Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

SOMETHING WICKED IN YOUR PERIPHERAL VISION...

RUDY RUCKER IS COMING!

This will be the last blog from me here, as Rudy Rucker is taking over. I may or may not add a little to this one tomorrow. (I'm not feeling well.) Here is a piece I wrote about Rudy that only appeared in the Readercon program book. Let this serve as an intro to the maestro...

RUDY RUCKER: a John Shirley perspective

Some people can’t deal with originality. Some people can’t digest the unique. Some people only eat food – and ingest art – that has been chewed and regurgitated for them. It’s like they’re baby vultures in the nests of the turkey vultures of literature, chirping to be fed. So when Rudy Rucker’s novels Spacetime Donuts and White Light came out, there was blinking confusion round about the guano-white science fiction eyries.

Some sf writers resonated to Rucker, to be sure— Thomas Disch, amongst others, had enough compass to swing to Rucker’s magnetism; Sterling knew the true quill when he read it. But a couple of reviewers in the general locus, so to speak, of “scifi” semi-fannish criticism, found his books troublesome. Maybe the sticking point wasn’t always an incapacity for digesting genius: maybe the only problem was a cultural divide, since, artistically, Rucker has more in common with Kerouac than Clarke, scientist though Rucker is. He’s not the usual science fiction fare. Rucker, you see, thinks at right angles, at a hyperspherical remove, from the conventional. His recent novels Spaceland and Realware are internally consistent, both of them, and, though not exactly linear, if you follow the thread you’ll get from the beginning through the middle to the end-- after many twists and loop de loops.

Rucker's novels are persistently hallucinogenic, but I resist calling them surreal—that suggests surrealism, which is sourced in the unconscious and dreams, and Rucker’s into being more conscious, not unconscious; he’s into the Transreal more than the surreal.

Still, Rucker’s a master of rigorous, empirical, analytical thinking. He’s a professor of mathematics, you know, a guru of computer science and higher-dimensional physics, author of, for example, the nonfiction works Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension, Infinity and the Mind, and The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality.

Me, I never passed algebra.

He has also just published As Above, So Below: A novel of Peter Bruegel. Didn’t expect that one, did you? As Above, So Below is an historical novel, exactingly researched, illuminating the 16th century –a period wherein the Inquisition thrived side by side with the Renaissance. This is his portrait of the Flemish master, a novel that creates triptychs in the reader’s mind, a panoply of tragic, comic, transcendent, and homely figures in the living landscape. Though colorful and grimly fascinating, rife with utterly believable, likable characters, it’s a novel for the most part lacking in the sheer uproar of his science fiction novels. The tone is that of a mural, an overall composition that meditates on the strange unity in chaos; each section of this episodic, biographical fiction, following the painter from youth to his end (an end that brought tears to this old cynic’s eyes), is titled after a Bruegel painting, and is a narrative set piece in itself, framed and balanced.

While the Bruegel novel is perhaps Rucker’s most mature work, artistically speaking, there’s a connective arc between White Light, the “ware” novels, Spaceland, and As Above, So Below...Like other Rucker characters, Bruegel’s searching for unity in himself, and the world, trying to see beyond the coarse limitations of subjective “reality.”

In most, perhaps all, of Rucker’s books there’s usually a bohemian, cheerfully alienated character who’s trying to understand—and who’s looking for a way out of the dilemmas, the defeats that life seems to hand out with all the pathological decisiveness of the Inquisition’s judges. If Rucker’s hero is not an artist, or a frustrated artist, he’s a free spirit drawn to the frontiers of science, where the secrets—the scientific arcana—of physics and math offer the possibility of unforeseen escape: A way out that the squares—that is, the merely two-dimensional—cannot see.

Hence Rucker’s fascination with the classic math novel Flatland, and his hilarious Silicon-Valley-based extension of it, Spaceland: From the perspective of the second dimension, the first dimension is purblind; from the perspective of the third dimension, the second is blindered; from the perspective of the fourth dimension, our three dimensional world is time-stunned, a-stagger with sleepwalkers; from the fifth dimension, the fourth is...you’ll have to ask Rudy.

