Seek!: Selected Nonfiction Page 3
Q5: When you were young, what kind of science fiction you liked to read? Tell us your growing-up story in SF field. Do you consider yourself as a science fiction writer?
A5: When I was young my favorite science fiction writer was Robert Sheckley. When I was fifteen I was injured when the chain of a swing broke and I ruptured my spleen. I was in the hospital, and my mother brought me Untouched by Human Hands by Robert Sheckley. Somewhere Nabokov writes about the "initial push that set the ball rolling down these corridors of years," and for me it was Sheckley's book. I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen, and I knew in my heart of hearts that the greatest thing I could ever become was a science fiction writer. For many years, it seemed like too much to dare hope for.
Q6: How do you want to be called? A writer, a programmer, a mathematician, a mathenaut, or a cultural hero?
A6: A writer. Writing is far and away the most important thing that I do. Over the long run, only the written language matters. Of course "cultural hero" sounds tempting, and it would be nice if I could briefly become one. In his blurb for my memoir All the Visions, Lee Ballantine said, "Novelist, scientist, and cult hero Rudy Rucker has emerged as a key figure in the cyberpunk culture that has developed at this century's close."
Q7: It seems that there is a strong relationship between your nonfiction and novels. For instance, White Light can be considered as a sort of novelization of Infinity and the Mind. Will you explain the relationship for us. And, do you have any plan to write a new nonfiction book?
A7: That's exactly true about White Light. And Infinity and the Mind also includes the Software idea about self-reproducing robots evolving to become intelligent; this is in a section called "Towards Robot Consciousness." The ideas in The Fourth Dimension appear in The Sex Sphere and again in Realware, which has a number of scenes in the fourth dimension. The Hacker and the Ants can be thought of as the fiction version of the research I carried out to write my soft-
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ware package Artificial Life Lab. In the case of Freeware and Realware, I wrote a fantastic made-up nonfiction work, Saucer Wisdom, to introduce the science ideas used. The Freeware "uvvy" communication device, the Realware "alla" matter controller, the aliens who travel as radio waves - they're all in Saucer Wisdom, presented as God's own truth. It's like now I'm reaching a point where even my nonfiction is speculative.
I used to like to say that SF is my laboratory for conducting thought-experiments. But maybe when I said that I was just trying to impress my academic friends. Now that I'm a tenured full professor, I'm more likely to tell the truth. I don't write SF to help my science. If anything, I study science to help my SF! I love SF for the ideas, but more purely I love it simply for the rock'n'roll feel of it, the power-chords, the crunch, funk.
My agent has often urged me to write another nonfiction book, as these seem to make more money over the long term than do my novels. But I'm not quite sure if I can do another one. In my books Infinity and the Mind and The Fourth Dimension, I was laying out the vast knowledge that I had about a field that I had been obsessed with for many years, respectively, mathematical logic and higher dimensions. I absolutely had to write those two books - or burst. Mind Tools was a little different, it was more of a survey of mathematics as a whole, trying to relate everything to the notion of "information."
Now I've been in Silicon Valley for thirteen years and I know a lot about computers and software engineering; my day job is teaching Software Engineering at San Jose State University. I've been working on successive drafts of a software engineering project textbook with a CD ROM about writing Windows programs for simple video games. It has the working title Software Project: Visualization and Videogames with Windows MFC. But I don't think of that as a "real" book; it expresses nothing that's deeply important to me, and it'll be totally obsolete seven years after its published, if not sooner. It's simply a chore that I feel I need to finish because there is real short-term need for this book; there isn't any book out there that does what my Software Project will do. But a lot of it is just techie Windows gobbledy-gook.
At the low level, teaching programming is like teaching automobile repair - just having to explain these random arbitrary things
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like the part-numbers of the pieces inside some particular model vehicle's carburetor. And you can't just skip over that stuff because the whole point of programming is to get a nice program that works really well on some specific actual machine.
At a higher level, I've learned a lot about computer stuff like fractals, chaos, cellular automata, complexity, virtual reality, and artificial life, so it would seem like a good idea to write a book about that. But these topics are very picked-over; too many people have written about them. It's like looking for a cigarette butt on the West Point parade ground. Even so, in 1997 I was trying hard to get a contract to write a book like this. I wanted to tie the computer-inspired ideas more closely to immediate perceptions of Nature and to one's own mental experiences. But somehow I ended up with a contract to write Saucer Wisdom, a book about my fictional encounters with a man who'd been shown the future by some saucer aliens! It's not always easy to predict what book you end up writing. Certainly my work with computers has very much affected the way I see the world, and maybe someday I can figure out a marketable way to write about this.
