by Rudy Rucker
As a simple example, Wolfram had noticed that a tiny cellular automaton program can produce the intricate triangular lattices seen on the cone shells of the South Pacific. And this where the synthesis-word “seashell” of my book title comes in.
Thus, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. As well as talking about artificial intelligence, I’d also be looking at the wider questions of what it means if we try to look at everything in the world as a computation: physics, biology, psychology, society, and philosophy.
I worked on The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul very intensely. By the start of 2005, I was almost done. But by this point a reaction had set in. Throughout the book, I’d been arguing that every natural process can be regarded as a computation—and by now I’d started doubting this. After all, at the immediate, emotional level, life doesn’t feel like a computation at all.
In February, 2005, to celebrate my retirement, I went on a South Pacific diving trip with my brother Embry. We went to the islands of Palau and Micronesia, an archipelago which dots the seas between the Philippines and Indochina.
On a kayaking-and-snorkeling outing near Palau, I regained my faith in the usefulness of thinking of things as computations. My moment of insight came at our last snorkeling spot of the day, where I swam among lovely pale blue and pink soft corals. These organisms were branching broccolis on the sandy bottom of an archway connecting two bays—and I noted that they were akin to computer-graphical fractals.
Swimming through the arch, I encountered a shoal of perhaps ten thousand tiny tropical fish, not unlike the fish you’d see in someone’s home aquarium, little zebras or tetras. Marveling at the scarves of density emerging from the fish’s motions, I considered that the schooling was really a kind of parallel computation, with each fish a processor.
The turbulent water currents were computing as well, I mused, and so were the ever-changing clouds in the sky, and the living splotchy patterns on the mantles of the giant clams, and the nested scrolls of the shelf corals, and the gnarly roots of plants on the land. The world was a network of computations, and computing was a metaphor for the dance of natural law.
And what about my thoughts? They could be computations too—deterministic but unpredictable processes akin to fractal broccoli, flocking fish, fluid turbulence, and nested coral scrolls. My thoughts were really no richer than the mass of life forms in these lagoons. My mind could be a naturally occurring computation.
And with this experience in mind, when I got home, I was able to write a satisfactory ending to The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.
For me, each book is in some sense a thought-experiment along the lines of, “What might happen if such and such were the case?” For the purposes of my book-length experiment, I’ll adopt some outré idea and psych myself into believing it deep down—and then I proceed to work out the consequences.
This is very much a style of thought that I learned as a mathematician. You start with a set of axioms and see what you can deduce. Software engineering proceeds in somewhat the same way. You create a little program and see what appears on the screen when the program runs. My SF writing is like this too. I make some unusual assumptions about my imagined world, put in a few characters, and see what happens in the story that I write.
Once I’m done writing a given book, I move on. Although the Lifebox tome gave me great fodder for future SF novels, on a day-to-day basis, I don’t think that the world is made of computations—any more than I think that it’s made of atoms or of curved space. These are all just useful modes of thought.
Over the long term, I have more of a pluralist attitude. The world isn’t one particular thing, it’s all sorts of different things. If I focus on my immediate experience, I’d be inclined to say the world is made of shapes, sounds, emotions—and the ubiquitous white light.
There aren’t any simple answers. And we’ll never know what it’s all about.
On the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, in late February, 2005, Embry and I rented a car and drove to a spot called Liduduhniap Falls. It was up a long dirt road that was hard for us to find—none of the roads had signs. A pamphlet from the tourist office said there was a store at the end of the road by the falls, and that one should pay a dollar to the storekeeper to visit the falls. When we got up there, we saw only a pair of rudimentary Micronesian buildings, basically tin roofs on posts, and neither of them looked particularly like a store.
We heard the sound of a radio from one of the buildings. Peering behind a low fence in front of it, we observed a stocky, bare-breasted brown-skinned woman asleep on the ground, wearing a bright flower-printed skirt with an elastic waistband. No matter how low you set your expectations of formality, the Micronesians always slip beneath it.
Embry and I went ahead to the waterfall, which was a classic tall cataract surrounded by green jungle plants. The two of us went wading and swimming in the waterfall pool. It was exciting to have the falls beat down on us; it gave me a magical feeling of healing.
Looking over at my pale-skinned, gangly big brother, I felt a great tenderness towards him. We were still two boys in a swimming hole.
But, I also thought, perhaps this might be the last time Embry and I would take a trip of this kind. I imagined one of us in the hospital, and the other one talking about our moments of shared tropical joy.
The past never really goes away. The perfect and the imperfect moments always stand.
Life in my own little family rolled on. Sylvia and I came to enjoy our cozy times in our empty nest—it’s like a return to the early days of our marriage. I enjoy that Sylvia remembers all the old times, and that we have a long, shared history. We still seem beautiful to each other. I love to hear her voice, and to see her smile.
As Sylvia and I edged into geezerhood, we began fretting that our children might never marry. But then it was time. In the space of the four years 2003 to 2006, Georgia, Rudy Jr. and Isabel all had weddings—Georgia with her husband Courtney, Rudy with his wife Penny, and Isabel with her husband Gus. These were wonderful and deeply emotional events. And it’s been nice getting to know the three new in-law children.
