IN THIS ISSUE
June 2013 • Issue 629 • Vol. 70 • No. 6
46th Year of Publication • 30-Time Hugo Winner
Cover and Interview Designs by Francesca Myman, with Art by Rudy Rucker
Nebula Awards flank the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award and the Ray Bradbury Award
Interviews
Rudy Rucker: Quantum Wetware
Sofia Samatar: Stranger Scripts
People and Publishing
Notes on milestones, awards, books sold, etc., with news this issue about Jay Lake, Graham Joyce, Stephen King, Ann C. Crispin, R.A. Lafferty, George R.R. Martin, Octavia E. Butler, and many others.
Main Stories
2012 Nebula Awards Winners • Spectrum 20 Awards Winners • Beckett Wins Clarke Award • 2013 Campbell and Sturgeon Award Finalists • 2012 Aurealis Awards • Asimov’s Readers’ & Analog AnLab Awards
The Data File
SFWA Election Results • Clarion West Gets NEA Grant • Rep. Canterbury Proposes Required SF Reading • Fickling Goes Indie • Legal News • Publishing News • Announcements • Awards News • World Conventions News • Book News • Book Trends • Financial News • International Rights • Other Rights • Audiobooks Received • Publications Received
Locus Looks at Books
Gardnerspace: A Short Fiction Column by Gardner Dozois
Interzone 1-2/13; Interzone 3-4/13; Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Three Adventures, Garth Nix; Big Mama Stories, Eleanor Arnason; Good-Bye, Robinson Crusoe and Other Stories, John Varley; A Very British History: The Best Science Fiction of Paul McAuley, 1985-2011, Paul McAuley.
Short Fiction Reviews by Rich Horton
Asimov’s 6/13; Analog 6/13; Strange Horizons 3/13; Lightspeed 5/13; Beneath Ceaseless Skies 3/21/13; Tor.com 3/13; Tor.com 4/13.
Reviews by Gary K. Wolfe
The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Neil Gaiman; Evening’s Empires, Paul McAuley; Homeland, Cory Doctorow.
Reviews by Faren Miller
The Story Until Now, Kit Reed; Space Is Just a Starry Night, Tanith Lee; Wisp of a Thing, Alex Bledsoe; Cold Copper, Devon Monk; The Rithmatist, Brandon Sanderson, Ralph McSweeney, ill.
Reviews by Russell Letson
Protector, C.J. Cherryh; The Human Front, Ken MacLeod.
Reviews by Adrienne Martini
The Human Division, John Scalzi; Martian Sands, Lavie Tidhar; Dangerous Gifts, Gaie Sebold; Countdown City, Ben H. Winters; LoveStar: A Novel, Andri Snær Magnason.
Reviews by Richard A. Lupoff
The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey, Fred Nadis; Echoes of the Goddess: Tales of Terror and Wonder from the End of Time, Darrell Schweitzer.
Reviews by Divers Hands: Reviews by Stefan Dziemianowicz and Karen Burnham
Joyland, Stephen King; The Man from Mars: Ray Palmer’s Amazing Pulp Journey, Fred Nadis; Mitigated Futures, Tobias S. Buckell; Fearsome Journeys, Jonathan Strahan, ed.
Art Book Reviews by Karen Haber
The Art of The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, Wayne G. Hammond & Christina Scull; Frazetta Sketchbook: Volume 1, Frank Frazetta; Star Wars Art: Illustration, Anonymous, ed.; SHORT TAKES: Steampunk: An Illustrated History of Fantastical Fiction, Fanciful Film and other Victorian Visions, Brian J. Robb; Fantasy+ 4: World’s Most Imaginative Artworks, Vincent Zhao, ed.; The Ship That Sailed to Mars, William M. Timlin.
Special Features
Hal-Con 2013 • The Nova Albion Steampunk Exhibition • Spotlight on Deborah Biancotti, Author
Forthcoming Books
US Forthcoming Books by Author • US Forthcoming Books by Publisher • UK Forthcoming Books by Author • UK Forthcoming Books by Publisher
Listings
Magazines Received: April • Books Received: April • British Books Received: March • Bestsellers
New and Notable
Terry Bisson: This Month in History
Obituaries
Ray Harryhausen • Appreciation by Bob Eggleton • Andrew J. Offutt • Appreciation by Joe Haldeman • Deborah J. Miller • Appreciation for Robert Morales by Eileen Gunn
Editorial Matters
Interviews • Nebula Awards • This Issue/Next Issue Miscellany
Photo List and Ad List
Masthead
Return to In This Issue listing.