And through his fascination with robotics—extreme robotics, a variety of pure cybernetic mutability that Asimov never dreamt of in his philosophy—mortality is at last defeated, all the limitations of bodily form discarded like a baby shoe. Indeed, through the gonzo robotics of his “moldies”, every human activity is subject to re-thinking, liberation, nano-radical enhancement—but especially sex. Witness this passage from Rudy's novel Realware:

...just for the goof of it, Shimmer pushed her body right through Ptah’s, his bronze flesh forming itself back together on the other side of the marble Shimmer. Ptah did the same to Shimmer, and then they corkscrewed themselves together so tightly that they looked like a candy-cane or a barber-pole. To top off the foreplay, Shimmer divided herself up into an archipelago of separate globs, and Ptah juggled her. While continuing to juggle, Ptah began pinching off more and more globs of himself, until all that was left of him was a pair of hands down on the platform of the stage, incredibly keeping some two score white and bronze balls aloft. And then the bronze hands became balls as well...

Through the alien, the lateral, tri-cameral pathways of altered mind, the shattering implications of ideas carried through to places most people shy from, Rucker’s “stuzzedelic” heroes somehow transcend the material, the grubby cruelties of our world, and link up with a higher one, where things make some kind of sense. It’s not that he’s foolish enough to expect vindication of a human notion of justice, beyond the veil—but he finds a kind of completion there, in the higher dimensions, and in the sheer godlike creativity of human cybernetic invention: like the mirror that Bruegel carried about with him, so he could look at events on the street reflected in it, and in the fact of reflection itself see symmetry, and hidden linkages...

As above, the hermetic writers said, so below.

Rucker’s heroes have been growing up, lately. The stony hipster-heroes of some early novels are now the villains (or at least, problem characters) of Realware and Spaceland and As Above, So Below. Onar in Realware seems like a cutting edge, radical outsider on the make; same can be said about the programmer who steals the hero’s wife in Spaceland, or Williblad in the Bruegel book. It’s as if Rucker in his maturity has discarded the problematic part of himself but kept the good part of his inner trickster: the flexibility of creativity and openheartedness. It’s a kind of graph of classic Jungian unification.

Rucker has said that a seminal event in his life was a glimpse of “the White Light,” a unifying energy, a living light that underlay the cosmos, sheer undifferentiated ubiquitous consciousness, perhaps what Eastern philosophy calls The Ground of Being. Few, if any, are the Rucker novels without some reference to God, to the spiritual. His works more and more acknowledge the struggle to attempt, at least, to get “off the hook” of identification with the little stage we strut and fret our hour upon, to make connection with an Other that cares, even if that mysterious Other can’t always help directly.

This alone...the raw courage of this willingness to talk spirituality in science fiction, sets Rucker apart from the crowd; especially from the archly secular snobs dominating the air conditioned hells of its vast worldcons. Only Tim Powers and James Blish, a very few others, had the guts to talk something like spirituality in sf. It never seemed to occur to Rucker that this would hurt his standing with some critics, who aren’t allowed to approve of philosophy that incorporates real hope. But metaphysics—stretching from the dazzling interface between chaos and order to direct encounters with deity-- was always there in Rucker’s fiction.

The best spirituality accepts paradox; cannot do without it. Rucker is a paradox—a mathematician, a grounded empiricist, who seeks and finds transcendence. Not since Pythagoras (and MC Escher, perhaps) has one thinker so interlinked gnosis and knowledge, soul and numbers. It may be that Rucker constitutes living proof of the discreet soul, as a thing in itself: nothing else fully explains his capacity to be sternly analytical and heart-receptive at once.

I keep coming back to the confusion some pitiable readers have on reading Rucker. Perhaps it’s because he’s been so long on the edge of breaking out, and is so achingly due for a wider audience. One cause of the delay might be the other characteristic Rucker dichotomy: much of his imagery doesn’t eem “serious” enough to take seriously—at least, for people who take themselves too seriously. Inevitably, given Rucker’s 1960s era coming-of-age, much of his writing has just a hint of the flavor of adult underground comics, of Moscoso and company; it’s stuff that Frank Zappa could relate to. (Zappa loved Sheckley, whom Rucker also adores, and Rucker loves Zappa, completing the circuit.)

The tone, the dialogue, in some Rucker sf, can have a young-adult-novel quality, and readers are asked to accept increasingly improbable events – moldies who carry people down from the moon to the Earth inside their bodies, “alla” realware tubes that generate anything you think of—with the equally improbable equanimity of the novel’s characters. All this can be jarring for the uninitiated.

