Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  Cyberpunk

  Let me back up a little now, to trace out some parallel literary history. When Robert Sheckley had visited us in the spring of 1982, his wife Jay had been telling me about a new writer called William Gibson. Before they left, she gave me a copy of Omni with the story, “Johnny Mnemonic.” I was awed by the Gibson’s writing. He, too, was out to change SF. And he wasn’t the only one.

  I started getting mail from a younger writer in Texas called Bruce Sterling. He’d written glowing reviews of Spacetime Donuts and White Light in a weekly free newspaper in Austin—he was one of the very first critics to appreciate these books. Soon after this, maybe in 1982, Bruce began publishing a zine called Cheap Truth.

  Bruce loved all things Soviet—it wasn’t that he was a Communist, it was more that he dug the parallel world aspect of a superpower totally different from America. He spoke of Cheap Truth as a samizdat publication, meaning that, rather than printing a lot of copies, he encouraged people to Xerox their copies and pass them from hand to hand.

  Reading Bruce’s sporadic mailings of Cheap Truth, I learned there were a number of other disgruntled and radicalized new SF writers like me. At first Bruce Sterling’s zine didn’t have any particular name for the emerging new SF movement—it wouldn’t be until 1983 that the cyberpunk label would take hold.

  The Cheap Truth rants were authored by people with pseudonyms like Sue Denim and Vincent Omniaveritas. I was too out of the loop to try and figure out who was who, but I took note of the authors being hyped: Bruce Sterling, Lew Shiner, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, Greg Bear and me.

  I couldn’t actually find books by many of these people in Lynchburg, Virginia, but Bruce did mail me a couple of his own novels, which I greatly enjoyed. I was thrilled to be joining forces with some other writers, it felt like being an early Beat.

  Philip K. Dick had died of a stroke in the spring of 1982, during my last semester at R-MWC. By then he’d become one of my favorite authors, and I began thinking about him a lot.

  Some writers and editors were organizing an annual literary award honoring the memory of Philip K. Dick—and in the fall of 1982, Susan Allison told me that my novel Software had been nominated. I felt like I had a good shot at the award, given that my SF has something of the same off-kilter, subversive quality as Phil’s. I began dreaming that my writing income might rise to a sustainable level.

  Early in 1983, Henry and Diana Vaughan took Sylvia and me to a party at one of their saleswomen’s houses. I didn’t know too many of the people, they were country hippie types with long hair. There was plenty of pot and loud music.

  At some point I glanced across the room and in walked Phil Dick. He didn’t say he was Phil Dick, but I felt sure it was him. He looked to be wearing a replica of his body from some ten years earlier, with a beard and his hair still dark.

  At first I just grinned over at him slyly—like Aphid-Jerry eyeing “carrier people” in Scanner Darkly. And then I introduced myself and drank beer and whisky with the guy in the kitchen. I was too hip to confront him with my knowledge of his true identity.

  The man’s cover was that he owned a fleet of trash trucks. He called himself the Garbage King, and said, “I’ve furnished my whole house with things that people threw out.”

  I steered the conversation around to science fiction, mentioning Software, wanting to put in a plug for my book.

  “What’s the book about?” asked the Garbage King who housed the soul of Philip K. Dick.

  “It’s about robots on the Moon. In a way they’re black people. The guy who invented them is dying—he’s my father, see—and the robots build him a fake robot body and they get his software out of his brain.”

  “Go on.”

  “They run the software on a computer, but the computer is big and has to be kept at four degrees Kelvin. It follows the old man around in a Mr. Frostee ice-cream truck. There’s a big scene where these robots want to eat the brain of this kid called Sta-Hi.”

  “Alright!”

  In March of 1983, I got the Philip K. Dick award for Software. Sylvia and I flew up to New York City for the awards ceremony. Earlier that evening we had dinner with my editor Susan Allison, Phil’s editor David Hartwell, a writer friend of Phil’s called Ray Faraday Nelson, and the well-known author Tom Disch—who was the one who’d initially proposed starting the award. Disch was a good guy, immensely hip and cultured.

