by Rudy Rucker
At the end of my talk, the only comment from the gathered audience was from some old fart (well, he was younger than me, but older) who said, “I hated the beginning of your talk and the end of the talk, it’s all completely wrong.”
“How about the middle,” I snapped back, feeling like Johnny Rotten ducking his shoulder to avoid an incoming beer bottle. “How did you like that?”
I was close to walking out, but my host dragged me up to the computer science faculty lounge for a cup of tea. Several people came up to me and they wanted to argue about every little thing I’d said. But these guys weren’t programmers from Silicon Valley. My sense was that they didn’t know squat. They hadn’t spent years of their lives staring at cellular automata simulations, or worked at companies shipping commercial software. Hell, they were so out of it that they couldn’t see why I was teaching my software engineering students how to write programs for video games. They were like stuffy English professors angered that someone might discuss a science fiction novel in a literature course.
I took a lot of photos in Brussels. When I’m alone, having a camera along is sort of like having a friend. I show what I’m seeing to the camera, and the camera remembers it. I also see photography as a kind of sensory amplification. When I’m amped up to spot possible photos, I see my surroundings more clearly, and I become more aware of the visual patterns and of the contrasting collages of content within a street scene.
For many years I’d been using a Leica M4 and then a single-lens-reflex Leica R3 camera. In Brussels I switched to a compact high-quality Contax camera, still based on film. The upside with a smaller camera is that I tend to carry it around more, and I pick up accordingly more shots. The downside is that the images aren’t as sharp and richly shaded.
In Brussels, I found that the photo processing shop was willing to copy my film pictures onto a disk as electronic image files. This intrigued me, although at this point I didn’t have much use for the files. At this time, it wasn’t practical to email pictures as attachments, I didn’t have any decent image-processing software, and I wasn’t yet posting images on the web. I didn’t realize how very soon the mass changeover to digital photography would arrive, carrying me with it. Another wave. I’ll say more about this in the next chapter.
Touring around Brussels, I revisited the Atomium that I’d seen at the 1958 World’s Fair with my kind Uncle Conrad, now dead. The Atomium’s huge linked spheres had been shiny forty-four years ago, but now they were tarnished and even rusty. And all the bright pavilion buildings of the fair were gone.
“They should really keep the place up,” I told Sylvia on the phone later that day.
“It’s Europe, Rudy,” she replied. “Everything’s old, it’s hopeless.”
Inside the Atomium were a series of exhibits relating to the 1958 Worlds’ Fair. Seeing them was a knife in my heart. Outside the structure I was filled with the tragic sense of life. Looking at a tree, it seemed the saddest, most wretched thing I’ve ever seen. But I wasn’t really and truly depressed, this was more of a ham-bone, operatic kind of feeling. I was kind of wallowing in it, enjoying the intensity of my emotions.
To cheer up, I bought myself the most expensive beret I could find. They cost according to how big of a diameter they have. I’m not talking about the headband size, mind you, I’m talking about the floppiness, droopiness and zootiness of the thing. My big beret looked very “original,” the haberdasher assured me. I took to wearing it all the time, with a striped silk scarf and a long wool topcoat, imagining that I looked vaguely like the medieval philosopher Erasmus.
During this stay, I was also working on a science fiction novel. I’d decided to write a fat novel for once, an epic galaxy-spanning adventure. I felt like I’d never tried to hit the long ball before. To get in the spirit, I read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings—somehow I’d never gotten around to reading it before. I enjoyed the series, it has this funny quirk that, if a character is going to walk a hundred miles, Tolkien is going to tell you something about what the character saw during each one of those miles.
I wanted to write something that I could have read aloud to my own kids when they were young, so I made my hero a twelve-year-old boy named Frek. It’s 3003 and the biotech tweaked plants and animals are quite wonderful—but there are only a few dozen of the old species left. Nature has been denatured by profiteers. It’s up to Frek Huggins to venture out into the galaxy to fetch an elixir to restore Earth’s lost species. At least that’s what a friendly alien cuttlefish tells him the elixir will do. But can you really trust aliens?
