by Rudy Rucker
I sometimes write the best stuff when I don’t feel particularly creative. On a given day, it’s 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.
I felt Freeware turned out really well, but I tend to think that about all of my books. The meaning of the title 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. The alien minds piggyback onto high-energy radiation such as cosmic rays or the signals emitted by solar flares. 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 robots, whose minds now inhabit soft bodies made of gnarly, mold-infested piezoplastic.
My old character Sta-Hi is an ex-senator in Freeware. Due to various mishaps, Sta-Hi’s wife Wendy has her personality living in a piezoplastic ruff that she wears on her neck—as opposed to using her meat brain. She becomes infected with a computer virus called the Stairway to Heaven that opens her up to one of those compressed alien minds zipping around, and she becomes the avatar of a being called Quuz—who lives within the vortex tubes of our own sun. And that’s just the start.
Another element in Freeware is that Sta-Hi’s drug and alcohol problems are seriously messing him up. He’s finally thinking about getting sober.
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 had a not-quite-divinity called “Bob,” always spelled with the quotes. The Church, which managed to get some people to mail in donations, was a complex, interactive bit of dada art—or rather “bulldada,” as they put it. Walker and I had included an image of “Bob” with our CA Lab software so that the sacred visage could be nibbled by CA rules like the Zhabotinsky scrolls. Art patron that I am, I’d even paid Ivan Stang, the Church’s main man, for the rights—two hundred dollars out of my own pocket.
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.
I really liked the black velvet painting of the cockroaches—called Victors. The chartreuse and magenta glow from its background reminded me of a computer screen full of cellular automata. When I read a big article about Mavrides in Mondo 2000, I got stoked enough to buy the cockroach painting—and never mind that it was me who’d written that article!
Mavrides was a saturnine, puckish character, a little younger than me. I thought of him 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, 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 him the latest chapter of my novel-in-progress while he painted. Paul’s cartoonist fellow roomer, Hal Robbins, would often join us. A writer reading new work to his artist pals—that felt like the way life should be.
I was still having fun some of the time, but by 1995, alcohol and pot were taking an increasing toll. What had once seemed to be a path to bohemian adventure had become a ball and chain. I’d often wake up in the middle of the night and lie there wishing that I was dead. As for the future—I imagined ending up like a shabby animal in a concrete zoo pen, blank and weary, forever waiting for my next trough of slop.
Kerouac and Poe don’t work as role models when you’re pushing fifty.
At first I thought I could quit beer and keep smoking pot, but that only worked for a couple of weeks. The pot led me back to the beer. I needed to get past the habit of taking stuff in order to feel different. So I tried giving up pot too—but I found I couldn’t keep it up on my own.
Reluctantly I began going to the meetings of a mutual-support group for people with the same kinds of problems. I fully expected to find a bunch of evangelical, goody-goody squares at the meetings. But of course they were drunks and stoners, sober now, but still crazy—definitely the kind of people I might have hung with in the past. Their stories were twisted and darkly funny.
Even though I liked the group and I knew I wanted to quit, it took me about six months to make it stick. The turning point came in June, 1996, three months after I turned fifty.
I’d gone backpacking alone near Cone Peak in Big Sur. The first night, I made a camp by a stream in a redwood grove six miles in from the road, and on the second day, I hiked a big loop, leaving my stuff at the camp.
On the steep grassy hills overlooking the ocean, I savored the mind-opening feeling of the vast space around me. I felt embedded in the natural world. The hills were dotted with yucca plants: batches of big spiky leaves with giant phallic stalks shooting up ten or twelve feet, huge and covered with white flowers smelling of magnolia. Everything was placed in just the right spot—the yuccas, the slopes, the oaks and redwoods, Cone Peak in the background, and the foggy curve of the coast.
Back at my tent, I went to sleep early, and awoke in middle of the night feeling fully rested. The half moon was high overhead. I got up and strolled around, wanting to savor this rare moment of being alone in the wilderness, beneath the redwoods by a stream.
At the sight of some spooky, dead branches hanging down I began to be a little scared. To push that away, I expanded my awareness to have a sense of the cosmos all around and within everything, a sense of the universe as being filled with love. I saw the world as a single fabric that I was a pattern in. And then, alone in the dark woods, I felt as safe as if I were at home. I sat by the inky, silvery stream, its gurgles and splashes like musical notes—chaotic and beautiful.
Something about this experience made it possible for me to begin mentally reaching out for help at crucial times—for instance when I was about to take a drink. I’d feel like the help came right away—and I’d be able to resist the drinks. Amazing.
Although I’ve always believed in a mystical overarching cosmic mind, I’ve never been conventionally religious. Yes, I’ve gone to church on an occasional basis for my whole life, and I enjoy the service—but I don’t take the prayers and hymns to be literally true. I see a church service as a social bonding ritual and a form of communal meditation. It wouldn’t be at all accurate to say that I’m a born-again convert.
