by Rudy Rucker
One character, called Cobb Anderson, would be an old man modeled on my father in his current state. To some extent I could project myself into this character too. For all our disagreements over the years, Pop and I never were all that different. Another factor in my writing about Pop was that I was in some sense trying to inoculate myself against ending up like him—besotted, afraid of death, and on the run from the family.
The other character in my novel was a young guy called Sta-Hi Mooney. After all these years, I wanted finally to develop a character based on my wild and wacky friend Dennis Poague—the guy who used to turn up in Geneseo to visit his big brother Lee who was teaching there. What I liked about Dennis was that he seemed to have no internal censor. He always said exactly what he was thinking. He was relatively uneducated, but he had a fanciful mind, and a hipster, motor-mouth style of speech.
In the opening scene, Cobb is sitting on a beach in Florida, drinking sherry, and he’s approached by his double. At first I thought I was writing a time-travel novel, but then I hit on the notion that Cobb’s double should in fact be a robot copy of him.
To make this work, I developed the idea that it will become possible to extract a person’s personality from their brain, and that it will then be possible to run the extracted human software on some fresh hardware—and why not have the hardware be a robot resembling the person’s former body!
Software. In 1979, this was a technical and little-known word—I’d picked it up from an article in the Scientific American. I decided to use it for the title of my book. I finished Software near the end of our stay in Heidelberg, in the summer of 1980, and I had no trouble selling it to Susan Allison, the pleasant and intelligent woman who’d taken over from Jim Baen as the science fiction editor at Ace Books.
My idea of copying a person onto a robot was a fresh concept in those days, and my book gained power from the intensity of its father/son themes and from the colorful anarchism of my robot characters, whom I called “boppers.” Also I had some over-the-top scenes of which I was proud. At one point, some sleazy biker types are about to cut off the top of Sta-Hi’s skull and eat his brain while he’s still alive. They wanted to extract the software, you understand.
I do recall that Susan Allison got me to take out a scene in which the stoned Sta-Hi takes a shit in the ocean while he’s swimming. “Excise the turd,” was the way she put it. Why would I even write a scene like that? I guess I thought it was funny—and a fresh way to outrage any straitlaced readers. But there were plenty of other outrageous things in the book.
Regarding the computer-science theme of the book, although I knew all about the theory of computation from my studies of mathematical logic, I didn’t know jack about real-world computers—we SF writers very often don’t know the technical details of what we’re talking about. In terms of my teaching career, I could see the wave of computer science starting to build, but I didn’t quite know how to get onto it. The only way to access a machine was to use a text terminal with its nasty, inscrutable protocols—or to feed a deck of punched programming cards to a giant machine in a basement.
An oddly anachronistic thing about Software is that, in those years, I couldn’t imagine there being a really small computing device with the power of a human brain. So, instead of giving my Cobb-emulating robot a supercomputer that could fit inside this bopper’s skull, I had the Cobbrobot’s brain be a big supercooled clunker that follows the robot around in the back of a refrigerated van that’s disguised as a Mr. Frostee truck. But that’s okay. It makes the book more fun. And, at a deeper level, the brain in the truck is nice concrete symbol for an organization which maintains complete control over its agents.
Near the end of our stay in Heidelberg, I did take a programming course involving an old-school language called PL/I. I managed to punch a deck of cards that would emulate a Universal Turing Machine. This meant that my deck could emulate any possible computation, provided you added a supplemental deck of punch cards to describe the computation you wanted to emulate. I was amused by the self-referential aspect of my project. And now I could tell my job interviewers that I knew a little computer science.
There was no way to stretch out my grant any further than 1980. I made some attempts to find a teaching job in Germany, but that didn’t work. I had to face the music and once again look for a math professor job in the US.
I flew back for a series of job interviews and, in the end, I received but one job offer, from a place called Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, known as R-MWC for short. They had a three-person math department.
The R-MWC math department chairman was a plump, uptight guy a couple of years younger than me. From the very start we felt zero empathy towards each other. My first thought upon seeing him at the Lynchburg airport was, “This is a terrible mistake.”
But I made a good impression on the Dean and the President, and I gave a very well-received demonstration lecture, a highly polished, low-level presentation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem—which I’d been thinking about for years. The professors other than the math chairman loved my lecture, and it could be that they pressured him into hiring me.
And so my family and I moved back to the U.S. In the summer of 1980, with a job in hand, Sylvia and I bought a car and a house in about a week. It was exhilarating to find America’s bigness still in place. And, ah, the supermarkets! Outside a Winn-Dixie in Louisville, we two had a moment of ecstasy, hearing the Beatles “Back in the USSR” on the radio.
We’d enjoyed our time in Germany, but were glad to be back in our native culture where we more or less knew what was going on. The children were gung-ho for diving back into American life. And moving to Virginia sounded like fun.
Lynchburg?
Lynchburg, Virginia, was the home town of the infamous TV evangelist Jerry Falwell. His supporters mostly lived in a different part of town from our part, which was near the college. People seemed to dress very strangely in our neighborhood. You’d see women in lime-green skirts and hot-pink blouses patterned with little white whales.