  Our whole party walked over to Times Square, where we saw Bladerunner, the brand-new movie based on Phil’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. On the way over, I talked to Ray Nelson—he was such an in-the-moment guy that later in the evening when he had to make a speech, he just went over the things we’d talked about.

  I liked the Bladerunner movie a lot, particularly the first part, with the blimps bearing electronic billboards, and the cop smoking pot while he interviewed the android, and the dark futuristic city with the neon lights glinting off pavements slick with rain. The last part of the movie seemed too violent, and inappropriately so, given that Phil’s Androids novel had largely been about empathy and peace. But that’s Hollywood.

  At the time I was wondering if Phil’s worries about the movie in progress had driven him to his fatal stroke. But those who knew him said he was happy and excited about the film.

  “Phil would have loved it,” Ray Nelson reassured me after we saw the movie.

  The award ceremony was in an artist’s loft, with the hallways covered in reflective silver paint. One of the first people I ran into was my artist friend Barry Feldman from college—whom I’d invited. Incredibly, he was wearing a suit, and he looked more like Chico Marx than ever. He seemed just a bit envious of me getting an award—although Barry was a great painter, working all day long in his studio, he wasn’t breaking into the gallery scene. On a sudden whim, I told Barry he could pose as me and enjoy the fame.

  As I was such an outsider to the SF scene, nobody knew what I looked like, and the substitution worked for about half an hour. Barry stood by the door shaking hands and signing books, twinkling with delight. I stood across the room, drinking and hanging out with Sylvia, our Rutgers friend Eddie Marritz, his wife Hana, and Gerard Vanderleun, who’d edited The Fourth Dimension at Houghton Mifflin. In the end it all got sorted out, and I met the people I needed to meet—among them was Susan Protter, who’d end up being my literary agent for the years to come.

  Finally I stood on the bar at one end of the silvery room and delivered a short acceptance speech that I’d composed on the plane, thinking about the Garbage King.

  “If I say that Phil Dick is not really dead, then this is what I mean: He was such a powerful writer that his works exercise a sort of hypnotic force. Many of us have been Phil Dick for brief flashes, and these flashes will continue as long as there are readers…. I’d like to think that, on some level, Phil and I are just different instances of the same Platonic form—call it the gonzo-philosopher-SF-writer form, if you like…. If it is at all possible for a spirit to return from the dead, I would imagine that Phil would be the one to do it. Let’s keep our eyes open tonight, he may show up.”

  The next day we went to visit Barry and his wife Randy Warner at his studio. I’d lifted a bottle of liquor from the awards ceremony to give him. He looked a little embarrassed. It turned out he’d bagged three bottles himself.

  I first met my fellow cyberpunks Sterling, Gibson, and Shiner in September of 1983 at a world science fiction convention in Baltimore. They’d all read my new novel The Sex Sphere, which had just been published by Ace. They were impressed by how out-there my book was—Sterling compared it J. G. Ballard’s Crash.

  Gibson was a remarkable guy, and I liked him immediately. He was tall, with an unusually thin and somewhat flexible-looking head. At one of the con parties, he told me he was high on some SF-sounding drug I’d never heard of. Perfect. He was bright, funny, intense, and with a comfortable Virginia accent.

  Back home in Lynchburg after the convention, I spent a
day at my downtown office as usual and drove home in Sylvia’s 1956 Buick, feeling resplendent in a Hawaiian shirt that she’d had sewn for me. And there were Gibson, Sterling and Shiner on our front porch, along with Bruce’s wife, Nancy, and Lew’s friend, Edie. They’d decided to drive down from Baltimore after the convention.

  These guys were all a bit younger than me—I was thirty-seven by now. To some extent they looked up to me. And I admired their writing in equal measure. It felt wonderful to hang around together.

  I met the other canonical cyberpunk, John Shirley, two years later, in 1985, when he and I were both staying with Bruce and Nancy Sterling in Austin, Texas, in town for the North American science fiction convention, which was featuring a panel on cyberpunk. John was a trip. When I woke up on Sterling’s couch in the morning, he’d be leaning over me, staring at my face.