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker was born March 22, 1946 in Louisville KY. He attended Swarthmore, earning a BA in mathematics in 1967, and did graduate work at Rutgers, studying mathematical logic and set theory, and getting a Master’s in 1969 and a PhD in 1973.
Rucker’s novels include Spacetime Donuts (1978); White Light (1980); the Ware series, which includes Philip K. Dick Award winners Software (1982) and Wetware (1988), plus Freeware (1997) and Realware (2000); The Sex Sphere (1983); Master of Space and Time (1984); The Secret of Life (1985); The Hollow Earth (1990); The Hacker and the Ants (1994); illustrated novel Saucer Wisdom (1999); Spaceland (2002); As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (2002); Frek and the Elixir (2004); Mathematicians in Love (2006); Postsingular (2007) and sequel Hylozoic (2009); and Jim and the Flims (2011). He published his latest novel, Turing and Burroughs (2012), through his own Transreal Books. The Big Aha is forthcoming.
His story collections include The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka (1983), Transreal! (1991), Gnarl! (2000), Mad Professor (2006), and the two-volume Complete Stories (2012). His poetry has been collected in Light Fuse and Get Away (1983), and he has written about his own life in ‘60s memoir All the Visions (1991) and autobiography Nested Scrolls (2011).
Rucker has written many non-fiction books on math, science, philosophy, and computer science, including Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension (1977), Infinity and the Mind (1982), Mind Tools (1987), essay collection Seek! (1999), and The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2005). He’s also written textbooks and monographs. As editor, he produced Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (1987) and co-edted Semiotext(e)SF (1988) with Peter Lamborn Wilson & Robert Anton Wilson.
Rucker taught at the State University of New York in Geneseo until 1978, then went to the University of Heidelberg for two years on a grant, returning to spend two years teaching college in Virginia. From 1982-86 he wrote full time, then took a position at San Jose State University, where he developed an interest in computer science. He taught there until his retirement in 2004. In California he became involved with cyberculture magazine Mondo 2000, and in 1992 co-wrote Mondo 2000: A User’s Guide to the New Edge with editors R.U. Sirius & Queen Mu. From 2006 to 2012, he published 13 issues of the SF webzine, FLURB.
Rucker lives with his wife, Sylvia Bogsch, married 1967. They have three adult children and five grandchildren.
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‘‘Nested Scrolls came about because I’d always wanted to write an autobiography, but I kept putting it off. Then I had to go to the hospital. I had a vein burst in my brain – I could have died. It’s what they used to call apoplexy. I’d just finished writing a story with Bruce Sterling. Bruce is a very opinionated person, and usually about two thirds of the way through collaborating we end up arguing about what we’re doing. After I got out of the hospital I jokingly told Bruce, ‘See, you almost killed me, by making me so angry.’ He said, ‘Well, if you would just accept that I’m always right, you wouldn’t have this problem.’
‘‘I realized I could have died, and I thought, ‘If you are ever going to write your autobiography, you ought to do it now.’ I wrote Nested Scrolls fairly quickly, in about five months. Then I set it aside and got into a novel, Jim and the Flims. I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to go back and look at that autobiography and make sure I wasn’t just out of it when I wrote it.’ I was still recuperating when I worked on it. But the book looked pretty good,
and I polished it some more. I didn’t want it to be exhaustive – Isaac Asimov did these exhaustive autobiographies that were interesting, but I didn’t want to do that kind of thing. I wanted it to be more like I was taking a car trip with somebody, telling them stories while we’re going along.
‘‘That’s one of the difficulties in writing an autobiography. Your life isn’t really a linear string of events, because everything reminds you of something else, and everything branches out. It’s like a fractal, or a bush, and then you try to turn it into a straight line. So it’s tricky, and you want to keep moving – you’re skating on the surface, and you don’t want to fall in and just wallow in this endless amount of detail. I did organize the book linearly, because that’s what people want. Actually, David Hartwell advised me to put in lots of dates, and always mention the date when something was happening. That’s useful. In Virginia Woolf’s journals, she doesn’t always have the dates of when things were happening, and that’s confusing.