I don’t use the word uninitiated lightly. You need initiation, to appreciate his books: you have to get a ways into them, and willingly undergo the rituals of his fantastic transmogrifications, his space-time transubstantiation. When you’re being initiated, you have to put yourself in someone else’s hands, and just do what they tell you to, and you’ll find yourself changed afterwards. This happens with any good writer—but it’s especially something you will need to accept when taking part in the alchemy of reading Rucker. Trust him. Go with him. He won’t hurt you. Eventually, you’ll like it. It’ll feel good. It’ll feel...wavy.

Yaaar!

posted by john shirley at 12:15:35 PM | permalink

SOMETHING WICKED IN YOUR PERIPHERAL VISION…

…in which John Shirley has the audacity to claim that your mind might be more than an accidental switchboard…

"Borg or Borges?" asks William Irwin Thomson in his paper (here) for the Journal of Consciousness Studies...Are we ultimately like Star Trek's Borg, as the reductionists would have us believe—and destined to be ever more literally like them, in that we're not to evolve without the help of implanted machinery—or are we like the great writer Borges, delightfully idiosyncratic and in touch with the infinite?

Mechanists like Kurzweil and Moravec believe, with many scientists, that consciousness is nothing but a by-product of the brain's mechanisms; that it has no objective reality, cannot exist without machinery; is just a mechanical illusion. They build on this presumption by planning to mechanically extend human life, and to copy what they regard as human consciousness into computer format. (It never seems to occur to them that even if this were possible, a copy of a mind is not a transferral of a mind. There's a break in continuity. Death can't be cheated so easily.) The mechanists prophesy that we are at the end of the human era.

But Thompson says that, "…in order to grant consciousness to machines, engineers first labor to subtract it from humans, as we work to foist upon philosophers a caricature of consciousness in the digital switches of weights and gates in neural nets….An engineer can be clever and construct a machine that says 'Ouch!' instead of flashing a red light, but this Gnostic demiurge is mimicking consciousness to trick humans. The machine is not a sentient being capable of suffering and…capable of experiencing compassion for the suffering of other sentient beings…The simple and linear binary gates of 1 and 0 are fine for artificial neuronal nets and weights, but if one wishes to enfold complexity and make it portable for the life of a unique individual, then the sloppy and chaotic folding of proteins in a cell or of neurons in a brain is the way to go…Like the Borg of Star Trek, the mechanists have perverted evolution, for it is the wet and the biological that is the truly advance design…"

He relates mechanists and "Galilean Dynamics with its linear system of single causal reductionism" to a mentality exemplified by "Microsoft and Monsanto".

And, he says, "just as the Inquisition and the Counter Reformation sought to block the Renaissance, so these gigantic corporations like Microsoft or Monsanto are seeking to block the planetary renaissance and this new possibility for capitalism [Linux, freeware, organization from the bottom up rather than the top down] by maintaining the dualistic systems of the domains of the extremely rich and the extremely poor. Microsoft wishes to own the new cultural ecology of the noosphere, and Monsanto, and other companies, are seeking to own the genome of plants, animals and humans…President Bush et alia are wedding imperial capitalism to Christian fundamentalism with its repression of complexity in the arts and sciences…"

Pause for identity check: According to the site Sound.photosynthesis.com William I Thompson "was a professor of Literature at MIT and has taught at Cornell, Syracuse, the University of Hawaii, and the University of Toronto. He left university teaching in 1972 to found Lindisfarne Association in order to explore the new planetary culture in fellowship of artists, scientists, and contemplatives. Thompson is the author of sixteen books, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1972, and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986."

Thompson especially won me over in the course of his essay by agreeing with me (though he didn't know he was agreeing with me.) Somehow that always gets my approval, I don't know what it is. You see, I've been saying for years that an invention that pollutes is an unfinished invention; that an invention with unwanted side effects is only partly invented, no matter how marvelous it is. Thompson says, in this paper, that the "boomerism" of the present era means selling your new technology without discussing its negative side effects; it means rushing it into the marketplace.

He also says that "Slowness is fundamental to the nature of consciousness." Kurzweil's emphasis is on speed, in his consciousness model, but the field of consciousness "has more to do with slowness and a higher dimensionality…One channel of sensory registration can be a digital gate, a matter of plus or minus, but when two or three differing sensory registrations are cross referenced to one another, an emergent domain is brought forth."