  “I’m trying to analyze the master’s vibes,” he told me.

  The antic SF personage Charles Platt was there in spirit; he’d mailed Bruce a primitive Mandelbrot set program that he’d written in Basic. We’d set the program to running on Bruce’s crude Amiga computer, and a couple of hours later we’d see a new zoom into the bug-shaped fractal—chunky pixels colored in blue, magenta and cyan.,

  As we walked around Austin together talking, John Shirley had a habit of picking up some random large stone from a lawn, lugging it over to me, and putting it into my hands. Sometimes I’d be so into the conversation that I’d just carry the rock along for a few steps before noticing it.

  Naturally we’d get high in the evenings. I recall driving a rented Lincoln around town with John. He was riffing off my book Software, leaning out of our car window to scream at the Texas drivers, “Y’all ever ate any live brains?”

  The writers on that 1985 cyberpunk panel were me, Shirley, Sterling, Lew Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Bear. Gibson couldn’t make it. The moderator—an SF fan whose name I’ve forgotten or never knew—hadn’t read any of my work, and was bursting with venom against all of us. He represented the population of SF fans who are looking for a security blanket rather than for higher consciousness. For his ilk, cyberpunk was an annoyance or even a threat. He’d slid through the 1970s thinking of himself as with-it, and cyberpunk was yanking his covers. And he wasn’t the only one who resented us.

  To my eyes, the audience began taking on the look of a lynch mob. Here I’m finally asked to join a literary movement, and everyone hates me before I can even open my mouth? Enraged by the moderator’s ongoing barrage of insults, John Shirley got up and walked out, followed by Sterling and Shiner. But I stayed up there. I’d traveled a long distance for my moment in the sun.

  “So I guess cyberpunk is dead now?” said Shiner afterwards.

  I didn’t think do. Surely, if we could make plastic people that uptight, we were on the right track. That’s what the punk part was all about.

  Soon after getting that Philip K. Dick award for Software in 1983, I signed on with Susan Protter as my literary agent. Actually I’d met two potential agents at the award ceremony, but it was Susan who followed up and kept phoning me. She was a very talkative woman, with a great New York accent. She said she’d been a Red Diaper baby, that is, her parents had been Communists—indeed her father had been the treasurer of the New York City branch of the Party.

  As an author, it’s often up to you to find your book deals on your own, although sometimes an agent can turn up a fresh opportunity. The larger part of what agents do is to get you better terms for your deals—an agent has the nerve to tweak the fine print of the standard contracts that publishers offer. Agents also make sure that the publishers actually pay you all the money they owe you. Every now and then payment is an issue, whether the cause is a bureaucratic snafu, deliberate chicanery, or a corporate bankruptcy. And it’s useful to have an agent to orchestrate your foreign rights sales. If you leave that to your U. S. publishers, they skim off a full seventy-five percent of the foreign advances.

  The best thing of all about having an agent was that now I had someone else on my team, someone just as interested in my book deals as I was.

  I was planning for my next book to be something different, a Beat novel and not science fiction at all. I planned to call it All the Visions, and saw it as a lightly disguised account of my life thus far, focusing on the more ecstatic and countercultural events.

  As I mentioned earlier, I’d always savored the legend of Jack Kerouac writing On the Road on a roll of teletype paper—and, emulating the master, I got a roll of copier paper, rigged up a holder for it, and pounded away on my trusty IBM Selectric. In about two weeks, I’d speed-typed the ninety-foot scroll that was All the Visions, really more of a memoir than a novel.

  To my disappointment, I quickly learned that, at least coming from me, such a book was unmarketable. I’d have to get back to science fiction.

  Despite the Dick award and the cyberpunk connection, my sales weren’t shooting up to any particularly high levels, and it didn’t look like my Ace advances were going to increase. In the fall of 1983, Susan Protter made a contact with a new company called Bluejay Books. In point of fact, this company was just one guy, Jim Frenkel, who’d sunk his life savings into his dream of becoming an SF publisher. But he was willing to pay me considerably more than Ace, he’d publish me in hardback, and he wanted a two-book deal.

