Nested Scrolls

by Rudy Rucker

  CYBERPUNK

  Virtual sex, smart drugs, and synthetic rock ‘n’ roll!

  A futuristic subculture erupts from the electronic underground.

  Very satisfying.

  One might then have expected Mondo 2000 to become a successful magazine about the emerging computer culture. But it didn’t work out. Queen Mu ran the advertising department under the pseudonym of Ann Venable, and she tended to get into crazy arguments with potential advertisers. She was also editor in chief, and Mondo was forever off schedule, with the issues coming out at best twice a year.

  In short order, some gimlet-eyed yuppies showed up and ate Mondo’s lunch. Thus was born Wired magazine. They covered the same kinds of topics as Mondo, but they were tightly organized—and they slanted their articles to appeal to entrepreneurs rather than to stoners.

  I remember an epic party from the declining days of Mondo in 1994, held in a building called the Brazilian Room, deep in Tilden Park on a hill overlooking Berkeley. Eventually I’d rework this scene for my novel Saucer Wisdom of 1999.

  The Brazilian Room was a low wooden hall surrounded by a big patio, perched on the brow of a long meadow rolling down to some woods. The theme of the party was the Casbah, and a lot of people were wearing costumes.

  Wes Thomas, who’d begun working as the editor at Mondo, was dressed as an Arab woman named Amara. The Casbah theme had been Wes’s idea. He felt that we should think of the Web as an arabesque labyrinth. The Mondo editors were always big on understanding technology as metaphors—instead of actually learning anything hard. Queen Mu was holed up in the kitchen, spaced-out and inaccessible behind starry eyes and rictus-like smile, her voice breathy and brittle. Bart Nagel the art director, a saturnine man with a shaved head, was nicely turned out in a tuxedo and an authentic-looking maroon fez. R. U. Sirius, whose Mondo post had changed to “Icon at Large,” was slouching around on the patio with his lovably goofy grin, eternally fingering his long hair, simultaneously alert and bemused.

  “Hi, R. U.,” I said.

  “Rudy! What’s happening? Hi, Sylvia. Glad you guys could make it.”

  “This place is magical,” said Sylvia. “I never knew it was up here.”

  “Find your way through the labyrinth,” said R. U. “I think I was at an acid test here a really long time ago. Or maybe it was a wedding.”

  There was a good spread of mid-Eastern food, lots of beer and wine, a fair amount of pot out on the fringes of the patio, and who knew what odd chemicals in some of the people’s blood-streams. For entertainment, there was a celestial hippy-dippy storyteller, a cursing poetry performance, and bizarre instrumentless electronic live music.

  Among the guests was an astronomer from U.C. Berkeley; it turned out he’d read one of my science books. He was a professor on a sabbatical visit to Berkeley from his native Rome.

  “Do you think aliens could travel as cosmic rays?” I asked, getting down to an idea I’d been thinking of using if I ever wrote another of my Ware novels.

  “That is a genial notion,” said the astronomer. “What do you have in mind exactly?”

  “Suppose that beings all over the universe code themselves up, both mind and body, and send the coded patterns across space as high-energy electromagnetic signals,” I said. “Cosmic rays.” I held out my arm and wiggled my fingers, and then drew my fluttering hand down an imaginary line towards my head.

  This being a Mondo party, the professor was primed for weirdness, and he took this happily in stride. “Like Puck who slides down a moonbeam. A most efficient method for interstellar travel. Some cosmic rays are energetic gamma rays. These are the signals your extraterrestrials can be modulating with information. A fine idea. Life is to make entertainment.”

  Looking across the patio, I could see an impressive dominatrix-dressed woman named Raven. She looked like a red and black ice-cream sundae.

  “Perhaps she offers us a ride in her flying saucer,” said the astronomer. “She is very ample.”

  “I’m not sure she’s really a woman,” I said. “She’s from San Francisco.”

  “America is the great labyrinth,” said the astronomer.

