White Light (Axoplasm Books) Read online

  April and I were silent for a few minutes. This was only the second day I’d been conscious, and it was the first time I’d seen Nick and Stuart. It would be good to leave Bernco, to make a fresh start.

  April sat by me for the rest of her half-hour, patting my hand, talking about Iris, spinning plans for our life in New Mexico. She never bothered to ask me what had been in the manhole.

  AFTERWORD

  From 1972 to 1978, 1 was indeed an assistant professor of mathematics at the state college SUCAS (yes, they really do call it that) Geneseo in upstate New York. During the years 1978–1980, I was a visiting scholar at the Mathematics Institute of the University of Heidelberg. My research was to be on Cantor’s Continuum Problem, but sometime in early 1979 I despaired of making any mathematical progress on it and wrote the novel White Light instead.

  Rereading the book nearly twenty years later, I wish that Felix were less self-centered and more considerate of his wife, April. Also I wish that he were aware that there are problems with chronic drug and alcohol use. But I’m proud I wrote it – White Light has nice visualizations of infinity, fine evocations of the time when it was written, heartfelt attempts to break through to ultimate truth, good surreal imagery, and lots of laughs.

  Underground comix were a major influence on the book. I loved Zap’s sex, drugs, surrealism, and humor. Another influence was Rene Daumal’s strange, unfinished book Mount Analogue, which is about a mysterious mountain. A final influence was Franz Kafka. Kafka’s friend Max Brod said that when Kafka read “The Metamorphosis” to him, Kafka laughed so hard that he fell out of his chair. Franz on his back, all eight – or is it six? – legs kicking.

  I sent the manuscript to the Scott Meredith Literary Agency because I’d read an article by Philip K. Dick in which he mentioned that the company was his agent. The agency charged me a couple of hundred dollars to read the manuscript, sent me a savage critique of the book, and told me it was unpublishable. I remembered an adage in an article by Robert Heinlein: “Leave your work on the market until it sells.” So I sent the manuscript directly to some publishers myself.

  I had just read Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors, which I thought was a really good book that was in some ways on the same wavelength as White Light. Miracle Visitors was published by Ace Books, which struck a special chord with me, as my hero William Burroughs’s first book, Junkie, had also been an Ace book. I sent Ace the manuscript of White Light with a note to the effect that “This book is like Miracle Visitors, only better.” If you don’t believe in yourself, who else will?

  A few months later James Baen, then an editor at Ace, wrote back saying that Ace wanted to publish White Light. In the meantime, I’d met Maxim Jakubowski, who was going to edit a line of books for the British record company Virgin. I’d given Maxim a copy of the manuscript, and it turned out that Virgin wanted to publish White Light in England, which was OK with Ace.

  Virgin got the book into print a bit faster, as White Light was very nearly its first book. The Virgin edition came out, I think, in the summer of 1980, and the Ace version came out in the fall.

  The front-cover blurb of the Ace edition gave the impression that the book was a conventional exploration of near-death experiences. “First, Life After Death, then, Illusions, and now – White Light.” But some other Ace flack caught the tone much better on the splash page: “Albert Einstein! Georg Cantor! David Hilbert! Donald Duck! The Secrets of the Universe Revealed!”

  At about the same time I wrote White Light, I wrote a nonfiction book called Infinity and the Mind, which was recently reprinted by Princeton University Press. In some sense the two books are about the same thing: how can the human mind perceive the Absolute Infinite? You might want to look at Infinity and the Mind if White Light has left you hungry for more information about infinity.

  I still believe the basic premises of White Light: that God is a blinding white light that is possible for a human to directly perceive, and that this cosmic One is located at a nexus where Zero and Infinity are the same. One additional belief I’ve acquired in recent years is that rather than being an impersonal metaphysical abstraction, God can and will help individual humans overcome their spiritual difficulties. You just have to ask.

  RUDY RUCKER

  San Jose, California