Q8: You told me that you were considering to write a story based on your experiences visiting Japan. Is there any progress on that project?
A8: Hmm, I had in fact forgotten my reckless promise to write such a story. The thing is, William Gibson has written so much about Japan in his books, and he's done it so well. He's kind of made it his core subject matter. So I'm resisting the notion of writing about Japan. But if I were to write about Japan, I'd write about a lizard I saw in the famous Zen garden in Kyoto. A lizard living under a rock in the most famous Zen garden. How enlightened is that lizard - or what? I could have him be a limpware moldie construct inhabited by pay-per-view users.
Q9: Recently I bought some CD ROMS: The Hugo/Nebula Anthology, Isaac Asimov's Ultimate Robots, Robert Grudin's BOOK (Expanded Book version), and so on. How do you think about those multimedia titles? Any plan of making one for yourself?.
A9: When I get really old, I want to take everything I've done: all the books, all the journals, all the software - take all that and put it in
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one giant wonderdisk, or chip or S-cube or whatever. But I'm not done doing new stuff yet. And the longer I wait, the better and more together the tech will get. Not that multimedia tech will ever be stable. As someone who's been involved in developing computer software, I've really gotten to hate the impermanence of computer platforms. It's like writing on the water, like pissing in the wind. You knock yourself out creating a CD-ROM, and five years later everyone's switched to DVD. Only writing on paper is for the ages.
Q10: As a question to a philosopher of modern age, do you still believe the Many Worlds Interpretation? In Mind Tools, you defined reality as a group of cellular automata, but after that you seem to have changed your opinion. What made you think that reality is more complicated than that?
A10: The Many Worlds Interpretation is a science fictional kind of quantum mechanics view of the universe, and no, I don't think it's true. I think our specific universe exists because there is some intelligence or design that carves it out. I don't think it reasonable to say that our world exists only because every other possible universe exists as well.
The Many Worlds Interpretation is a notion that comes out of quantum mechanics, and I don't have good feelings about quantum mechanics at all. I have the basic layman's response that quantum mechanics is a bunch of hand-waving by scientists to cover up the fact that there's something they don't understand at all. Some popular books on quantum mechanics make it sound like we're supposed to be happy and intrigued about the nonsensical aspect of quantum mechanics - about the duality and uncertainty and complementarity stuff. I'm not happy about it at
all, I think it sucks. My mathematical training was as a set theorist, and I have this hope that maybe if some day physicists start using actually infinite quantities in their theories then the weirdness of quantum mechanics might be banished.
I have a tendency to think the universe is like whatever I've been recently studying. When I got interested in cellular automata, I started to think the universe is a cellular automaton (CA) - which is a kind of multidimensional grid of little cells that carry out interacting computations in parallel. Of course there's no grid in the real world, so the definition of a CA would have to be changed to make it more like a coral reef. You could have the cells themselves carry the grid, that is, each cell
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could carry a list of connections to its "neighbors." But granularity is still a problem, that is, why should the world divide into cells of a certain size? That sounds like quantum mechanics, which is just what we don't want! So then I thought maybe the cells could be made of smaller cells, which are made of smaller cells, ad infinitum. This could be a chance to have some infinities. Think of a pattern like a fractal. So this is why, at the end of Mind Tools, I said reality is "a fractal CA of inconceivable dimensions." (I use "inconceivable" here in a special technical sense to mean "larger than any finite number that people can name.")
The "inconceivable dimensions" part has to do with the fact that I think that any view of reality should include the mental element as well as physical space and time. And there's a real sense in which our minds inhabit a world of inconceivably many dimensions.
But all the science can easily miss the immediacy of how the world feels. At an immediate level, reality is very gnarly and very novelistic. It's a supreme work of art, inconceivably rich. And we'll never know any final answers.
Athens, Greece
From: Alia Skourtsi
For: ZeroOne Monthly Magazine
Q11: Are still mathematics able to help us in exploring ourselves and the universe?
A11: Of course, mathematics is the best forever. Mathematics is the science of form, and everything is form - plus the single divine content of existence.
Q12: Do you really believe that cyberspace is sterile and boring without A-Life organisms wandering in it? In a few years it is going to be overpopulated by people. Why should we fill it with more living organisms?
A12: In this context, I am thinking of graphical representations of cyberspace, such as in for instance the game Quake or Half-Life. These worlds would be more interesting if there were artificially alive things in them continually changing them. Mold, for instance, or plants, or ants.
Q13: Do you still want to create a second self inside a computer?.
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Why? Would you like somebody else to lead your life or are you seeking eternity?
A13: I would still, yes, like to make an interactive multimedia hyperlinked compilation of all my writings. Interacting with the construct would be in some sense like talking to me. This construct would easily be able, for instance, to answer these interview questions.
I want to do this because it is a type of immortality, and like most people I am interested in extending my influence on the world as much as possible. I also happen to think that my information and knowledge is valuable, and that it would be an objectively good thing to have a Rudoid simmie available for the edification of future generations. In Saucer Wisdom, I call such a program a "life-box."
Q14: What do you think is the main disadvantage of the contemporary computers, besides being slow?
A14: They are very hard to program. You can have an idea for a program in an hour but it takes you a year to properly implement it. Of course all art is like this.
Q15: Do you think that the digital revolution will lead us to a more democratic society?
A15: I think politics in every form sucks. The more you think about politics, the more of your energy is siphoned off and turned into garbage.
Well, I'm especially full of cynicism today because I'm so tired of hearing about the idiotic Republicans. Russia got rid of the Communists, why can't the U.S. get rid of the Republicans? It'll be hard to ever get rid of them; as hard as China getting rid of the Communists.
But yes, in the sense that people can get better info and make input more easily it would seem that digitizing makes things more democratic. But if there is a whole lot of democratic input it's just going to be ignored the way it is now. The majority of Americans want to get rid of guns, and everyone knows this, but nevertheless the Republicans in Congress are still capable of trying to make assault weapons legal again. It is to weep.
Bottom line: fuck politics, it'll just rip you off and break your heart. Focus on getting your own life in order.
Q16: Why do you prefer the term transrealism more than cyberpunk?.
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A16: One very practical reason is that when people mention "cyberpunk," they always mention Gibson and Sterling and don't always mention me. I prefer a genre word that applies primarily to me! "Transreal" is my word; I made it up. It has to do with the idea of writing SF about my immediate perceptions, and using real people as models for the characters. This is the way I almost always write. Many of my books are also, of course, cyberpunk.
Q17: Does cyberpunk have an expiration day? If yes, what do you think will follow?
A17: Cyberpunk is a stage in the endless Bohemian subculture that created the beats, the hippies, the punks, and the grungers of today. This type of countercultural sensibility will never go away. But cyberpunk in the sense of writing about computers may someday not be interesting, just as writing about space flight is not currently interesting. As long as Gibson, Sterling, Shirley and I are writing, cyberpunk will still be around; just as beat writing was still around as long as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs were writing. And maybe even longer. Even though Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs are all dead now, there's still certainly the possibility of others using the "beat" sensibility in their writing.
Q18: Which places in the Net do you visit more often?
A18: Well, ahem, there's my home page www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker. Not that I myself would go look at it over and over! But if you're interested in computers, I have a lot of free software for you there.
Mostly I just read my email. That in itself uses up a fair amount of my time. I get plenty of email, and that pretty much satisfies my Net hunger. So I don't cruise the Web that much. I don't find it a pleasant way to get information. I don't like waiting for a page to download and then having it be a page I don't want to see. It's like being in a strait-jacket having an overbearing Nurse Ratched feeding you a McDonald's Happy Meal. And she's using a tiny souvenir spoon that has advertising on it.
This said, maybe we have this leftover hominid instinct to stare at something flickering in the evening - like a fire. So either you stare at the TV or at a computer screen, and certainly a computer screen's no worse for you than TV. A computer has the plus of being more
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interactive, but it has the minus of being less easy to watch with friends.
Q19: What is your wildest dream?
A19: Being able to fly; I dream about this a lot, a couple of times a month.
Q20: Have you ever been to Greece or met Greek people? What is your opinion about our mentality?
A20: I have never been to Greece, although I would like to go there. I've been around Europe a lot, but never made it that far east. I have no particular opinion about Greek mentality; the only Greeks I'm familiar with are the ancient intellectual heroes such as Plato, Euclid and Zeno. I imagine Greeks to be both passionate and logical.
Tokyo, Japan
From: Michiharu Sakurai
For: "Noise" issue of [relax]
Q21: I think people feel more relieved in some disorderliness than being in perfect order. What lead people feel so?
A21: Complete order is lifeless, and we don't feel safe in a lifeless environment. In a fanatically clean setting, you yourself feel like a pi
ece of dirt which is perhaps going to be cleaned away.
Put differently, noise is an aspect of chaos, and chaotic processes are what we as living organisms are made of.