‘‘First PS Publishing said they would publish it in England, and then Tor said, ‘If they’re publishing it, we might as well publish it too, because we can use their layout.’ I was happy to get the book out. I thought, ‘This is the one that will break me out into the mainstream. It isn’t a science fiction book, it’s a memoir. I’m not just a science fiction person, I’m a mathematician, a computer scientist. Maybe we’ll get a review in the Times.’ That didn’t happen, but I’m glad I got it out there.
‘‘I’ve been fortunate to meet a number of my heroes over the years. I met the famous logician Kurt Gödel when I was in grad school. That was a big deal. He’s the smartest man I ever met, and just an amazing person. He knew what I was going to say before I said it. I only spent a couple of hours with him, but that was such an important event for me, like seeing the guru in his cave.
‘‘I also got to meet Allen Ginsberg around 1982. We were at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (at the Naropa Institute). The Beats were always there, Ginsberg and Burroughs and Corso. I was teaching a course on the philosophy of mathematics, but I always wanted to be a beatnik writer, or a beatnik science fiction writer, so I was thrilled to meet these guys. As soon as I met Allen, I told him I was a writer and I said, ‘Can I get your blessing?’ Like in a myth, where you meet the old writer, the old guru, and you say, ‘I need your blessing.’ He was into it, and right away he slapped his hand down on the top of my head and said, ‘Bless you.’ I got to give Burroughs a copy of White Light. He said it looked ‘far out.’ That made me happy.
‘‘Robert Sheckley had always been a big hero of mine, too. He was the first science fiction writer who I really connected with at a deep level – I was about 13, in 1959. I liked science fiction a lot in any case. Like anybody in those times, I liked Asimov, I liked Heinlein. But Sheckley spoke to me more than anyone else. There are two aspects of his work that I have tried to emulate. There’s satire and humor in it, but you aren’t just going for laughs. There’s also a feeling that he’s writing about real people he knows, himself or his family, his friends – that’s something I came to call transrealism. I like to root my novels in my actual experience. I met Sheckley a couple of times in the 1980s and it was a big deal for me. He had a friend with a connection to Timothy Leary, and Leary had this idea that he wanted to host a TV show, sort of like Nova with Carl Sagan. It could have been an interesting show, covering various modern topics. Sheckley and I went over to Leary’s house to have a story conference, and that was kind of wild. Leary was a very charming man. At that point, around 1987, I was working as a computer scientist in Silicon Valley, and I had this special circuit board you could put into your PC computer, and it would show the kind of graphics I was interested in. They were sort of psychedelic images, called cellular automata, and Tim thought they were great. He would mention cellular automata sometimes after that.
‘‘Certainly when I started writing, I didn’t quite grasp what a long row it is to hoe, if you want to be a writer for your whole life. I’ve published 35 books now, and I’m working on my 36th, The Big Aha, my 21st novel. It just goes on and on. If I’m going to write a novel, there are a number of things that go into it. First, there has to be a place I want to go that attracts me. Some scene, or something about the world, or some event. At the beginning it’s like I’m standing at the edge of a wilderness. There’s this mountain that I see in the distance, and I think, ‘I want to get there.’ But don’t really know how I’m going to get there through the wilderness or how I’m going to get back. I like to have the characters clear in my mind. As I said, I sometimes model my characters on people I know. I used this trick more when I was younger. I’d say, this character is going to be like my father – like the character Cobb Anderson in the Ware series. Or the character Sta Hi; he was modeled on a guy I knew, the younger brother of a friend of mine. It’s that transreal thing. Am I writing science fiction or am writing I beatnik novels about my own life? The virtue of modeling your characters on other people is that then they’re not smooth, they’re sort of irregular. They’re not like dolls. It’s one of the weaknesses in generic golden age novels, the way characters are very interchangeable. They might say, ‘Well, let’s give this guy a limp’ to differentiate him. But what else?
