by Rudy Rucker
So be it.
A year after I’d retired, I had a fleeting nostalgia for professorship, and in the fall of 2005, I went back to San Jose State for one semester to teach a graduate philosophy course on “Philosophy and Computers.” I had an interesting bunch of people in my class. I mostly talked about The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, but I also wrote two linked short stories that I read aloud to the students.
After the semester ended, I kept thinking about those two stories, and I ramped them into my next novel, Postsingular, which I worked on all through 2006. The title plays off the then-popular notion of an impending technological singularity after which computers are intelligent and everything is changed. The idea had first been proposed by the SF writer and computer science professor Vernor Vinge back in 1993, but over time, some people had taken it up with a nearly religious fervor—there was a Singularity Institute, a Singularity University and an annual Singularity Conference. Some of these people seemed to imagine that taking a lot of vitamins would make them into geniuses who lived forever. I was mildly annoyed by the hype, and I liked the idea of leapfrogging past it—thus my title, Postsingular.
It wasn’t easy for me to write that book. For a time, we SF writers had been resisting the singularity. But Charles Stross had shown us the way in his superb novel Accelerando. Once I read Stross, I realized that writing about postsingular worlds only requires a straight face and a little practice. Earlier SF writers learned to write about starships, telepathy, robots, and aliens. It’s really no harder for us to write about worlds where a toothpick might be as smart as Albert Einstein. Just start pitching the bull—and keep it consistent.
Although I’m often able to sell my short stories to science fiction magazines, it’s a fair amount of trouble for very little pay, and my stories do sometimes bounce back. In the fall of 2006 I hit upon the idea of starting my own online science fiction magazine.
I’d recently written a story with my old SF pal Paul Di Filippo, a tale called, “Elves of the Subdimensions.” I was in a rush to get the story published so that I could put it into an upcoming anthology of my stories. Although some will argue that it’s a good policy to have at least one brand-new story in each anthology, my feeling at the time was that I wanted to publish “Elves of the Subdimensions” in a magazine as well.
There wasn’t time to get “Elves of the Subdimensions” into one of the major print magazines, so I tried one of the existing online SF webzines—and they had the temerity to turn our story down. And that’s when I decided to start my own webzine. I mean—why should I court rejection from strangers who weren’t even going to pay me, just in the hopes that they might post my story online?
Thanks to working on Rudy’s Blog, I knew enough about the web to be quite sure that I could design and organize an online magazine. And given that my blog was getting quite a few hits, I’d be able to steer a respectably large audience to the webzine. There’d be no expense, as my son Rudy’s internet business, Monkeybrains, was willing to host my webzine as well as my blog.
What to call the webzine? The name jumped out at me from a line Paul had written in our joint story. The elves, who live in the subdimensions (whatever the heck that means), are discussing the oddities of our human world.
“The high-planers ingest sweet chunks of their worldstuff!”
“They use picture boxes to learn their hive mind’s mood!”
“Of flurbing, they know not!”
Yes, my webzine’s title had to be Flurb. I liked the Mad Magazine sound of the word, and its vague feel of stumble-bum incompetence. If pressed, I might define “flurb” as a verb meaning “to carry out a complex, non-commercial artistic activity,” and “flurb” as a noun could mean “a gnarly artwork that’s incomprehensible to the average person.”
Rudy Jr. helped me register a domain name for my webzine, www.flurb.net.
I started by asking my SF writer friends for stories, and, as the issues went on, I branched out from there, first turning to writers that I knew less well, and then starting to read contributions sent in by strangers.
I have a fairly clean design for the zine, running a colorful border down along the left side of each story. For the borders, I use patterns that I create with CAPOW, the cellular automata software that I’d developed on with my students at San Jose State—I use a fresh pattern for each story.
And, just as on my blog, I illustrate the stories with photographs that I’ve taken, although for Flurb, I cast the photos into a slightly larger format. I only do a new issue every six months, so I have a large number of photos to choose from. I make a pool of the best ones, and I choose the individual illustrations from the pool fairly quickly, almost at random, depending on the gods of synchronicity and on the pattern-creating qualities of the readers’ minds.
I’ve come to enjoy the interactions with my Flurb authors, and in the fall of 2010, I reached issue #10. At this point, we get in excess of sixty thousand visitors per issue. And no money at all is involved. I don’t charge people to read Flurb, nor do we carry any advertising, nor do I pay my authors. I try to treat them well, they get a little publicity out of it, and they get to keep all rights. It’s a sideline for all of us.
I like to think that Flurb is a kind of clear-channel border-radio station for SF. As a personal matter, having Flurb as an outlet has freed me to write some stories that are so quirky and non-commercial that I wouldn’t have done them otherwise. For instance I wrote a story called “Tangier Routines,” about William Burroughs having sex with—and being in some sense eaten by—the early computer scientist Alan Turing. A lot of people liked this gnarly tale. But I could never ever have published it for a large audience in any locale other than Flurb.
Editing an issue of Flurb twice a year is a slight distraction from my writing—but writers are always looking for distractions. You get distracted until you miss writing enough to want to do it again.