At our reunions, I like the moments when Sylvia and I get into the same old cozy give and take with our three kids. For a minute or two we’ll once again be rolling on the ground in a heap with our three clever piglets, all of us squealing and nipping at each other—I speak figuratively, of course. Not that we can do this for very long, as the kids do have their own families now. It’s amazing to see our children growing up and taking their places in the world.
Our family’s size kicked up another notch when Georgia and Courtney had their daughter Althea in 2005, a tender little bud, perfect in every detail. And in 2007, Rudy and Penny had twin girls, Zimry and Jasper, followed by Georgia and Courtney’s son Desmond. As I write this in 2009, when we manage a full reunion, there’s twelve of us.
I’ve found that being with our grandchildren is even more pleasant than I’d expected. The biological drive for reproduction is one of those things, like empathy, that’s wired in at a very deep level. When I’m watching over the little ones, my face sometimes gets tired—from smiling so much.
And how odd it is to have our own children age towards their forties, to remember how I myself had been at that age, and to realize that the children have ongoing interior lives as rich as mine ever was. Many of their thoughts will forever remain unknown to me.
Georgia shares my raucous sense of humor and my self-driven ability to finish creative projects. She’s a graphic designer, and a master at assembling unusual outfits for herself and her children. She’s grown into motherhood, becoming gentle and warm. Rudy Jr. has Sylvia’s kind nature and my rebellious qualities. He loves to tinker with things and to make them work. He’s a cheerful, joking father to his twin girls. Isabel is a jeweler, an artist, a Wyoming outdoorswoman, and the most stylish among us. She’s intensely loyal to her family and friends. She’s playful and she loves a good laugh.
With
five generations to think about, I can shuffle among all sorts of viewpoints. I might compare a memory of my grandmother playing with me to Sylvia playing with one of our grandchildren. Or I might compare my daughter looking at her son to my mother looking at me. Or I might think of how my children’s conversations with me echo my conversations with my father.
Life is an endless cascade, a hall of mirrors, a forest with new trees replacing the old.
In the fall of 2004, I started blogging regularly on a site I call Rudy’s Blog, with the address www.rudyrucker.com/blog. Rudy Jr. runs an internet service provider business called Monkeybrains, and he gives me the server bandwidth for free.
By 2010, after five and a half years of blogging, I’d put up some seven hundred posts which, taken as a whole, bulk to a word count comparable to that of three medium-sized novels.
Am I wasting my time? What’s the point of a blog?
The issue of wasting time is a straw man. A big part of being a writer is finding harmless things to do when you aren’t writing. To finish a novel in a year, I only have to average a page a day, and writing any given page can take less than an hour. So I do in fact have quite a bit of spare time. Of course a lot of that time goes into getting my head into the right place for the day’s writing—and then contemplating and revising what I wrote. But blogging isn’t a bad thing to do while I’m hanging around waiting for the muse.
I often post thoughts and links that relate to whatever writing project I’m currently working on. And my readers post comments and further links which can be useful. To some extent my blog acts as a research tool.
Another thing about a blog is that it’s a means for self-promotion. By now, my blog has picked up a certain following, and every month it receives about a hundred thousand visits. The only ads I run are for my own books.
But my blog isn’t really about research or commerce. The main reason I keep doing it is that the form provides a creative outlet. I like editing and tweaking my posts, and I like illustrating them. I alternate text and pictures, usually putting a photo between every few paragraphs.
I switched over to digital photography around the time when I started my blog in 2004. I’ve used a series of pocket-sized models—they only tend to last for a year or maybe two, but that’s okay as they’re relatively cheap and the technology is always improving. I also have a heavy-duty Canon 5D digital reflex camera with several lenses.
I carry one or another camera with me much of the time, and I’m often on the lookout for photographs. I sometimes think of photography as instant transrealism. When it goes well, I’m appropriating something from my immediate surroundings and turning it into a loaded, fantastic image.
When incorporating my photos into my blog, I don’t worry much about whether the images have any obvious relevance to the texts that I pair them with. As I mentioned earlier, the human mind is capable of seeing any random set of things as going well together. So any picture can go into any post. The Surrealists called this practice juxtaposition, and it’s akin to our Sixties game of listening to music while you watch a TV show with the sound off. Our perceptual system is all about perceiving patterns—even if they’re not there.
This said, if I have enough images on hand, I do what I can to bring out harmonies and contrasts among the words and the pictures. Subconscious and subtextual links come into play. Assembling each blog post becomes a satisfying work of craftsmanship.
Having the blog and the digital cameras has revitalized my practice of photography. With the blog as my outlet, I know that my photos will be seen and appreciated. It’s not like I’m just throwing endless packs of photo prints into a drawer. For many years, Sylvia assembled our photos into yearly family albums, but now, with the children gone, she’s let this drop. “The kids don’t want to see albums of us two taking trips,” she points out.
