert Müller, my grant supervisor, was very laissez-faire. He gave me a nice quiet office in the modern building of the Mathematics Institute and told me to do whatever I liked. I worked away on Cantor’s Continuum Problem for a few months, reading most of Cantor’s philosophical writings in German. But sometime early in 1979 I despaired of making any mathematical progress and wrote the novel White Light instead. And I gave it a subtitle lifted from a paper by Kurt Gödel: What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem? As I recall, I started writing the book in longhand while I was alone with the kids for a long weekend, with Sylvia visiting relatives in Budapest.

  White Light was my first book written fully in what I came to call my transreal style. That is, the novel described, more or less accurately, my life as an indifferently successful academic at a small college in upstate New York. That was the “real” part. The “trans” part was that my character, Felix Rayman, leaves his body and journeys to a land where Cantor’s infinities are as common as rocks and plants. I fused Beat autobiography, science-fictional adventuring, and science-popularizing mathematical rigor. The book’s title was, of course drawn from my memorable acid trip. Other influences were the Donald Duck and Zap comics that I loved so well—White Light has both a chapter featuring Donald and his nephews, and a chapter where objects start talking, as they sometimes do in R. Crumb strips.

  I finished the manuscript for White Light late in 1979, and after a few false starts, I managed to place it with Ace Books in the US, and Virgin Books in England. I made the Virgin connection by attending my first science-fiction convention, Seacon in Brighton—recall that I was living in Heidelberg at the time. The atmosphere at mathematics conferences had always been rather frosty. There weren’t enough jobs to go around, and newcomers weren’t particularly welcome. But the science-fiction folks were, like, “the more the merrier.” It was great. Some guys from London got me high on hashish, I met a man who was editing a new line of books for the Virgin record company, and I got my hands on a copy of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly—a hilarious, sorrowful transreal masterpiece.

  In 1983, I’d describe my ideas about this new way to write science fiction in an essay, “A Transrealist Manifesto,” which appeared in the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America. The word “transreal” was in fact inspired by a blurb on the back of my Seacon copy of A Scanner Darkly to the effect that Phil Dick had written “a transcendental autobiography.”

  Over the years, I’d write several transreal books rather directly based on my life, and even the more freely-invented books would often use characters and scenes inspired by the people I knew and the things I saw. Case in point: Dennis Poague, the younger brother of my friend Lee Poague, a fellow untenured professor at Geneseo. Dennis was a wildman, a free spirit who always said exactly what he was thinking. He was relatively uneducated, but he had a brilliant, undisciplined mind. In some ways he was my Neal Cassady, serving as inspiration for the character Sta-Hi Mooney who appeared in my next novel, Software. The theme behind Software was that one might be able to extract a person’s personality from their brain, and it might then be possible to run the extracted human software on some fresh hardware, for instance on a robot resembling the person’s former body.

  I finished Software during the second year of my grant at Heidelberg, and had no trouble selling this to Ace Books as well. The world software was new in the early 1980s, and my idea of copying a person onto a robot was fresh as well. The book gained power from the intensity of its father/son themes and from the colorful anarchism of my robot characters, whom I called “boppers,” and endowed with bizarre Beat rhythms of speech. The book has an unforgettable cyberpunk scene where some sleazy biker types are about to cut off the top of a guy’s skull and eat his brain while he’s still alive. In 1982, Software was honored with the first Philip K. Dick prize for the best paperback novel of the year. To this day, people tell me that I’m Phil’s legitimate heir, and that my SF has that same off-kilter, subversive quality that Phil’s did.

  Given how many Dick-based movies th
ere are, it’s seems possible that one of my books might eventually be filmed. Indeed, in the Nineties, Software was under option to Phoenix Pictures for ten years, and went through ten scripts. But the film was never made. Some other books of mine are also under option, but I try not to put much emotional energy into speculating about what Hollywood might or might not do with my work. If a film is ever made, great, but there’s no point letting a long-shot dream dominate my life.

  While in Heidelberg I also started a non-fiction book entitled Infinity and the Mind, dealing with some of the same issues as two Heidelberg SF novels. I’ve often worked by alternating between writing science fiction and writing popular science. Since I tend to invent new things in my popular science rather than simply repeating what’s well-known, there’s a nice interplay with the thought-experiments of my science fiction.

  With my grant expiring, it was time to find another job in the U. S. Once again, I received but one job offer, this time from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sylvia, the kids and I were happy to be back in the States, but the Lynchburg of 1980 took some readjustment. For one thing, it was the home town of the then-famous TV evangelist Jerry Falwell. Far from being populated by beatniks, hippies and university types, Lynchburg seemed filled with rednecks and preppies. There were but three people in the Mathematics Department, and the chairman and I never saw eye to eye. He disliked that I didn’t collect and grade homework on a daily basis, and after two years, I was out of that job as well.

  What with getting fired from two jobs in a row, I had a lot of punk sentiment; indeed, for a very brief time, some other terminated faculty and I formed a punk rock band called The Dead Pigs. I was the singer, even though I can’t really sing—but I can’t play any instruments either. It was exciting, and fun to be doing something non-intellectual for a change. But, as per usual with punk bands, we self-destructed fairly fast. I was unhappy and Sylvia was unhappy too. It was a tough time, an emotional low point.