I went with a simple title, Frek and the Elixir, not-so-coincidentally echoing titles like Harry Potter and the Enormous Royalty Check. In order to organize my long book, I decided to base my outline on a well-tested pattern, as well. I turned to Joseph Campbell’s, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.
Campbell identifies seventeen typical stages in the universally recurring monomyth, and I decided to write one chapter for each stage—The Call to Adventure, The Refusal of the Call, the Helper, Crossing the Threshold, the Belly of the Whale, and so on.
The Belly of the Whale? At first this Campbellian stage struck me as odd, but, come to think of it, a “whale” that swallows you might any type of transport craft. In many of my own books, a character does get inside something and go somewhere. In Freeware, Sta-Hi is carried away from earth inside a flying plastic robot; in The Hollow Earth, Mason stows away inside a riverboat; in Realware, Willy ends up inside a hyperspherical being called On; in Spaceland, Joe is carried to the higher dimensions inside a cuttlefish named Kangy.
And in Frek and the Elixir, Frek travels to the center of the galaxy inside a creature that once again resembles a cuttlefish. I have a thing for cuttlefish. Their facial tentacle-bunches strike me as so bizarre and science fictional. I named Frek’s alien cuttlefish after a memorably weird math professor I’d had in grad school: Professor Bumby.
When my alien cuttlefish, Professor Bumby, appears on stage, digging his way out of the ground where he’d been buried, he quotes one of my favorite remarks from the history of mathematics, “Eadem mutata resurgo!” This means, “The same, yet altered, I arise again.”
The mathematician Jakob Bernoulli had this inscribed on his tombstone along with a picture of a spiral—and to me it expresses a certain feeling that I get whenever I manage to start another book. When I’m not writing, I’m dead and dry, but when the words start to flow I’m living again.
During my stay in Brussels I also had the opportunity to perform some real-time video displays as an accompaniment to a piece of electronic music written by the composer Gerard Pape. Pape was the director of a small institute in Paris devoted to the music of the avant-garde composer Iannis Xenakis. Sylvia and I took the train down to Paris a few times, and I’d spend the day at Pape’s offices, sometimes working with a Turkish student of his named Sinan Bokevoy.
One afternoon, Sinan was playing his latest electronic composition for me, and I was struck by how well this situation matched Frek and the Elixir. I’d just been writing a scene where Frek is in a windowless reality-generating room with alien lampreys. And here I was in the windowless electronic music studio, with a pile of big fat lamprey-like cables behind me, each of them holding about a dozen lines with individual jacks, just perfect for plugging into my spine.
Sinan’s piece started with the dilated sound of a hammer pounding, weirdly stretched in time. A single voice began to sing, then decomposed into a choir of reedy wails, deconstructed by Fourier analysis software. It was like an acid trip where a conversation shatters into droplets of sound.
“Why does electronic music always sound so sinister?” I asked Sinan.
“Because these are sounds we’re not used to hearing, and anything strange is a possible menace,” he answered readily. “Also these sounds are deep, like big things. Also they’re dissonant, like unpredictable disorganized things. And they seem to come from every side, like things you can’t get away from.” He pat
ted his laptop. “Polyphony is a creation not by God, so we think of it as Satanic.”
My concert with Gerard Pape was early in December, 2002, at a Paris event called “Recontres 2002: Musique et Arts Visuels.” Gerard had written a twelve-minute electronic music piece called “Clouds,” using samples based on tympani crossed with storm sounds. While it played on the eight speakers in the room, Gerard twiddled dials to continuously adjust the mix. At the same time, I was working my laptop’s mouse and keyboard to project a flow of graphics onto a wall-sized screen. There was an audience of about a hundred people.