For me, asking for help can be as simple as getting into the moment, taking a few breaths, and wishing to be a calmer, more loving person. And I don’t feel that it’s necessarily true that I’m getting help from the outside.
It could be, that when I’m asking for help, it’s a way of saying, “My usual logical mode of thought isn’t working, and I need to jump off my gerbil-wheel.” In more exalted terms, it might be that, if I view myself as part of a cosmic web of existence, it’s easier to rise above my personal fears and resentments—and those are the feelings that made me want to drink and get high.
Staying sober requires a certain amount of ongoing effort, although over the years it’s gotten easier. I like it. I feel more comfortable in my own skin. I’m less tormented, and I don’t want to die. And I have better relationships with the most important people in my life: Sylvia and the children.
I had a slight worry that giving up pot and alcohol might impair my courage to write or lessen my flow of inspiration, but far from it. The pace of my writing production picked up, and I went on to write four novels and two anthologies in the ensuing five years, a run as good as
any I’ve ever had.
I seem to have more time available for work now, and I’m better able to plan and control my projects. It’s easier than ever to relax and to proceed at writing degree zero, telling my version of the truth.
One thing I’d always liked about drinking or smoking pot was that it tended to alter my usual trains of thought. It’s always unpleasant when I get into a mode of endlessly replaying certain mental tapes—rehashing an argument, say, or obsessing over some fears or resentments. Sometimes I long to turn off my inner monologue. And getting zonked is one way to do this.
But I’d always known there are other paths to liberation. Somehow I’ve never had the patience for prolonged bouts of sitting meditation. But exercise has a way of emptying out the mind as well. I like the stretching and bending of yoga. And mountain-biking around my village and the nearby hills is a wonderful way to get out of my head and into my body.
Writing is a kind of spititual practice as well. When I’m actively writing, I forget about myself. I get drawn into the craft and into the play of ideas. As the John Malkovich character in the movie Art School Confidential puts it, doing my work provides me with a “narcotic moment of creative bliss.”
The first book I wrote after getting sober was, perhaps thanks to my own imp of the perverse, one of my oddest books of all: Saucer Wisdom. I wanted to do something special for the Millennium.
The book evolved in a strange way. In 1997, Wired magazine had decided to start a line of books. I’d done a couple of journalistic pieces for Wired over the years—for one article I went into the Intel chip-fabrication plant; for another I went to the secret storeroom at Skywalker Ranch where they have Yoda, R2D2, and the Lost Ark. And in 1997, one of my old friends, Mark Frauenfelder, had become a new editor at Wired.
Mark was a fan of my writing and a thoroughly likable guy. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I’d written some ephemeral pieces for Mark’s print zine Boing Boing—which would, in 2000, evolve into the most popular blog in the world.
Mark suggested that I write a work of speculative futurology to be a Wired book. I sent him some ideas that he liked, but then his fellow editors wondered if I could find a thread to tie my disparate predictions together. I proposed that I frame my book as if I’d learned my facts about the future from a man who’d actually been there. My time-traveler was to be Frank Shook, a crackpot UFO abductee who’s been given a tour of the next three thousand years by the aliens.
My old pal Gregory Gibson was visiting me at the time, and I took him along to the pitch meeting with the Wired editors in February, 1997. On the drive from San Jose to San Francisco, Greg and I cooked up the scheme that he would present himself as actually being Frank Shook, the saucer nut. Greg has a piercing glare, and was then wearing a full beard, with his hair very long. He looked like a homeless Viet vet. At the pitch meeting, with four editors present, Greg made a few tense, distracted remarks, and then stalked out, muttering that it was too painful to be talking about his experiences to so many of us at once.
There was a stunned silence. After a bit, I let on that Greg had been hoaxing them, but the editors didn’t quite want to let go of the illusion. It was decided they’d present the book as a factual true-life adventure starring the characters Rudy Rucker and Frank Shook. And they’d market it as it were a book akin to Whitley Strieber’s UFO abduction book, Communion. I was a little worried about what this might do to whatever slight credibility my name has, but I was willing to grit my teeth and go through with it—not only in hopes of sales, but also as a way of thumbing my nose at conventional notions of respectability. Eddie Poe the hoaxer would have done no less.
The guys at Wired were fond of me, and relatively new to book-publishing. My agent Susan Protter hit them for an advance about five times as large as I was usually getting. They didn’t realize how cheaply I could be had. Or maybe they did, but they wanted to do me a favor.
I had a bit of trouble writing the book. The big advance made me nervous—I felt like I had to come up with something unusually good. And, as I got deeper into the project, I started being paranoid that the aliens—if they existed—might show up to harass me.
In April, 1997, for instance, I went on a road-trip with Sylvia and Georgia. We hit Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon and Zion national park in Utah. At Zion I had a very frightening dream.