‘‘I’ve run out of people to use for my characters, or they’re tired of me doing that, so now I tend to invent my characters more than before. But I think about them, I sketch out background stories for them, I work that out. I’ve also, over the years, started planning my novels more. I find it very hard to write outlines. Because, again, I can see one or two peaks I’m trying to reach, and there’s the woods in between, and I don’t really know what I’m going to hit in the woods. Is there going to be a canyon, is there going to be a river? So I can’t exhaustively describe the outline. Sometimes when you’re trying to sell a book to a publisher and you haven’t written it, they like to see an outline. But the outlines, when I’ve written them, I’ve never viewed them as being chiseled in stone. If I have an outline, when I finish a chapter, I’ll go ahead and revise the rest of the outline to fit. Frankly I think that, if a novel’s worth writing, then it’s in principle impossible to write an accurate outline of it in advance. The story’s like a living thing: it’s growing, and you need to stay open to new possibilities. When you work at the limits of your abilities, you can’t possibly know what you’re doing. And if you do know, you’re not pushing hard enough.
‘‘The other thing I do when writing a novel is to work out some conceptual ideas. Maybe more so than many SF writers. I did, after all, get a PhD in mathematics. I worked as a computer scientist, so I have a really scientific frame of mind. I want to have crazy ideas in my novels, but I want them to have internal logic. I want it all to hang together. Whenever I make something happen, I want to figure out – how does that fit into my theory of, like, how the hyperjump to another place in space works, or how travel to a parallel world works? I’m always working on the theory as well as the story, going back and forth between the two. You might think that would be limiting, but it’s not. When I work out the theory, there will be little aspects of it that suggest new things that could happen, things I might not have thought of otherwise.
‘‘Like the book that I’m working on now, The Big Aha. There’s a certain theory of telepathy based on quantum mechanics, that you could in a sense merge your brain function with someone else’s. That works, but there’s a catch in that when you separate back into two people, you can’t really remember the experience. That’s something I haven’t really seen other writers do with telepathy. It’s sort of like, if you see somebody in a dream, and you have these memories about it, but they’re surreal, not accurate. Or when you have a deep, romantic conversation with somebody, and later you don’t necessarily remember the words, but you remember the feelings. I call it ‘oblivious link’ or ‘oblivious teep.’
‘‘I like to call telepathy ‘teep.’ When I’m working on a book I like to invent a language for it –
short, easy slang words. Language is like a rock tumbler, when you tumble rocks to make them into gemstones. Every existing word has been smoothed over the years by everybody using it over and over. You don’t want to have a slang word that’s awkward or hard to say. I’ll think, ‘What’s the word sound like? What does it remind people of?’ Like in the Ware tetralogy, I called the robots the ‘boppers.’ I liked the sound of that, and it hooks into be-bop and bopping. While I’m working on a book, I’ll keep a document of notes that ends up being as long as the novel. Paul Di Filippo can’t believe that I do that. When I don’t necessarily want to work on my novel, I’ll work on the notes. I have all the PDFs of the notes posted online. One last trick that I’ve started using for writing is that I sometimes make paintings that are connected with the book. Like if I can’t imagine what’ll happen in a coming chapter, I might make a fairly spontaneous painting of a scene that could fit into my book. It’s relaxing to work with the paints, they’re so non-digital. Not like sitting at a keyboard. I’ve had a couple of shows in the Borderlands Books cafe, and now and then I even sell a painting. I like looking at them.
‘‘For Turing and Burroughs…. When I moved to California in 1986, I started working at San Jose State, and before that I’d been a mathematician with a specialty in mathematical logic. At San Jose State, I retooled and started teaching computer science instead. I got to be pretty knowledgeable about computers, and I worked there about 20 years, so I was riding the Silicon Valley wave, from about 1986 to 2006. That was exciting. I even dropped out of teaching for a couple of years, and I worked at Autodesk, writing software for them. I helped write the software to accompany James Gleick’s book Chaos: Making a New Science.
‘‘One of the big figures in computer science is Alan Turing. He’s a legendary figure. He created the idea of what’s called the Turing machine, which is a simple abstraction of a computer, and he was able to prove interesting theorems. As a sort of daily example, when you’re on your computer and you’re waiting for it to finish doing something, you’ll see a wait icon, like an hourglass or a progress bar, or something like that, and the progress bar isn’t always accurate. Turing showed that even in principle, it’s impossible to write a program to predict how long the wait is going to be, which is strange. A given computation can’t really know everything about what the other computations will do. In a roundabout way, this connects with the remark I made earlier, about it being impossible to predict where your novel is going to go.
Locus, June 2013 Page 1