We couldn’t decide if it was a time-warp or a space-warp, that is, whether people looked like this everywhere in America in 1980, or whether they’d always looked this way in Lynchburg.
“It’s the preppy look,” Georgia told us.
This use of the word was new to me. “Preppy means tweedy,” I protested. “Like button-down shirts.”
“You’re old and out of it,” she scolded. “You’re groovy!” In her new circle of friends, groovy was a word of extreme opprobrium.
Many of the students at Randolph-Macon wore Add-A-Bead necklaces, with a few more gold beads added to the chain after each holiday with their parents. Of course, given that I was teaching math classes, there were a few bright and enthusiastic faces. But overall I couldn’t relate to my students very well.
I’d been listening to the Blondie song, “I’m Not Living in the Real World,” and I quoted the title line to my calculus class. A stern young woman impatiently asked, “Then where are you living?” There was no way to explain.
I’d only been teaching there about three months when the chairman told me that he wanted to fire me.
“You can’t do that,” I implored. “I just moved my whole family here. We bought a house. Why do you want to fire me?”
“You haven’t been collecting homework. Some of the students told me.”
“I’ll collect homework, I will, I promise.”
“It’s not enough just to do it, Rudy. You have to want to do it.”
I buckled down and started collecting homework, and the chairman backed off—for a time.
Early in 1981, I finally finished putting together my popular book about logic and set theory. By now I’d accumulated a great mass of material, both in the form of course notes and in the form of academic papers I’d been publishing in various offbeat journals. My final insight about how to structure my book came to me while I was at, of all things, a religious retreat.
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Jerry Falwell’s Thomas Roads Baptist Church cast a shadow across all of Lynchburg. One of the first things people would ask when they met you was where you went to church. There were stories that on Sunday mornings Jerry’s people would send vans into the residential neighborhoods, luring children with promises of cake and fun, so as to ferry them to Jerry’s church for a session of his Sunday school.
We warned our children never to get into one of Jerry’s vans. And to be really safe, we began attending the local Episcopal church—which was only a block or two from our house. They had a young minister there named Rich Jones who was a good guy—he and his wife had two kids the ages of Georgia and Rudy, and we often hung out together. Rich talked me into attending this religious retreat to be held at a lodge in the Blue Ridge Mountains, some forty miles away. Sylvia was stuck staying home with the kids.
I was in a state of mental crisis, trying to switch over from being a free-living expatriate science fiction writer to being a plodding pedagogue in a conservative Southern town. The dinkiness and smarminess of Randolph-Macon was oppressive—the tiny campus felt like a stage set, a dollhouse, a heap of pink faces and wriggling arms. The students paid a hefty tuition, and there was an unspoken understanding that we faculty were to think of ourselves as servants. One night they even made us act as croupiers at a Casino Night for the girls and their dates. Ugh.
It was a horrible job, but I couldn’t find a better one. My only hope for escape lay in my writing, not that the advances I’d gotten for my first two novels were anywhere near being enough to support a family. But maybe, if I could just twist my mind around into the right configuration, I could write a best-seller.
At the Blue Ridge retreat, I quickly tired of the break-out groups and the uplifting chalk-talks. I skeeved off and went walking in the mountains, part of me looking into myself, part of me reaching outward in search of the White Light. When you get down to it, Nature’s always been the real church for me. Yes, there’s something soothing about praying or singing with a group of people. But I always feel closer to the Absolute when I’m outdoors.
The practical pay-off from the retreat was that I came up with a chapter outline for my nonfiction book and, come to think of it, the title, Infinity and the Mind. This would in fact turn out to be my best-selling book.
As I write this memoir, there’s over half a million copies of Infinity and the Mind in print, in nine different languages, with a new English edition out from Princeton University Press—who published monographs by Einstein and Gödel. But somehow the success of the book came at such a slow and gradual pace that I never did get any large amount of money at any one time.
In the summer of 1981 my little family and I took a road trip from Lynchburg to the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Naropa was the brain-child of a Tibetan guru called the Rimpoche, who’d brought his followers there. The Rimpoche was close to Allen Ginsberg. Along with the poet Anne Waldman, Allen had started up a heavily beatnik literary program at Naropa, including lectures and workshops. In memory of the deceased king of the Beats, they called it “The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics.”
I had a mathematician friend, Newcomb Greenleaf, who happened to be a follower of the Rimpoche, and he got me invited out there to give some lectures Rather than being there in my role as an SF writer, I was to talk about the philosophical One/Many Problem, as filtered through the concepts of set theory and mathematical logic. We’d get a free apartment and a little money.
It was our family’s first drive out West, and we loved it. We five squeezed into our station wagon, making a special cushioned area in the way-back that we called the Pig’s Nest. The big thrill for me was, of course, to meet my beatnik heroes, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, who were on the summer program as well.
It was amazing to see Burroughs giving his talk, dressed in his invariable suit and tie, reading his lecture in a bone-dry voice. Allen Ginsberg was in the background, saintly and helpful, adjusting the windows, the mike, and the chairs. There were only about twenty people in the audience, and they’d allotted quite a bit of time for questions, so I posed the Master a few.