Although Gerard’s tracks were pre-recorded, my programs were generating the graphics live, that is, computing the moving images in real time. That’s always been a touchstone goal for me in my computer programming—to create graphics programs that run fast enough to be useable as light-shows. I was excited to be performing at this event.
I started with a two-dimensional cellular automaton cloud in black and white, perturbing it by mouse clicks that made blotches like exploding H-bombs. I switched into some artificial life-forms that flew about like insects, leaving twisty trails in a virtual three-dimensional space. And then I went with a smooth and undulating two-dimensional cellular automaton wave, luminous with a ramped palette of color. I conceptualized this sequence as being a storm with black and white clouds, followed by a scene in the woods where some gnats buzz around each other—above a peaceful puddle, rippled by the winds.
The other composers quietly, earnestly, said, “Bravo,” to me as I sat back down. It was very satisfying. Gerard said nothing quite like our collaboration had ever been presented in Paris.
Although Gerard and I had dreamed of using algorithms to connect my graphics to his sounds, we’d ended up just using our brains. Gerard made what he considered to be sonic equivalents of the kinds of chaotic visual effects I’d shown him. And then I listened to a preview tape of his composition a number of times until I thought of a sequence of moving graphical displays that would fit.
The week of that concert I’d been thinking a lot about quantum mechanics, both because I wanted to lecture about quantum computation at Leuven, and because I wanted to use some quantum mechanical gimmicks in Frek and the Elixir. One of the interesting problems in the philosophy of quantum mechanics has to do with whether or not you become inextricably entangled with the things that you look at.
Walking in the Latin Quarter, looking at some smoke from a chimney against the sky, not naming it, just seeing it, letting its motions move within my mind, I struck me that I was no different than a mouse cursor moving across the screen of a two-dimensional cellular automaton. I was entangled with the smoke, and in a very real sense, I was the cursor dragging the smoke across the sky.
At this moment I had a strong sense of aha. A satori in Paris. I realize that this account will make little sense to most people. But I strongly remember the feeling.
At the time I thought of my experience in terms of a classic koan, momentarily understanding it in a very personal and experiential way.
Q: I see a flag is blowing in wind: Is the flag moving or is the wind moving?
A: Mind is moving.
Back home in Los Gatos, I stayed on leave during the spring of 2003 so that I could finish writing Frek and the Elixir, which ended up being my longest novel yet. I’d had some hopes of selling it to the publishers of the Harry Potter books—after all, my hero was 12, just like Harry—but we ended up selling Frek to Tor Books. They did a nice job with it and it sold quite well.
When I went back to teaching at San Jose State in the fall of 2003, I felt like A Square from the book Flatland, returning from his trip into the higher dimensions, settling back into the dull level wilderness of his old world.
I no longer felt willing to stay in academic harness. The endless hours of keyboarding and mousing were getting to my hands and my back. We had really uncomfortable office furniture. A state directive specified that any new desk chairs for the California State University faculty had to be purchased from the California Prison Industry Authority, and these prison-made chairs were cheap junk snapped together from kits made in China. Very 1984.
Overall, the California state budget was a mess, and our teaching loads and committee obligations were going up. I felt like I was beginning to repeat myself in my lectures. And I longed to spend my remaining years on what I love most: writing and traveling.
So in the spring of 2004, urged on by a golden handshake offer issued to the faculty by Arnold Schwarzenegger himself, I retired from teaching. I was fifty-eight.
My last day as a professor, I sat at the outdoor coffee bar under my office building where the baristas were playing a Ramones CD, including the songs “Rock N’ Roll High-School” and “I Wanted Everything.” My favorite musicians had come to sing me goodbye. Joey was dead, but he was still my friend.
I sat for awhile in the sun, drinking tea and listening to the Ramones. No rush. “The KKK Took My Baby Away” was on, one of my faves. What if I got up and started dancing? All around me students were studying, as if there were no music.