  The evening wore on. The air was filled with a combination of licentiousness, California weirdness, and business chatter. There were lots of young gen-Xers, tons of old punks and hippies, and a good sprinkling of new-wave media artists, writers, and scammers from the ages in between. Everyone had the sense that somehow, some way, there was money to be made off the rising tidal wave of electronic information, but nobody was sure how. Above and beyond all that was the joy of being at a big weird party, a feeling of being close to the center of hip.

  The oleander bushes at the edge of the patio began to shake—and who should emerge but my California science-writer friend Nick Herbert. Nick had at one time been a physicist working for Memorex to help them design their magnetic memories. But he’d gotten deep into thinking about telepathy and teleportation. He was continually elaborating upon his quantum-mechanical theories about how we might talk directly with Mother Nature.

  Nick lived in a tiny cabin in the mountain town of Boulder Creek, and rarely got out. He made a little money by writing popular-science books, by working at a winery, and by carrying out off-beat product promotions. Today he was carrying things like flashlights.

  “What are those?” I asked Nick.

  “I’m trying to sell Liberty Lights,” said Nick. “Tools for enlightenment. Keep an eye on them, would you?” He handed me the three lights and started towards the bar. But then he went briefly into orbit around Raven. Maybe she was a woman. Maybe it didn’t matter.

  “What are Liberty Lights?” asked Sylvia. “Are they ray-guns?”

  “I’m not sure.” The flashlights had flame-shaped plastic cones glued over their lenses. Sylvia turned one on and so did I. There was a weighted wheel inside the cone that moved as you moved the light; the effect was that the color of the light kept changing. R. U. joined us, and we were waving around the three colored lights and laughing.

  “Far out,” said Sylvia, not quite seriously. “Cosmic!”

  “Ten dollars each!” intoned Nick, skipping back with a lit reefer in his mouth. “Yes! All Bezerkistan freaks need Liberty Lights to see God! Test trials are free, but don’t be absconding with these carefully tuned devices.”

  Nick took back the three Liberty Lights and began juggling them, the lights glowing in the dark. He juggled as easily as if he were moving in slow-motion.

  “I’m not actually here,” he said after a bit, turning out his lights one by one. His joint had gone out as well. “I’m just dreaming that I am.”

  The bushes shook, and Nick was gone.

  Initially I wasn’t writing much fiction in California. I had my hands full with my teaching job and with learning computer science.

  As a small, initial writing project, I edited an anthology of mathematically-related science fiction stories, Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder. My inspiration was a pair of such anthologies that the author Clifton Fadiman had edited when I was in high-school and college: Fantasia Mathematica and The Mathematical Magpie.

  Those two anthologies had gone a long way towards making me want to be a mathematician. I thought it would be nice to have a fresh volume along similar lines, although with a sharper focus on SF. Fadiman’s books had included a certain number of classical literary pieces, humorous essays, poems and even cartoons that, in my opinion, weakened the impact of the mix. I was looking for a jolt of real math and real SF.

  There was one story in particular that I wanted to include—this was “The Mathenauts,” by Norman Kagan, a story that I loved so much that I used its title for the title of my anthology. Kagan’s tale is one of the very few that captures the flavor of what it’s like to be a mathematician, and it served as an inspiration for my own math-maniac novels White Light and Mathematicians in Love.

  Kagan is by no means a prolific writer of SF—over the years he’s spent most of his energy in writing
books of film criticism. While editing Mathenauts, I was so eager to meet him that I actually organized a day of mathematical SF movies at San Jose State—and had Kagan as a guest speaker. He proved every bit as quirky and funny as I’d hoped.

  As these were pre-Internet years, finding the other stories for the volume was a somewhat hit-and-miss affair, largely conducted via the U. S. mail. I got a number of recommendations from my math-columnist mentor Martin Gardner. And once I got the word out, a number of people mailed in suggestions or submissions.

