The Ware Tetralogy
Page 100
In 1995, I’d been laid off from my programming job, but I was still a computer science professor at San Jose State University, south of San Francisco. A year had gone by with no novel even started, and now it was time to get back on the One True Path. I decided to return to the world of Software and Wetware, and I began work on Freeware, which would eventually appear in 1997.
I sometimes write well when I don’t feel particularly creative. On a given day, it can be good if I’m just doggedly trying to finish the next scene of another goddamn novel. If I feel like I’m crafting a masterwork, the language is more likely to get away from me. When nothing is at stake, I’m free to go wild with the effects and have my characters say brutally honest things—without losing control. I develop a deadpan, surreal tone that I think of as writing degree zero.
The meaning of “freeware” in my novel is that, throughout the universe, alien minds are traveling from world to world in the form of compressed information files—akin to the files you might download from the web. When these rays strike a sufficiently rich computational object, the object may wake up—and begin emulating the alien mind.
In Freeware there are indeed a lot of computationally dense objects on Earth—these are descendants of the Software boppers, whose minds now inhabit soft bodies made of gnarly, mold-infested piezoplastic. I really liked the idea of having flexible, slug-like robots that stink—as different as possible from the standard images of machine-men. The form of the moldies had a lot to do with the computer science research I’d been doing on chaos and on cellular automata.
My old character Sta-Hi is an ex-senator in Freeware—by now he calls himself Stahn. Due to various mishaps, Stahn’s wife Wendy has her personality living in a piezoplastic ruff that she wears on her neck. And Stahn’s drug and alcohol problems are seriously messing him up.
While I was writing Freeware in 1995, I was seeing a lot of my artist and cartoonist friend Paul Mavrides. Mavrides had created a number of images for a parodistic cult called the Church of the SubGenius, which has a not-quite-divinity called “Bob,” always spelled with the quotes. The Church, which manages to get people to mail in donations, is a complex, interactive bit of dada art—or rather “bulldada,” as they would have it.
More recently, Mavrides had taken to painting on black velvet. But he wasn’t painting Elvis, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or dogs playing cards. He was painting the Kennedy assassination, the bodies at Jonestown, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS virus, and cockroaches.
Mavrides was a saturnine, puckish character, a little younger than me, and in some ways an inspiration for my character Corey Rhizome—although I hasten to add that Paul doesn’t share most of Corey’s bad traits. I thought of Paul as an old-school beatnik, with his finely honed sense of the absurd and his espresso-dark cynicism. I liked taking a day off and driving up to San Francisco to hang in his studio, often smoking pot, later going out with him for coffee or tapas on nearby Valencia Street. During those peaceful afternoons, if we were in the mood, I’d read Paul the latest chapter of my novel-in-progress while he painted. A writer reading new work to his artist pal—that felt like the way life should be.
In January, 1997, I decided to write another Ware book, this one to be called Realware, with part of it set in the South Pacific island kingdom of Tonga, which my wife and I had recently visited. Realware continues along the thread I followed throughout the Ware series, that is, the process of expanding the range of things that we might regard as being conscious patterns of information. Ten years later, I’d push my expanding-consciousness thread yet another notch further in my pair of novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, in which ordinary, unprogrammed matter comes to life.
I structured Realware as a pair of love stories—I’d come to feel that it’s a good idea to have romance at the heart of a novel. I also included a scene with my main character hugging his estranged father and seeing him off to something like Heaven. And old Cobb himself achieves an apotheosis as well. In writing these scenes, I felt as if I were partially laying to rest the specter of a painful argument I’d had with my father the last time I’d seen him, shortly before his death in 1994. One of the virtues of writing is that you get to revise your past.
I was happy with how Realware came out, I felt it had good tightness and focus. But by now I felt like I’d pushed the series as far as I could—although I do sometimes wonder what kinds of adventures Cobb had with the Metamartians in their flying saucer. I got the idea for the very last line of the Ware Tetralogy from Sylvia.
One of my other recent writing projects has been an autobiography, with the working title Nested Scrolls, slated to appear from PS Publishing and from Forge Books in 2011. Much of the material in this afterword is in fact drawn from my memoir. So seek out Nested Scrolls if you want to know what else I’ve been doing for all these years. And for ongoing information, you can always check my blog, www.rudyrucker.com/blog.
I’m very happy to see my Wares in one volume like this, and to reach a new generation of readers. Enjoy the adventures—and seek the gnarl.
—26 April, 2010, Los Gatos
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as a contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice—for his novels Software and Wetware. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. He lives in Los Gatos, California. See his page www.rudyrucker.com for more information.
OTHER BOOKS BY RUDY RUCKER
Novels
Hylozoic
Postsingular
Mathematicians in Love
Frek and the Elixir
Spaceland
As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel
Realware
Saucer Wisdom
Freeware
The Hacker and the Ants
The Hollow Earth
Wetware
The Secret of Life
Master of Space and Time
The Sex Sphere
Software
White Light
Spacetime Donuts
Non-fiction
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
Software Engineering and Computer Games
All The Visions
Mind Tools
The Fourth Dimension
Infinity and the Mind
Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension
Collections
Mad Professor
Gnarl!
Seek!
Transreal!
The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka