NEWS FROM THE RUDOID SIMMIE

The following is excerpted from a cumulative email interview with Rudy Rucker. The questions were submitted by different zines from those three seats of culture and learning: Athens, Rome, and Berkeley. Actually reprinted with permission, rather unusual for us here at CNS.

RR: 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 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. 90% of Americans want to get rid of guns, and everyone knows this, but nevertheless the RepubliKKKan KKKongresss wants to make assault weapons legal in the U.S. 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.

ZEROONE: Why do you prefer the term Transrealism more than Cyberpunk?

RR: When people mention "cyberpunk," they always mention Gibson and Sterling and don't 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.

ZEROONE: Does Cyberpunk have an expiration day? If yes, what do you think will follow?

RR: 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 counterculture sensibility will near go away. But cyberpunk in the sense of writing about computers may someday not be interesting, just as writing about space-flight is no longer interesting. As long as Gibson, Sterling, and I are writing, cyberpunk will still be around; just as beat writing is still around as long as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Burroughs write. (Of course Kerouac is dead, but Ginzy and Bill are still at it.)

ZEROONE: What is your wildest dream?

RR: Being able to fly; I dream about this a lot.

DELOS: Rudy, I know you're working at the third novel called Freeware, which should end your series started with Software and then followed by Wetware. Could you give us a picture of it?

RR: I am at last on the home stretch of FREEWARE after two years. It's turning out very well, maybe it's the best book I've written. It's cyberpunk to the max, cyberpunk for the 90s. It is about soft robots, moldies made of chipmold-infected flicker-cladding. These creatures appear as Happy Cloaks in SOFTWARE and at the end of WETWARE they took over. At the end of FREEWARE, yet another change on the future robots appears. They become --- buy the book. In terms of style the book has about ten long chapters and each chapter is like a self-contained short story.

DELOS: You're generally described as one of the creators of the cyberpunk movement along with Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. How do you feel in such a description? Do you fully agree?

RR: Absolutely. My novel SPACETIME DONUTS could be considered the first cyberpunk novel, it came out in 1981 from Ace. I did software in 1982. Bruce and Bill and John (Shirley) looked up to me in those beginning times. When I published THE SEX SPHERE in 1983 they really flipped out.

In 1978 I got high with Allen Ginsberg at a party in Naropa in Boulder and first I said, "Give me your blessing, Allen," and he said "Bless you,"and stuck his yarmulke-shaped hand on my head, a good shock. Then I said, "Well I'd like to be part of a really hip literary movement like the Beats, and I'm writing this really out-there literary science-fiction, and I need to find some friends to help me make the world see it and, Allen, how did the Beats get so much ink?" His answer: "Fine writing." Fortunately in the cyberpunks I found a group of like-minded fine writers.

BAD SUBJECTS: Do you see contemporary computer science as having more room for mysticism and scientific "intuition" than older, more traditional sciences like medicine and engineering?

RR: All roads lead to Rome. You can find God in any deep study. One of the things I liked about GRAVITY'S RAINBOW was that it gave a good feeling for the ecstatic visionary process experienced even by aeronautical engineers. I think it's kind of funny that you ask this question, for so many people would assume that computer science is the *least* mystical of studies. But it is indeed a very open and suggestive field both because it enables you to use languages in strange ways, and because it lets you set into motion very chaotic and unpredictable experiments; experiments which are not constrained by any kind of physical law.

BAD SUBJECTS: What are some connections between counter-culture and computer science?

RR: Computer science provides a niche for intelligent people who are lacking in the ability to behave like plastic people. Lots of hackers work at home alone. When I moved to California in 1986, I felt like some Darwin's finch with a certain specialized beak who is suddenly surrounded by special seeds which the beak was design to open. You don't need a great deal of expensive equipment to be a professional computer worker, about $5000 will get you everything you need. There's no hierarchy. It's wide open. In a broader sense, the Net is an incredibly open arena; anyone who wants to can publish there; it's completely beyond government control, and any kinds of restrictions that are put in place can be easily circumvented. This isn't a topic I need to talk about very much though, as it's been gabbed to death by many others.

When you talk about counter-culture, it's natural to think of music. There's a bit of a feeling that learning to do things with a computer is like learning to do things with an electric guitar. I wish I could tighten the connection so that my cellular automata would sound like punk and grunge. The connection's there in my head --- I can *hear* things when I look at the patterns, but I still don't have the physical funk together. My genius hacker collaborator John Walker is hooking our cellular automata program (formerly called CA Lab, now called Cellab) up to a midi driver, so who knows, maybe in 96 you'll be able to mosh to CAs.

A last question I might address is why it is that certain musical sounds seem counter-cultural. Is it just because they become associated with young people who listen to them? Or is it something about the sound itself? Who can forget their initial sighting of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" video on MTV? The roughness of the sound could correspond to an increased amount of chaoicity. Maybe each generation is able to see patterns in more and more gnarly things. I guess I'd like to think of myself as the janitor rockin' out in "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The one who when Beavis and Butthead watch the video one time and they showed the janitor, Butthead said, "There's your Dad, Bevis." Yeah, man, that's me.