  In the end, it was a nice volume, but it was too specialized a book for Avon Books or Houghton Mifflin, who’d been publishing my other books. My agent Susan Protter sent the proposal to the editor David Hartwell at Arbor House, and my anthology came out in 1987. Hartwell really understood the idea behind Mathenauts, and he took the trouble of promoting it to mathematics departments across the country. This would prove to be the beginning of a long and pleasant editorial association with him.

  But really Mathenauts was just a sideshow. For my own peace of mind, I needed to get a novel going.

  In my last year at Lynchburg, in 1986, I’d begun thinking about writing a historical SF novel involving one of my favorite notions from fringe science: the Hollow Earth. The idea is that our planet is in fact hollow like a tennis ball or like a fisherman’s float. A race of people live inside. But how do we get in there to visit them? Perhaps through holes in the ocean floor, or perhaps via an immense hole at the South Pole.

  My special inspiration was Edgar Allen Poe’s novel, The Journey of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which describes a sea voyage to the walls of ice around the Southern pole, with the implication that there is a huge opening to be found there, a great shaft leading into Mother Earth’s womb. Wanting this to be true, I reasoned that, even if Poe had erred about the hole being clearly visible, it might still exist, but be hidden beneath a sheet of accumulated snow and ice.

  My old friend Gregory Gibson, in his capacity as antiquarian bookseller, sent me some nineteenth century sailing narratives, and a fine twenty-volume edition of the collected works of Poe. I pored over these, coming to identify with Eddie. Poe wrote of being possessed by an imp of the perverse, who impelled him to do deliberately alienating and antisocial things—which described my punk attitude to a tee.

  While still in Lynchburg, my expanding researches had led me to the rare book room in the library of the University of Virginia, where I found writings about John Cleves Symmes Jr., who began proselytizing his doctrine of the Hollow Earth in 1818. Symmes lived in Newport, Kentucky, and he styled himself the Newton of the West. He was too busy lecturing—or too sly—to publish any books under his own name, but I found a nonfiction Symmes’ Theory of Concentric Spheres, and a novel, Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery, which are purportedly written by Symmes’ followers. My feeling is that, as the books speak so very highly of Symmes, he either wrote them himself or collaborated heavily.

  In California in 1986, I started work on my novel, The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia. It’s about a country boy who leaves his farm and travels down the James River as a stowaway in a bateau, accompanied by his dog Arf and his boyhood companion Otha, who’s now an escaped slave. They meet Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond, and they travel onward to Antarctica and to the Hollow Earth.

  I wasn’t sure how to light up the inside of the Hollow Earth, a land which I called Htrae. If you put an Inner Sun in the center, then it seems like everything would fall up into the sun. One day when I was walking around San Francisco with Marc Laidlaw, I found the solution.

  It was a new science toy called a plasma sphere, on display in a new age shop. By now nearly everyone’s seen these one of these things—it’s a hollow glass ball with an electrode in the center. Branching lines of electrical discharge reach out from the electrode to the outer surface, and if you move your fingertips around on the sphere, the glow lines trail after them. That’s the way to light up the Hollow Earth! Have titanic aurora-like streamers of light reaching from the Central Anomaly to the inhabited inner surface of Htrae.

  The writing went slowly. I find it hard to keep my novelistic momentum if I only have a spare hour here and there in which to write. The only extended patches of free time that I had were during the school vacations—especially in the summer—but often we’d want to take family trips then, making road trips around California or flying to visit Sylvia’s father and brother in Geneva.

  When my first August in California came to an end and the fall semester loomed, I thought of the early sailing ships trying to reach the fabled southern continent of Antarctica. Sometimes they’d overstay the brief polar summer, become iced in, and spend the dark, howling winter hunkered in their vessels, hunting seals for food.

  Repeatedly iced in by my teaching duties, I took nearly three years to finish writing The Hollow Earth, which finally appeared in 1990, edited by David Hartwell, who’d moved to William Morrow. At the end of the book, I used the hoaxing Poe-like expedient of writing an afterword to the effect that The Hollow Earth was a manuscript that I’d found in the rare books room at the University of Virginia.