“You seem so serious today,” I said. “Do you laugh when you’re writing?”
He gave a thin, sly smile. “I might. If it’s funny.”
“Do you have any good SF ideas on how to send yourself into outer space without using rockets?” I asked.
“Go as a virus,” answered Burroughs.. “Code your information into a bug that others catch,”
“You used to say the word is a virus,” I pressed. “Would you say that a writer reproduces personality-software in a virus-like fashion so that, later on, readers embody the writer’s mind?”
“That’s why they call us the immortals.”
This was great stuff. And I even got to press a paperback copy of White Light into Bill’s hands. “Far out,” he said.
Later I’d use Burroughs’s notion of making your personality into a communicable virus in at least three of my novels: Freeware, Saucer Wisdom, and Hylozoic. And for that matter, the idea lies at the heart of my non-fiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. I kept the trope new by implementing it in a different way each time.
Sylvia and I made friends with a pair of Naropa tai-chi teachers and grant-writers—Bataan and his wife Jane. Bataan seemed always to be high, armed with a pint of brandy and a pipe of weed. I remember him telling Sylvia and me his vision of reality: “Life is a river. A long and winding river.”
One night my family and I went for dinner at Bataan and Jane’s. We were deep into loud African pop music, laughing it up.
“Let’s do a hot-tub,” proposed Jane.
I was happy at the prospect of getting into a hot-tub—I don’t think I’d ever even seen one before. But no way were our three kids about to undress with drunk grown-ups. And the modest Sylvia wasn’t into the concept either. They left me alone at Bataan and Jane’s and went back to our temporary apartment. Meanwhile I started bragging to my hosts about what a great novelist I was going to be—a beatnik SF writer.
So Jane said, “Well, we’ll tell Allen to come over.” And the next thing I knew, Ginsberg was there.
Allen and shared a joint. I was babbling about having read “Howl” aloud with Niles with Louisville, and how much it had meant to me—but of course he’d heard that routine a zillion times. He perked up when I starting talking about beatnik science fiction.
Emboldened, I burst out, “What I want from you, Allen, after being hung-up on the Beats all these years, what I want is your blessing.”
And real fast Allen whapped his hand down on my head like a skull-cap or an electric-chair metal cap that goes zzt zzt.
“BLESS YOU!” he yelled.
We rapped a little more. “How did the beatniks get so much ink?” I asked, trying to plan a career.
“Fine writing.”
And then I was into the hot-tub with Bataan, Jane, Allen, and Allen’s young boyfriend, passing around Bataan’s brandy. Allen and I started quoting Kerouac haikus to each other. I told him my favorite:
“Useless, useless, Heavy rain falling into the sea.”
“Neal liked that one too.”
A few days later, Sylvia and I went to see Allen recite poetry with a new-wave band, the Gluons, at a club in Boulder. Bataan drifted in, sat with us, and broke out his trusty corn-cob pot-pipe. And now the Beat poet Gregory Corso appeared, sitting with us as well, looking like a criminal saint.
Meanwhile Allen was reading his latest poem, “Birdbrain,” snaking back and forth, his bald head twitching like a Hindi dancer’s, holding up a sheaf of papers.
“I am Birdbrain!” he declaimed. “I declare Birdbrain to be victor in the Poetry Contest!”
There was a break, and in the quiet, I tapped Gregory on the shoulder, hoping to talk to him. He whirled around.
“Do you so love me?” He pushed his face an inch away from mine, “Do you so love me?”
“Uh, ye
ah, sure.”
“Why?”
“Well, I always really dug Jack and he was your friend…”
“Okay. We’re all here. We’re all here but something’s wrong. What?”
“Jack’s dead.”
“You got it. Lissen to this. Blukka. Whats’ at mean? Blukka.”
“I don’t know.”
“Here and now. Like right there, trying to understand that, you got a blukka.”
“Yeah, sure. Satori.” I twitched in excitement and our heads banged hard into each other.
“Here and now,” said Gregory. “Like you can’t hold onto it. Let it go past. A knot on your head.”
On the stage, Allen was back. “This poem is for Gregory Corso,” he announced.
Gregory, reacting to that, locked his head against my shoulder to continue talking, mouth to ear like prisoners in the pen. “I knew a guy who died,” intoned Gregory. “I knew a guy who died.”
“You mean Jack?”
“I knew him, you know. And he died. I didn’t meet him after he was dead. I knew a guy who died.”
“Yeah.” I kind of felt like we should be listening to Ginsberg’s poem.
Gregory chuckled and leaned back, picking up on my tension. “Look at him,” he said, admiring Allen onstage. “Look at Ginsey go.” Ginsey was flickering like a flame, spouting total anarchist propaganda, it was just so Beat. “He’s the master,” added Gregory. “We’re like two guys at a ball-game. On the mound, the master.”
When the poem was over Allen walked back to us. “Did you listen to your poem, Gregory?”
Sylvia started talking to Gregory then, and he rolled up his sleeve to show her his special tattoo. It was a little oval with a red dot and a green dot inside the oval, and coming off the top of the oval was a line that branched at its end.