Thomas is talking about a kind of "slowness" that is a neurological process; a stopping to compare and assess. But it's also, on another level, something understood by people who struggle to be more mindful--who engage in zazen and other forms of mindfulness meditation. Returning to the present moment in full consciousness is a kind of "stop"--like the "stop exercise" of the Sufis and GI Gurdjieff. It means a turning of attention to the totality of now, the physical, mental, emotional now....But there is a paradox afoot in the process. On the one hand it involves a kind of slowing, as I think Thompson hints, so that one can focus on now, in silence; on the other hand it involves a widening, and opening of the floodgates of consciousness, which means more information comes in. Less leads to more. And that "more" is of better quality.

In a way this work with attention, this focus on the now, involves taking in more "frames per second"--to resort, ironically, to a mechanistic comparison--which means more information. If you watch a short version of a film, cutting 7 out of 10 frames, the film will end sooner,; it'll be over faster, and you'll see some kind of continuity. But if instead you see all the available frames, you get more information, a better film, although it takes longer to see the film: it seems slower.

See, the internet is good, and access to convenience is addictively wonderful, but if we train ourselves to speed in everything, we train ourselves to superficiality. Thompson gives the example of a Beethoven string quartet: "one may enhance the baud rate of data-processing, but one will no longer have music."

This brings me elliptically to the discussion we were having at the John Shirley Message board. "Chester" posted about the apparent inevitability of the arising of intelligent life in the universe, dead matter's tendency to produce life, and his notion that something higher may underlie this...

Someone else, “Lawman”, responded with the inevitable (and quite cogent) argument that in an infinite universe life will arise in accordance with random probability, and “there is no reason to anthropomorphicize these inanimate objects/events or associate them with a supernatural force. They, like us, are simply a result of coincidence. The difference is that, because they never existed, we cannot see they nearly infinite number of Universes which favored destruction, rather than creation.”

And he says that our consciousness is an illusion of our makeup. As to that, well, what is real consciousness then? Pain is no illusion, as Dr Johnson demonstrated, and it's a function of consciousness. And in his analogy of the computer that says "Ouch!" Thompson echoes that.

The fact that consciousness comes in degrees of more or less fullness can be collated , meaningfully, to the fact that organisms evolve to greater efficiency and capability.

The usual notions of God, as a Planner, a benevolent Monitor, always seemed narrow and anthropomorphic to me. But that doesn't mean there's nothing beyond the obvious consciousness; doesn't mean there's no consciousness more powerful and pervasive than ours. We're ineluctably a part of the universe, andwe're conscious, so that part of the universe, anyway, is conscious.

There seems an arrow of direction in evolution. This has been sharply argued with, but those arguments are, to me, unconvincing. Life on Earth has gone from single cell to multiple; from mindless to mindful. That's a direction. If consciousness's development accompanies that direction--and it seems to--and if that direction offers increasing capability of organisms, and it does, why should not that direction offer increasing capability of consciousness itself? God, perhaps, develops and evolves through the universe's creatures. The universe is ancient; that evolved consciousness may be influencing things, in its slow, indirect way, even now. I see no reason to view that (admittedly theoretical) consciousness as “supernatural“. It's likely quite natural. We just don't understand its nature very well.

It may or may not be relevant that this is, probably, just one of an infinite number of universes. This is ours. And some part of it...lives!

#############

John Kerry's speech at the Democratic National Convention...

...was stirring, wasn't it? He fired off his own smartly sculpted soundbites--something you have to do if you're going to get people to pay attention at all, now--and managed to keep his tendency to circumambulation and prolixity under control. His wife was watching like a falcon. A real presence. And when Kerry said he had something he wanted to say to George Bush my wife and I both at once burst out, hopefully, "'Shove it!'"

But no, he didn't echo his wife's comment to a reporter, he merely suggested that Bush campaign without too much negativity, or name-calling. Take the high road, George. As John McCain found out during the primaries a few years back, Bush and his attack ads will say whatever it takes to shake confidence in his opponent, no matter how false or damaging...

Still thinking about Teresa Heinz Kerry. A strong woman. Not a woman likely to be taken in by a fortune hunter. If a Democrat marries a rich woman the Republicans call him a "gigolo"--if a Republican marries a rich woman they say he "married well."

And anyway, Kerry is just preparation for someone else. Who's preparation for a third guy. I say...JOHN EDWARDS IN 2012! With Barack Obama--obviously someone with a brilliant future in politics--as his Vice President!

And then Barack Obama for President in 2020!