  To this day, I get occasional emails from readers taken in by this. They wonder why I haven’t done anything to help mount an expedition to retrace my hero Mason’s steps. One guy even assumed that since The Hollow Earth was just an old public-domain manuscript that I’d edited, it was okay to post a page-scan of my book on the web!

  My kids liked hearing me talk about the Hollow Earth. Once, while cross-country skiing with Isabel near Lake Tahoe, I pointed out the blueness of the light that seemed to emerge from the holes our ski-poles made in the snow.

  “Proof that the Earth is hollow!” I told my daughter.

  “As if more proof were needed,” she responded cheerfully. “When will they see?”

  Oh, one more thing. In 1990, there was an article about my novel in the San Jose newspaper, and a bum came by my office to tell me some news.

  “The sun is cold and hollow,” he said. “That light you see overhead is just the interaction of some special rays from the sun with our upper atmosphere. I used to be a very famous surfer, you know. Look.”

  He pulled out a page torn from an encyclopedia with a grainy picture of someone on a wave.

  “That’s me. Inside the Hollow Sun.”

  I identified with Edgar Allan Poe because of his outré imagination, his difficult career, his connection to Virginia, his love of language, his charlatanism—and for another reason as well. Along with Jack Kerouac, Poe is one of the writers most known for their drinking problems. As I mentioned, Poe once wrote an essay about his inner “imp of the perverse,” a force that goaded him to screw things up whenever they were running too smoothly. Poe was said to have a genius for being drunk at the wrong time, and for making the worst possible impression on prospective publishers or employers.

  In California, I was smoking more pot than before, and drinking a lot too. I don’t think I ever did any serious writing while drinking, although once in a great while I’d write while high. Given that my books are somewhat strange, people sometimes imagine that I was often high while writing, but that’s not the case at all. Surrealism, gnarl and odd-ball dialog come naturally to me—they’re more or less an automatic default. I’ve never lacked for wild ideas.

  In any case, I was always sober for my teaching job. Having alcohol on my breath would have been out of the question. And I’d learned very early that you never want to be high when you’re giving a lecture. Why not? If you’re high, then (a) everything seems a lot more important than it really is, and (b) the lecture seems to last for hours.

  But just about every evening I’d get into some beer or wine. And, yes, if I had a free afternoon, I was likely to smoke a joint and go for a walk and jot down any ideas about my writing or my programming that happened by. Sober or not, I’ve always carried a folded-in-four piece of typing paper in my back pocket for this purpose.

  My drinkin
g and pot-smoking caused some stress in the family, upsetting the children, and leading to quarrels with Sylvia. And often I’d annoy my old friends with late night phone calls—especially the friends who were back on the East coast, three time zones later than California.

  One exception was good old Sheckley. He was always glad to talk with me—in fact I remember one time when I phoned him up stoned, and he was like, “Wait a minute,” and he quickly lit up some pot so he’d be on the same vibrational level.

  I’ve always been somewhat ambivalent about science fiction conventions. It’s exciting to be in a huge crowd of fanatical weirdos—but cons tend to emphasize aspects of SF that don’t interest me. The main reason I go to them is to hang out with my fellow writers, to make contacts with editors and publishers, and to meet a few of my readers.

  Quite early on, my Ace editor, Susan Allison, had cautioned me about how to behave at SF cons. “They look like parties,” she’d told me. “But they’re not. They’re business meetings.”

  But I had trouble internalizing this advice. As the years went by, my infrequent trips to the cons became something of a problem for me. I’d go with the best of intentions. But, feeling shy around so many semi-strangers, with free booze on every side, and with louche characters to party with, I’d end up totally wasted, sometimes reaching the point of insulting people who might help my writing career.

  It took only a few iterations of this scenario until many of the people in the SF world had gotten the impression that I was obnoxious and blind drunk all the time. After all, that’s how I’d been the two or three times that they’d seen me! It was a drag. I wanted to clean up, but I didn’t know how.