Mad Professor (38 page)

Bruce is such an interesting guy that he actually gets
paid
to blog, see his Wired-sponsored site
http://blog.wired.com/sterling/
.

Written July 18, 2000, with John Shirley.

Appeared in Al Sarrantonio, ed.,
Redshift
(Roc, 2001).

I first met John at Bruce Sterling's house in Austin, Texas, 1985. We were there for the first-ever convention panel on cyberpunk. While we were walking around town, John kept sidling up to me and handing me enormous heavy rocks that I'd unthinkingly start carrying. An ant-to-ant exchange. I liked him right away, he has a charmingly skewed view of reality, and an ability to cobble nearly any situation into a story premise.

In the summer of 2000, John approached me with the first few paragraphs for this story and the invitation to join him in the
Red Shift
anthology. John figured he needed some mad professor input on how to make his higher-dimensional pockets work. Also, he and I shared an interest in using the pockets as an objective correlative for addiction and recovery. The writing
of the story went very smoothly, and I get a kick out of the accent John gave Threakman. Punk forever.

In March 2003, I convinced John to go backpacking in Big Sur with me and to cap off our trip with a night in an inexpensive bunk-room at the Esalen Institute. This was not a good idea. John got blisters on the hike, and he hated the people at Esalen-as John put it, “You can't expect me to fit in at Esalen. When I had my band, I used to break beer bottles over my head till the blood ran, and dive off the stage into the audience.” I quarreled with him for making our visit so hard and—let me quote from my journal:

“Then I mistakenly drank three cups of blackberry sage tea (caffeinated), thinking it was herbal, and that night couldn't sleep for a really long time. We were in a room with six bunk beds, my bed under John's, and it bothered me to be physically coupled to his creakings, also to have the plywood bottom of his bed so close to my face. In the wee a.m. hours I moved to the one other vacant bed, an upper bunk. The other guys sharing the room drifted in. Visions of a spaceship crew's quarters. Image of Shirley crawling towards me across the ceiling of the room, his fingers sticking to the dry-wall like a gecko's. Outside raged the lethal, silent energy winds of deep space, visible as in my mind's eye as Riemannian vortex meshes. At this point I actually felt some joy at being there and being embroiled in something so different from quotidien life.”

We got over the argument—eventually it began seeming funny—and we still see each other every couple of months, most recently when Terry Bisson organized a joint reading for us in San Francisco as “The Dread Lords of Cyberpunk,” where John read from what sounded to be one of his greatest novels yet,
The Other End
(Cemetery Dance, 2006). The book is about John's vision of what the Apocalypse might be like if the avenging angels happened to be John's kind of folks—as opposed to the angels that appear in the Christian “Left Behind” series of novels about the Rapture and the end of the world. Thus John's title-he's describing an
other
kind of end, an Apocalypse envisioned from the other end of the political spectrum.

John's latest doings can be tracked on his Web site,
www.darkecho.com/johnshirley
.

Written January 1997.

Appeared in
Other
magazine, March 2006.

“Cobb Wakes Up” is set in the world of my
Ware
novels:
Software, Wetware, Freeware,
and
Realware.
I originally intended to use this piece as the opening chapter of
Realware,
but then decided to open that book in a different way. I only happened to unearth this fragment recently, in the process of posting my writing notes for my most recent nine novels at
www.rudyrucker.com/writing
. Now that I'm retired, I'm industriously assembling a lifebox simulacrum of my mind online.

This tale is a self-contained vignette, a little thought experiment concerning what might happen if you could store someone's mind as software, and if you then gave that mind two separate bodies.

Rereading the story makes me miss the
Ware
worlds, and my father Embry Cobb Rucker, who was the model for Cobb Anderson. My father was a very human, sociable man: a businessman and then an Episcopal priest. I used to feel myself to be very different from him, but as the years go by, I realize we were always the same.

Written May 22, 2006.

Previously unpublished.

In the summer of 2005, I read
Accelerando,
a collection of linked short stories by Charles Stross (Ace Books, 2005). These stories had a tremendous effect on me; Stross showed that it's possible to go ahead and write about what happens after the co-called Singularity.

As many readers will know, the Singularity is a notion invented by the novelist and computer scientist Vernon Vinge in a 1993 talk-to read the original
talk, just search the web for “Vinge Singularity.” Vinge pointed out that if we can make robots as intelligent as we are, then there seems to be no reason that the robots couldn't plug in faster processors and bigger memories to then be
more
intelligent than people. And then-the real kicker-these superhuman robots can set to work designing still better robots, setting off an upward cascade of ever-more-powerful machines.

Some timid souls have suggested that writers and futurologists must stand mute before the Singularity, that there's no way for us to imagine the years beyond such a cataclysmic change. But, hey, imagining the unimaginable is what thought experiments are for! And Stross shows us how; he blows right past the Singularity and deep into some very bizarre and fun-to-read-about futures.

In his
Accelerando
the solar system has become concentric Dyson spheres of computing devices with only our Earth remaining like “a picturesque historic building stranded in an industrial park.” And some minds in the shells want to smash Earth, simply to enhance their RAM and their flop by a few percent.

This struck me as being no different, really, from people wanting to fill a wetland to make a mall, to clear-cut a rainforest to make a destination golf resort, or even to kill a whale to whittle its teeth into religious icons of a whale god. I was outraged. But also very intrigued by the idea.

And so I began writing my novel
Postsingular
(Tor Books, projected for 2007). The novel opens with an attack of world-eating nanomachines called nants. The nants are rolled back, at least temporarily, and then one of the characters introduces a more benevolent kind of nanomachines called orphids, as described in “Visions of the Metanovel.”

I'm very intrigued by the question of what kind of art we might make given vastly improved abilities. By way of researching the question, I studied Jorge Luis Borges's visionary writings, particularly his tale, “A Survey of the Works of Herbert Quain,” which indeed describes an imaginary novel called
April March.
(The Quain piece appears in, for instance, Jorge Luis Borges,
Collected Fictions,
Viking Penguin, 1998.) Also of use to me in this context was Stanislaw Lem's book,
A Perfect Vacuum
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), in which he reviews a series of nonexistent books.

Although
Postsingular
features a kiqqie metanovelist named Thuy Nguyen, I didn't include the full text of “Visions of the Metanovel” in my novel. My sense is that people reading a novel don't want to negotiate a bulky sequence of intellectual games. But I felt that the games might seem amusing if presented as a single short piece. So here, to close this anthology, are my descriptions of imaginary metanovels, a final offering from the mad professor.