Seek!: Selected Nonfiction Read online

  * * *

  title : Seek! : Selected Nonfiction

  author : Rucker, Rudy v. B.

  publisher : Four Walls Eight Windows

  isbn10 | asin : 1568581335

  print isbn13 : 9781568581330

  ebook isbn13 : 9780585251783

  language : English

  subject Popular culture--United States.

  publication date : 1999

  lcc : PS3568.U298S44 1999eb

  ddc : 814/.54

  subject : Popular culture--United States.

  Page iii

  Seek!

  Selected Nonfiction by Rudy Rucker

  Page iv

  © 1999 Rudy Rucker

  Published in the United States by:

  Four Walls Eight Windows

  39 West 14th Street, room 503

  New York, N.Y., 10011

  Visit our website at http://www.fourwallseightwindows.com

  First printing April 1999.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechan- ical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

  Rucker, Rudy v. B. (Rudy von Bitter), 1946-

  Seek! Selected Nonfiction/by Rudy Rucker.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 1-56858-133-5 (cloth)

  ISBN: 1-56858-138-6 (paper)

  I. Title.

  PS3568.U298S44 1999

  814'.54dc21 99-10706

  CIP

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Text design by Ink, Inc.

  Printed in Canada

  Page v

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Seek What?

  1

  37 Questions

  8

  Part I: Science

  Welcome to Silicon Valley

  33

  A Brief History of Computers

  40

  Cellular Automata

  64

  Four Kinds of Cyberspace

  85

  Life and Artificial Life

  95

  Hacking Code

  119

  A New Golden Age of Calculation

  122

  Mr. Nanotechnology

  131

  Fab! Inside Chip Fabrication Plants

  135

  Goodbye Big Bang

  144

  Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel

  152

  Part II: Life

  Drugs and Live Sex

  159

  Jerry's Neighbors

  167

  The Central Teachings of Mysticism

  175

  Page vi

  Haunted by Phil Dick

  180

  California New Edge

  188

  Vision in Yosemite

  202

  Cyberculture in Japan

  208

  The Manual of Evasion

  238

  Memories of Arf

  254

  Island Notes

  265

  In Search of Bruegel

  274

  Part III: Art

  A Transrealist Manifesto

  301

  What SF Writers Want

  304

  What Is Cyberpunk?

  315

  Cyberpunk Lives!

  323

  Interview with Ivan Stang

  337

  Special Effects: Kit-Bashing the Cosmic Matte

  342

  Art in Amsterdam

  350

  Pieter Bruegel's Peasant Dance

  354

  Additional Information

  Dates of Composition

  361

  Bibliography

  363

  Page vii

  INTRODUCTION

  Page viii

  Rudy's parents Embry and Marianne in 1950.

  Page 1

  Seek What?

  I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 22, 1946. At that time my father Embry had a small business making inexpensive furniture and my mother Marianne was a housewife. I have one sibling, my brother Embry, Jr., who is five years older than me, and he still lives in Louisville.

  My childhood was comfortable, conventional, middle-class. We lived in a ranch house my father built on two acres in a part of town that was not quite yet a suburb of Louisville. For awhile the neighboring properties were farms. There weren't that many kids around, but I had one or two friends. We spent a lot of time in the pastures, it was always fun to play with the little brooks. New developments were going up all around us, and exploring the building sites was another thing we kids did a lot. I loved to read. TV barely existed yet, at least not in Louisville.

  My mother, who was born in Germany, was an enthusiastic gardener, amateur artist and potter. She was something of a character, soft-spoken but very opinionated. Two of her favorite words were "disgusting" and "amazing." When I was about eight, my father's business went bankrupt, but he was able to start another company that made small wood parts for furniture, things like table legs or the backs of drawers. This type of business is called a ''dimension manufacturer."