I like how my digital cameras give me immediate feedback—I don’t have to wait for a week or a month to learn if my pictures were in focus. And I like using my image-editing software. I crop my pictures, tweak the contrast, mute or intensify the colors, and so on. It’s like being back in the darkroom with, wonderfully, an “Undo” control.
I mentioned before that having a camera along for a walk is a bit like having a companion. Now that I have my photo-illustrated blog, this is even more the case. When I’m out on the street, I’ll sometimes slip into a photojournalist mode of searching out apt images while making mental or written notes for a post.
An interesting effect of the internet is that, if you’re a heavy user, your consciousness and sense of self become more distributed and less localized. Even when I don’t have the camera along, the blog is a virtual presence at my side. My old sense of self used to include my home, my workplace and the coffee shops I frequent—but now it includes my blog, my email, and the online social networks. As Bill Gibson puts it, cyberspace has become a part of daily life.
As I briefly remarked in the first chapter, The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul gave me so many ideas that I ended up using them in my next three science fiction novels. In Mathematicians in Love, which I wrote from 2004 to 2005, I took up the idea of imagining a world in which nature is in fact predictable, a world in which, for some reason, it’s possible to foretell the results of computations in advance.
The book plays out around contemporary Silicon Valley, and it features a couple of punk math grad students who repeatedly alter reality while competing for the same woman—which is how they happen to end up in an offbeat sheet of reality in which, unlike in our actual world, the future is predictable.
In order to give some coherence to the notion of multiple sheets of reality, I used the notion—which I mentioned earlier—that there might be a god-like being who keeps designing fresh drafts of our universe, like a novelist would do.
My specific image of the world-building divinity in Mathematicians in Love was based upon a memorable day when my brother Embry and I visited Jellyfish Lake on an atoll near Palau during our epic dive trip of 2005. The unique species of golden jellyfish in this lake barely sting, they don’t eat anything, and they get their nourishment from algae cultures that live inside their bodies. All they do all day is pulse their bells so as to move themselves into the sunniest part of the lake to make the algae in their tissues grow. Our guide said that visiting ctenophorologists studying this lake’s population had estimated it to be fifteen million strong.
We swam a hundred yards out into the wide lake, wearing masks, snorkels and fins. The jellyfish were of every size. Each of them was pulsing with a repetitive beat, the little ones pulsing faster than the big ones. They seemed to have no inkling of up or down, although once they’d pulsed down to about twenty feet or so, they’d vaguely notice the darkness and bumble back towards the surface.
It was like space-travel to sink into the water staring at them. I saw nothing but the greenish-yellow sunlit water and the endlessly many jellyfish. A couple of times I dove down to twenty feet, then floated up with the jellyfish all around me. If I relaxed, I could share a sense of there being no special location or direction.
In the more densely packed regions, there might have been sixty of the jellyfish touching my body at any one time, maybe four big guys, eight small ones, sixteen still smaller jellyfish, thirty-two tiny ones, like that.
The jellyfish stung ever so slightly, and the longer I stayed in, the more I could feel the venom. Particularly when I was free-diving down through them, I’d feel tingles on my lips. A couple of them even drifted inside my trunks and touched my private parts. I thought of a line from William Burroughs’s novel, The Ticket That Exploded.
“Skin like that very hot for three weeks, and then—wearing the Happy Cloak.”
Years earlier, I’d used Burroughs’s notion of a Happy Cloak in my novel Software, where the Happy Cloak takes the form of a jellyfish-like cape of intelligent plastic that sends probes into your spine when you throw it over your back.
In Mathematicians in Love, the designe
r-god of our universe is in fact a very large jellyfish in Jellyfish Lake. This jellyfish-god makes a new version of our universe every Friday.
Sometimes I get a little tired of being cast as a science fiction writer. In my mind, I see my novels as surreal, postmodern literature. I just so happen to couch my works in the vernacular genre form of SF because the field’s tropes appeal to me. The downside is that, since my books have that SF label on them, many people don’t realize that I’m writing literature.
In academic philosophy, they use the phrase “category mistake” to refer to a situation where one tries to apply a property to something that cannot possibly have this property. The classic example of a category mistake is the question, “Is virtue triangular?”
Sometimes I feel like my whole career of writing literary SF is a category mistake, and I wonder if there might be a way to get my work relabeled.
As Kurt Vonnegut famously put it in 1974, “I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled ‘Science Fiction’…and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.” Not too long after this, Vonnegut did make it out of the drawer. Although he never stopped writing SF, he got people to start viewing his works as literature.
More recently, Jonathan Lethem is a strong example of a former SF writer who’s managed the escape-from-the-ghetto move. He’s a high-lit writer now, but in some sense his books are still SF, or at least fantasy-tinged. In terms of crossover, others start out as a literary writers, and then begin adding SF elements to their novels—Margaret Atwood comes to mind. These kinds of books tend to be called speculative or imaginative fiction rather than SF.
When I gripe about my SF-label to Sylvia, she laughs at me. “Not science fiction? You’re writing about robots and talking cuttlefish and flying saucers and trips into the fourth dimension! What do you expect people to call your books?”