I went in for my very last class meeting. My graduate Software Project students demonstrated the final versions of their computer programs, mostly video games. I liked these kids, they were smart and eager. They gave me a farewell card, brought in a pizza, took some pictures. It was touching.
In my office I erased the sign I’d made on my whiteboard, preparatory to retiring.
“Look homeward angel and melt with ruth.”
Teaching Assistant 1967–Professor Emeritus 2004.
Thirty-seven years of teaching, off and on. I was ready to be done. Leaving the building, I felt light as a feather.
Old Master
The big project I wanted to tackle in the fall of 2004 was to finish writing my tome about the meaning of computers. I already had some rough draft material that I’d used as the notes I handed out for my philosophy of computer science lectures at the University of Leuven. I’d jokingly entitled my lecture notes Early Geek Philosophy—meaning that, yes, we computer types are starting to philosophize about what we do, but we’re only the early geeks, and more wisdom will eventually be revealed. But really I was really quite serious about the project.
I wanted to understand what computation means. I’d meant to nail this much earlier on—when I’d moved to Silicon Valley in 1986. At that time, my old friend Greg Gibson had said, “Imagine if William Blake had worked in a textile mill. What might he have written then?”
Initially I’d thought I’d get into the scene, figure out what was happening, get out, and write my book on computers and reality. But somewhere along the line I went native. My cover story ate my personality.
I had a mental image of a Soviet jeep driving up to a barbed wire fence like they used to have between West Germany and East Germany. Some East German soldiers carry a struggling figure wrapped in canvas to the fence and throw him over to the Western side. Inside the bundle is a double agent who forgot his old life. That was me—covered in a thick blanket of computer code. But now I was free. I was ready to tell the world what I’d learned during my twenty year stretch in the dark Satanic mills of Silicon Valley.
Hoping for a better-than-usual advance for my book on the philosophy of computer science, I engaged the prominent science-book agent John Brockman. He helped me work out the proposal, and we adopted the title, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. And then, as seemed to be the fashion, I added a long, explanatory subtitle: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How To Be Happy.
Brockman sent my proposal to about thirty publishers, but in the end, we ended up selling the book for a mid-range advance to my editor friend John Oakes, then at Avalon Publishing. Ironically, Oakes had wanted to buy the book before I even got involved with Brockman. In the past he’d been publishing some of my reprints and anthologies at his own house, Four Walls Eight Windows—which had recently been bought out by Avalon, who would i
n turn be bought out by Perseus Books a few years later. For a writer, it’s a little unnerving how chaotic the publishing business is these days.
My book title, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, was meant to be a kind of dialectic triad, that is, a pattern of the form, The Thesis, the Synthesis, and the Antithesis.
With the thesis word, “lifebox,” I meant a large database that might include, in my case, my books, my journals, my interviews, my photographs and perhaps an overarching memoir—with the various pieces connected by hyperlinks. A lifebox might resemble a large website.
Some fairly simple programming could endow a lifebox with interactive abilities—to start with, a search engine might be enough. And then people could pose questions to the lifebox, and it would answer with appropriate links and excerpts of text. The result might be a construct that would function as a simulacrum of the lifebox’s author.
“What was great-grandfather like?”
“Go online and talk to rudy-the-elder. He’ll tell you all about himself.”
Could a lifebox become conscious and alive? Initially, the notion of an intelligent lifebox seems quite absurd—which is why we might think of “soul” as being the antithesis of “lifebox.”
But maybe someday, a lifebox could have something like a soul—if you were to equip it with the right kind of software and run it on the right kind of hardware. Computer scientists have amply shown that simple computations can in fact generate a wide range of natural patterns. The fabulously gnarly Mandelbrot fractal’s basic algorithm is little more than a rudimentary equation.
The point is that we may not need a huge intellectual breakthrough in order to create something as florid as artificial intelligence. It may be that a very simple program can do the job, provided we feed the program enough data and run it on fast processors with large amounts of system memory.