  Susan and I decided to go for it. My first Bluejay book would be the golden-age-style SF novel Master of Space and Time that I’d recently finished. And the second would be a transreal version of my scroll, science fictionalized into a novel called The Secret of Life.

  It took me about a year to write The Secret of Life, from June of 1983 to June of 1984. By my standards of those years, this was a long time. I was hung up on the notion that I needed to write a great SF novel; I wanted to bat this one right out of the ballpark. Since then, I’ve learned that overly high expectations only drag me down. I write the most fluidly when I write as if it doesn’t matter. Trying too hard only hangs me up.

  Another thing slowing down my writing—relatively speaking—was that, to some extent, I was running out of steam, scraping the slice of melon right down to rind. I’d been driving myself awfully hard.

  But I do like the way The Secret of Life came out. As an objective correlative for my ongoing sensation of alienation from mass culture, the Rudy-like main character actually is an alien. He’s a flame-creature from a UFO who happens to have his flame-mind embedded into the spine of a human body. I put a lot of my past into the book—my friend Barbie’s toy circus, my Beat Chevalier story, the flying wing that Embry and I had seen, my vision of the One with Niles in Louisville, my wild times in college, my courtship of Sylvia—I even included Sartre’s Nausea, using quotes from it as the section headers.

  Whenever I finish writing a novel, I’m homesick for my characters and the little world that I made. And I miss the daily hits of creative bliss. When I finished The Secret of Life in the summer of 1984, I took it even harder than usual. I drove up to Charlottesville to attend a talk by a philosopher of mathematics I was interested in, and on the way back home I stopped at a winery and bought a case of wine. For the next week I was guzzling that stuff. My college friend Don Marritz came to visit us, and even when we went for a picnic in the woods, I was doing this Hemingway routine of cooling two bottles in the stream. I was a wreck.

  The Secret of Life appeared in hardback from Bluejay in 1985, and got a couple of good reviews. And then Bluejay Books went bankrupt, tangling up the book rights in such a way that no paperback edition of it ever did appear. It took Susan Protter some seven years to collect all of my advance money from Jim Frenkel—but eventually she did. She was like Inspector Javert tracking down Jean Valjean in Les Miserables. Let it be said, however, that Frenkel is a good guy.

  Feeling temporarily burnt-out and underpaid by SF, in the summer of 1984, I got a deal for another nonfiction book with Houghton Mifflin, a general book about mathematics, with the non-committal title Mind Tools. I agonized
over what to talk about, and how to slant it.

  Around this time I began to sense that I was missing out on a great intellectual revolution: the dawn of computer-aided experimental mathematics. Fractals, chaotic iterations, cellular automata—the images were popping up everywhere. If you’re a mathematician, becoming a computer scientist is not so much a matter of new knowledge as a matter of new attitude. Born again. Letting the chip into your heart.

  I wasn’t sure how far I might go in this direction, but by way of preparation, my new book would survey mathematics from the standpoint that everything is information.

  I worked on Mind Tools through the fall of 1984 and all of 1985. It turned out to be a lot of fun for me—I organized it in an interesting way, and I did more research into the history of math. It was good to nestle back into the bosom of Mamma Mathematics, and good to be learning a little more about computer science. I invented all sorts of new things for the book and I spent a lot of time making little drawings and models to go with it.

  I made a deal with Nancy Blackwell Marion at the Design Group to redraw my images in a uniform way—she was using the latest in graphical technology, an Apple Lisa, the high-priced precursor of the Mac. As Nancy’s office was right next door, we had a lot of pleasant back and forth discussions about the results. I spent over a year on the project.

  But no matter how fast and well I wrote, the money wasn’t coming in fast enough. Yes, my books were getting published and earning good reviews, but none of them were big hits, and my advances were only so-so. The kids needed braces, and their college tuition fees loomed on the horizon.