In my dream, the aliens are high over me, in a long-legged Dr. Seuss-style walking-machine that’s also a bulldozer, and it’s rocking uhhnnnm, uhhnnnm, uhmmmmn, the way machines do when they’re trying to push something. I protest, and the aliens shine a laser down into my mouth. The laser is etching my teeth as if they were computer chips in a fabrication lab—ZZZZT ZZZTTT. It’s incredibly painful, and it’s happening way too fast…
I woke myself up and felt that dark, helpless paranoia of the real UFO nuts who think the aliens have already taken over the world and that we’re just their cattle, their lab rats, controlled by our etched-in implants. I felt doomed.
The next morning the newspapers were filled with news of a mass UFO cult suicide. And when we got home, we found our house flooded with five hundred gallons of raw sewage. The main line had clogged up while we were gone, and the neighbors’ crap had backed up through our toilet. Was this the revenge of the aliens? Was the sewage the objective correlative of UFOlogy?
Walking the hills above Los Gatos a few weeks later, I lay down in a grassy little meadow and looked up. I was wondering how it would be to see a classic flying saucer up there, drawn in lines of pale light against the blue sky. The noises in the woods began to take on an alien cast, sticking together to form higher-order mental forms.
To further roil my psyche, Greg kept leaving me crackpot voice-mail messages in the persona of Frank Shook. And I was arguing with him about whether I was going to give him a percentage of my book advance. On our way into the Wired pitch meeting, I’d in fact told him that I’d cut him in, but once I had the deal, I didn’t feel like paying him after all. And then I did give Greg some money, but I grew so resentful about it that, for the sake of our friendship, he agreed to give the money back. It was a mess. I was going nuts.
Transrealism was the only way out. I put all my fears and misgivings into the book. I even wrote a scene where my character Frank Shook robs the home of my character Rudy Rucker. Frank steals Rudy’s book manuscript and his computer.
In search of a big third act for the novel, I flew to Spearfish, North Dakota, in June, 1997, to meet up with an artist friend of mine who lives there. His name is Dick Termes, and he paints primarily on spheres. He says that right after Christmas is the best time for gathering “canvases” to paint on, he picks up lawn-scale ball ornaments on sale at K-Mart, covers them in gesso and paints marvelous scenes using his own method of “six-point perspective.” What’s six-point perspective? Well, you can look it up—Termes has a video explaining it on the Web.
When I visited, Termes lent me his car, and I drove across the state line into Wyoming to visit the Devil’s Tower—which appears in the classic UFO film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. The Tower was even more alien and inspiring than I’d imagined it would be. My characters Rudy Rucker and Frank Shook had their final meeting there, and Rudy took a ride in an alien-filled saucer.
I ran this long, strange trip to the end and mailed the final manuscript to Wired in the summer of 1997—whereupon they told me they’d canceled their whole line of books. Susan Protter went after them and made them pay most of that fat advance they’d promised. Like I always say, it’s times like that when you really need an agent. And then Susan sold the book again to Tor Books—for a more modest sum.
I was happy to be selling a book to Tor—they’re the largest publisher of fantasy and science fiction in the world. And I’d be working with the editor David Hartwell, who’d moved to Tor as well. As it turned out, I’d continue selling books to Hartwell at Tor for some years to come.
I find Hartwell enjoyable to work with. He’s an old-school kind of editor, high
ly educated, and sensitive to the subtlest literary references. He has an encyclopedic familiarity of the existing SF and fantasy literature, a far broader knowledge than mine. He tends to understand what I’m writing about and what I’m trying to do—which isn’t always a given. And he tends to give me good advice on my manuscripts without over-doing it.
With all this said, I should mention that, in the isolated case of Saucer Wisdom, it was actually Dave’s wife, Katherine Cramer, who did the lion’s share of the editing. The book came to Dave’s desk when he was overburdened with multiple deadlines, so Katherine stepped in. And, as it happened, she gave me some very good advice about kicking the book’s ending up a notch.
I’d made a bunch of drawings to go with Saucer Wisdom, supposedly Frank Shook himself had drawn these figures. There was some question as to whether we’d need to have them redrawn by a professional artist. But Dave Hartwell made the call that we could just use my drawings as is.
As he put it, “If they’re supposed to be drawn by a UFO nut while he’s in a flying saucer, how polished do they have to be?”
To my relief, Tor didn’t have the stomach for mounting a campaign to promote Saucer Wisdom as being literally true. Instead we marketed Saucer Wisdom as a playful and visionary science book about our possible futures—which, to some extent, the book is. Possibly it might have worked better to describe the book as a transreal science fiction novel—which is a more accurate description of its nature.
Like Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire—which initially appears to be a long poem accompanied by extensive footnotes—Saucer Wisdom is deceptive. It doesn’t look like a novel, but a novel is what it actually is.
Saucer Wisdom didn’t sell particularly well. Saucer true believers were offended by my irreverent novelistic tone, while science buffs were put off by the presence of any UFOs at all. Some people didn’t seem able to figure out which parts of the book were serious and which parts were funny—and the uncertainty made them uptight.