  I went to private schools, graduating from St. Xavier High School - I was one of the few non-Catholics to attend that school; my parents had the idea it was very good for science. "St. X." While I was in high school, my father became ordained as an Episcopal priest, and worked as parish priest for the rest of his life, although he retained the ownership of his dimension manufacturing business.

  I went to Swarthmore College from 19631967, majoring in mathematics and getting a Bachelor's degree. I had a lot of fun there, and was sorry to graduate. At this point, my choices were the draft or grad school, so I had no hesitation in going to Rutgers University from

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  19671972. I got my Master's and my Ph.D. in mathematics. My area of specialization was mathematical logic, with my thesis on transfinite set theory. In 1967, I married my college sweetheart, Sylvia Bogsch, and not too long after that we had our three children: Georgia (1969), Rudy, Jr. (1972), and Isabel (1974).

  After grad school, I got my first job in the mathematics department at the State University College at Geneseo, New York, a job which lasted from 19721978. I started teaching the "Higher Geometry" course there, and turned it into a series of lectures on the fourth dimension. Eventually I wrote the lectures up as Geometry, Relativity and The Fourth Dimension, and managed to get them published by Dover Publications, a house which primarily publishes public-domain books by dead authors. They didn't pay me much, but it was enough to throw myself a good thirtieth birthday party - and my writing career was on its way.

  The next thing I wrote was a science fiction novel called Spacetime Donuts. This was in the summer of 1976. I wasn't sure I could write a novel, but I just kept going and after awhile it was done. Nobody wanted to publish it, but then I came across a new magazine called Unearth which was willing to serialize it in three parts. As it happened, Unearth went out of business before publishing Part Three.

  We were interested in finding a way to move out of cold, rainy upstate New York, and in 19781980 I luckily got a grant from the Alexander yon Humboldt Foundation, which is funded by the German government. The five of us lived in Heidelberg for two years, the kids making their way through German schools, and Sylvia struggling to keep everything together. (Bad news: in Germany, all the kids come home for lunch. Every day!) I had a pe
aceful office in the Mathematics Institute of the University of Heidelberg, and ended up writing most of Infinity and the Mind as well as two novels there: White Light and Software. White Light was picked up by Ace Books in the U.S., and by Virgin Books in the U.K. And then Ace bought Spacetime Donuts and Software as a package, and I was really a writer.

  The only math professor job I could find back in the States was at a tiny college called Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in, of all places, Lynchburg, Virginia, the home of then-prominent right-wing evangelist Jerry Falwell. After two years at Randolph-Macon

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  (19801982), I decided to give full-time writing a try. Sylvia and the kids and I stayed in Lynchburg; we had a nice big old house and it wasn't a bad place for the children to grow up. In the years 19821986, I wrote six books. This period marked the birth of cyberpunk science fiction, and I became recognized as a founding father of the movement. My cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware each won a Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback SF novel of the year. It must have been one of God's little jokes to have me do this from the Moral Majority's home town.

  As my own alternative to cyberpunk, I also developed a style of writing which I call transrealism. The essence of transrealism is to write about one's real life in fantastic terms. The Secret of Life, White Light, and The Sex Sphere are examples of my transreal novels. The first recasts a traditional coming of age memoir as a UFO novel, the second is about my time as a mystical mathematician in Geneseo, while the third turns my two years in Germany into a tale of higher dimensions and nuclear terrorism.

  Being a full-time writer in Lynchburg got to be too hard and thankless a way to make too meager a living. I wrote Mind Tools, a nonfiction book about mathematics and information, which got me to wanting to teach math again. When an old friend told me about a job opening at San Jose State University, I applied for it, and to my delight I was hired in 1986 and am still there today.

  I still can't quite believe that I got the chance to move to California. When I lived in Lynchburg, I was like some Darwin's finch with a specialized, highly-evolved beak designed for eating one certain kind of seed. There weren't any of those seeds at all in Lynchburg, but when I got to California they were lying all over the ground. In the Golden State, I was warmly welcomed by a great band of hackers, academics, science fiction writers and freaks - all on my wavelength.