Another thing I like to do these days is to paint. As I mentioned earlier, I took up painting when I was working on my Bruegel novel in 1999. And over the last decade, I’ve been painting more and more.
I have a visual imagination. For me writing is a like dreaming while I’m awake. That is, I see the scene in my mind’s eye before I write it. Sometimes I’ll nurse an image of a place or a situation for quite some time before I write about it, in fact I sometimes write a book simply to be able to mentally visit certain locales that I’ve dreamed up. I pretty much can’t write a novel unless I have an image of a fabulous place where I want to go. By writing about these scenes, I make them more real to myself. And painting is another way to layer on more details.
All along, I’d been making little pen and paper drawings of fictional scenes before writing about them. But now I have the more heavy-duty option of breaking out my tubes of paint. I smear things around, I drool over the pretty colors, and nothing is perfectly neat. A painting takes longer than a drawing, and I get more deeply into it.
My level of manual control is low enough that I tend to surprise myself with what I end up painting. Sometimes these surprises show me things that are a good fit for my current novel or story—you might say that I’m channeling information from another part of my brain. But it’s fine if I don’t use the images in my fiction. The main thing is that I’m feeding my soul and getting into the moment and, if I’m lucky, turning off my inner monologue. Given that painting doesn’t involve words at all, it’s even more meditative than writing.
Painting has, however, taught me a few practical things about writing. When I’m doing a painting, for instance, it’s not unusual to completely paint over some screwed-up patch and do that part over. I think this has made me feel more relaxed about revising my fiction. And I’ve also noticed that the details that I haven’t yet visualized are the ones that give me the most trouble. But the only way to proceed is to put it down wrong, and then keep changing it until it works.
I’ve done about seventy paintings over the years 1999 to 2010, and
I’ve even sold a few. I maintain a website for them, and I also have it set up so that people can buy prints. But I haven’t gotten heavily into the marketing aspects of being a painter. As my painter friend COOP remarked, “It’s a whole new way to break your heart.” For now I’m content to have painting be something that I do for fun.
This said, when Postsingular came out in November 2007, I did manage to have a gallery show in San Francisco. Sylvia and I went to a painting workshop in the South of France the previous summer—which had been a really wonderful time. In our class we’d met a character called Kevin Brown who runs a little gallery called Live Worms in the North Beach area of San Francisco.
Kevin uses his gallery mainly as his studio, but he’s willing to rent it out for a weekend to artists who want to put on a show. I was able to talk the Tor Books publicity department into paying the rent, so the Postsingular launch ended up being a three day North Beach party in an art gallery filled with my paintings.
It was great to my pictures all hanging together, with friends and fans milling around. Another dream come true.
After writing Postsingular, I launched into a sequel, a novel called Hylozoic, which I worked on from March, 2007, though June, 2008. “Hylozoic” is an actual dictionary word that means “pertaining to the philosophical doctrine that matter is intrinsically alive.” And that’s the theme of the book.
Humans—and some invading aliens—have learned how to tweak the quantum computations that are inherent in ordinary matter, and while they’re at it, they’ve developed telepathy. Human-level artificial intelligence is ubiquitous—a stone has a mind now, and you can talk to it. Every object is conscious and alive.
This was a situation I’d always wanted to write about—and my work on the Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul had shown me the way. If a fluttering leaf can emulate my brain, then the leaf itself can be conscious. Why not? After all, we’re talking science fiction here.
As another feature for Hylozoic, I used the artist Hieronymus Bosch as a character. At one point, I’d thought I might write a historical novel about Bosch—like I’d done with Bruegel. But somehow I didn’t feel enough empathy with the man to want to carry out such a project. It felt okay to put him into a science fiction novel.
I’d often wondered what kind of person Bosch was—some passages in his pictures seem rather cruel, in other spots you pick up a feeling of ecstasy, and then again there’s often a feeling of mockery and satire. I enjoyed combining these hints into the character that I developed for Hylozoic, where Bosch comes across as a genius, a devoted artist, a sarcastic mystic, and something of a prick.
As yet another element in Hylozoic, I included some aliens called Hrulls who resemble flying manta rays—this harked back to the mantas I’d seen while SCUBA diving some years before.
As I mentioned in the first chapter, on July 1, 2008—the day after finishing my final revision of Hylozoic, as a matter of fact—I had that brain hemorrhage.
One realization I had in the hospital was that I’m not really so scared of death anymore. At some point, it’ll be time, and it’s going to be okay. It happens to everyone. And I’ve had a nice long run.
Over the coming weeks, thanks to numerous brain scans, we learned that my burst vein had been something in the nature of an isolated birth defect—a malformed vein that had been lurking in my brain for sixty-two years. And, so far as the doctors could tell, there weren’t any more spots like this to worry about. So now it was time to get back to my life.
In the fall and winter of 2008, I wrote the first draft of this, my autobiography, Nested Scrolls. I let it sit for about nine months and then, in the fall of 2009, I came back to the work to revise it and complete it. I’d been almost scared to reread it, given that I started it so soon after my brain event. But now I think it seems good.