  When I started my job in the SJSU Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, I was urged to consider teaching computer science as well as math. I did not know a great deal about computer science at the time (understatement!), although my doctoral work in mathematical logic had certainly familiarized me with theoretical computing. The first computer science course I was assigned was anything but theoretical: it was Intel chip assembly language! Fortunately,

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  another professor was teaching the same course, and I was able to attend his lectures to help myself figure out what was going on. And soon I found something I was really interested in programming: cellular automata, which are parallel programs that produce rapid-fire self-generating computer graphics animations.

  During this time, and perhaps in reaction to my high-tech surroundings, I wrote an historical science fiction novel called The Hollow Earth. I also got involved with the magazine Mondo 2000, edited by a collection of Berkeley characters interested in cyberculture. Thanks to Mondo's influence, "cyberpunk" became something of a household word, taking on a broader meaning and even appearing on the cover of Time. I co-edited the Mondo 2000 User's Guide with R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu. As R. U. put it, "We need a mathematical logician, or we'll never put this thing together."

  As well as teaching me a lot about computer science, my interest in cellular automata led to a second job as a software engineer during the years 19881992. My job title was "mathenaut." This was with Autodesk, Inc., of Sausalito, California, makers of the popular AutoCAD program. It seemed that John Walker, the co-founder and then-chairman of Autodesk, was fascinated by cellular automata. After I met Walker at the Hackers 2.0 conference in 1987, he hired me to work on some cellular automata software with him. I worked on four shipped software products at Autodesk: Rudy Rucker's Cellular Automata Laboratory, James Gleick's Chaos, The Cyberspace Developer's Kit, and Atrtificial Life Lab. My transreal novel The Hacker and the Ants was heavily influenced by having worked inside a Silicon Valley software company.

  A drawback of working at Autodesk and SJSU at the same time was that I had very little time to write. In recent years I've gone back to just two careers: teaching and writing. In teaching, I feel I'm performing a definite social good; another point is that when I'm teaching, I'm learning - from covering new material, from having to organize my thoughts into lectures, and from the unpredictable conversations with students and colleagues. But since I mostly teach courses like Software Engineering for Windows, the course preparations do soak up a lot of time. Being a computer science teacher is like living on a Stairmaster. You continually have to keep stepping

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  Rudy and daughter Isabel in 1998. (Photo by S. Rucker.)

  up the level. In any case, as I write this introduction, I'm on sabbatical and I have more time than usual for my writing.

  In June, 1998, I completed the text and drawings for my "transreal nonfiction" work called Saucer Wisdom (Tor, 1999). The book recounts my (alleged) experiences with a UFO contactee named Frank Shook. The saucers purportedly showed Frank Shook many bits of Earth's future - right up through the year 4004. Saucer Wisdom gives detailed and illustrated accounts of Frank Shook's experiences, and is in this respect a millennial work of future extrapolation.

  In November, 1998, I finished writing a new SF novel, Realware (Avon, 2000), the fourth book in the Ware series. And right now, this very minute in January, 1999, I'm putting the finishing touches on my twentieth book, the nonfiction anthology, Seek!, that you hold in your hands. So why call it Seek! anyway?

  I picked the title partly because of a catch phrase I invented when I was writing the manual for the CA Lab software:

  Seek Ye the Gnarl!

  Some motivation for this phrase can be found in my "Cellular Automata" and "Life and Artificial Life" essays below. For the moment, suffice it to say that ''gnarl" is being used here in the sense of "gnarly," which is one of my favorite words now that I live in California. Surfers use it to refer to certain kinds of waves, kids use it to refer to dauntingly strange events of any kind, and I use it to apply to things

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  Sylvia, Georgia, Rudy, Isabel and Rudy, Jr., in 1998. (Self-timer photo.)

  that have a level of chaos that is tuned right to the boundary between order and disorder. When I write an interactive chaos-based computer graphics program, what I'm normally doing is seeking gnarl.