At the same time that I started thinking about this autobiography, I was thinking about a somewhat fantasy-like SF novel, a book called Jim and the Flims, about a young man who nearly dies and then, although still living and fully recovered, travels into the afterworld to deal with some potentially Earth-destroying beings called flims. The story arc of the book involves Jim’s mission to bring his dead wife back from the underworld as well—it’s kind of an Orpheus and Eurydice tale, only, given my penchant for happy endings, I’m planning to let Eurydice actually return.
I worked on Jim and the Flims all through 2009, and I’ll finish it in 2010.
Not that there’s any rush. At this point in my career, I worry a little about repeating myself, and about adjusting my work to appeal to the public’s changing tastes. After seeing the 2009 traveling King Tut show, I decided to add a gold sarcophagus and the reanimated mummy of Amenhotep to Jim and the Flims. And I’m thinking that next I might do a whole novel about William Burroughs and Alan Turing. Yeah, baby. Keep it bouncing.
Recently I was talking to the lordly old SF master Robert Silverberg about the ever-changing cast of SF writers. “When I go to a convention I don’t know anyone anymore,” he griped, exaggerating for effect. “I feel like Chaucer.”
When my father was on his last legs, around 1992, he said, “What was I so worried about all those years? What difference did any of it make?”
I felt both liberated and undermined by this remark.
Liberated—because Pop was reminding me that, in the end, my creative turmoil and business deals and emotional adjustments would come, in the end, to nothing. I was going to die just the same. So why spend my whole life tying myself knots trying to make things right?
Undermined—because, after all, the emotions, the creativity and the deals are the things that make my life interesting and pleasant. And if these things are for nothing, then my life is for nothing.
Ultimately I decided not to internalize Pop’s late, despairing views. Even if my struggles lead only to the grave, they mean something day to day. I’m keeping myself amused and happy. I’m helping Sylvia and the children make their ways through life. And I’ll be leaving some readable books behind.
Like many writers, I spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about the relative success of my works. But I also work at being grateful for what I have. After all, the vast majority of people don’t get published at all. My books are printed and find substantial audiences; I get money and respect for my work. I’m lucky to have the ability to write.
My book, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, includes a chapter on viewing society as a computation. Thanks to researching this topic, I’ve finally came to accept that writers’ sales obey a scaling law that’s technically known as an inverse power law distribution. You’re not getting lackluster book advances because someone is actively screwing you. It’s the scaling law.
The scaling law applies across the board—to the populations of cities, the number of hits on websites, the heights of mountains, the number of friends that people have, the areas of lakes, and the sales of books. There’s no getting around it. The graph of size versus rank isn’t a down-slanting straight line, it’s a curve that swoops down fast and hugs the horizontal axis like a graph of 1/x. Thus, if you’re the hundredth-most popular writer, you earn a hundredth as much as the most popular one. Instead of a million dollars, you get ten thousand bucks. That’s how nature is. It’s not anyone’s fault.
Even though my financial rewards are modest, I revel in the craft of writing. I like being able to control these little realities where things work out the way I want. It’s no accident that so many of my heroes leave the ordinary world for adventures in fabulous other lands. In just the same way, I move my mind from the day-to-day world into the fantastic worlds of my books. I make art because it feels good.
Writing is hard, and after each book is finished, I wonder if I’ll be able to write another. But I keep coming back. And I’ve got painting as well—another path to creative bliss.
I’ll end with one last Micronesia story. While touring around that obscure South Pacific island of Pohnpei in February, 2005, Embry
and I found our way to an enormous petroglyph rock. It was smooth to the touch, a hundred feet long, resting in the jungle beside an open field with green interior mountains beyond the field, and with heartbreakingly beautiful tree crowns waving against the pale blue sky.
The petroglyph designs carved into the rock were quite old—we saw images of paddles or knives, of woman’s vaginas or shields, some bow-tie shapes, and the outline of a whole woman.
To find this site we’d asked at a house near it and a betel-nut-chewing guy offered to guide us. We were glad to have him along for a few bucks. Wiley. He banged one spot on the big rock and it sounded a bit hollow and he said, “There is a door in the rock here, and the brothers went inside.”
“What brothers?”
“Two brothers came from far away—” Wiley pointed towards the other side of the island, across the interior mountains, it was maybe ten miles distant, as remote a spot as he knew. “From Kiti. They made these carvings. A giant came, and the brothers hid inside the rock. See here, it’s a picture of a lock and a key.”
I told Wiley that Embry and I were brothers, and then a little later I told him we were from Kiti, which got a good laugh out of him. It was fun to think of Embry and myself as archetypes, brothers from a legend.
In a field nearby, Wiley showed us a “woman rock” which had a crotch and a slit, really quite graphic. He touched the slit for good luck, and so did my brother and I, all of us hoping to see our women soon.
There were other boulders in the field, and Wiley said they were people as well. He said this field was his land, and that the land was a storyboard, which is a kind of wooden bas-relief that Micronesians carve to preserve their legends.
Wiley’s rocky field was a storyboard.
I loved that. He was living mythically and in depth. And that’s how I’d like to think I’ve lived too. It’s been deep and intense, here inside this cosmic novel.