Mitzi Brunsdale
Interview to Rudy Rucker
for Publisher’s Weekly. Mayville, North Dakota 4/5/2002
Q: How did you get interested in science fiction?
A: I love science-fiction's wild play of ideas. And I've always
enjoyed the home-grown, colloquial style of science fiction. It's an
art form as indigenously American as rock and roll.
Q: Your new book Spaceland is a kind of homage to Edwin Abbott's
Flatland. What made you decide to do that?
A: I first read Abbott’s Flatland as a teenager, and I never really
got over it. The book is a tale --- not really a novel --- about a two
dimensional character called A Square and about his difficulties in
understanding the third dimension. Our situation is similar: we’re
three dimensional creatures trying to understand the fourth dimension.
The idea is that we can form useful analogies between A Square and
ourselves. Four is to three as three is to two.
Thanks to Abbott, I ended up writing two non-fiction books about the
fourth dimension. And now I thought it would be interesting to make
the fourth dimension work in a realistic novel. I call my main
character Joe Cube. In Spaceland, I was particularly interested in
working out how things would look if I could travel out into the
fourth dimension. Nobody's ever pushed that notion very far before.
Q: How do you envision the typical reader of today's science fiction?
A: Freaks, geeks, and students. My people. In Spaceland I'm trying to
reach a bit beyond the confines of the genre. Joe Cube has a
believable emotional life and some painful romance problems with his
wife. The book is set in contemporary Silicon Valley.
Q: What authors have influenced you most?
A: Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, John Updike, Jorge Luis Borges,
Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace.
Q: Does the average person have the proper background to understand
Spaceland?
A: It's meant to be fun and easy. But a disconcertingly large number
of people don't want to touch a book that bears the taint of science
fiction. What if we were to call Spaceland a futuristic novel of ideas
rather than calling it SF? A work of techno-magical realism? A
fabulation?
Q: Could you put in layman's terms the mathematical notions you're
working with in Spaceland?
A: I don't use "fourth dimension" to mean "time," I use it to mean an
unseen direction that you might possibly learn to travel in. The idea
is that our universe is embedded in a much larger four-dimensional
space that contains two competing races of four-dimensional beings.
They're a bit like angels and devils, but it's not quite clear who are
the good guys.
Q: Spaceland has some very funny satirical elements. What are the
targets of your satire and why?
A: I live and work in San Jose, California, the very heart of Silicon
Valley. It's been a great opportunity for me as a writer: imagine if
William Blake had worked in a textile mill. Spaceland has a lot of
humor at the expense of the dot commers. I don't think it's giving
away too much of the plot if I mention that cell phones very nearly
destroy our universe.
Q: What did you enjoy about writing Spaceland?
A: I liked writing from the point of view of a character, Joe Cube,
who's non-technical and somewhat clueless. A middle manager. I came to
sympathize with him a lot.
Q: Do you have a pet peeve about today's science fiction market?
A: For sanity’s sake, I can’t pay too much attention to the ebb and
flow of the market. It’s been in crisis every since I started, nearly
thirty years ago. You need your own compass if you’re going to have an
extended career as a professional writer. I just wish I could have all
twelve of my SF novels in print at the same time, in a nice uniform
edition like the works of Philip K. Dick.
Q: What directions do you see science fiction taking in the next ten
years?
A: I think we’ll see more and more overlap between the mainstream and
the SF markets. It’s already quite common for mainstream writers to
treat SF themes in “futuristic” novels. And there’s a lot of SF
writers bent upon making their work more literary. Some writers use
the phrase “slipstream” for the merger between SF and literature.
Strictly on the SF side, it seems like it’s about time for a new
literary movement within science fiction. SF was born in the Forties.
In the Sixties, the excitement had died down, but then the British
-inspired New Wave movement perked things up. In the Eighties, SF had
gone stale again, and the cyberpunk SF movement brought life back into
the field. Perhaps the Zeroes will bring some new Young Turks.
Q: What do you consider your strengths as a science fiction author?
A: I know a lot about science, I have a sense of humor, and I write in
a literary fashion. I take a lot of trouble in crafting my books at
every scale: I try to pick or invent good words, to make lively
believable dialog, to create vivid and visually striking scenes, and
to get a nice archetypal flow to the plot.
Q: Which is your favorite among your science fiction novels, and why?
A: I always like my latest book the best. It would be depressing not
to think I’m still getting better. So I like Spaceland the best. It
was easier to write than some of my books, it was something I was
totally ready to do. It practically wrote itself. I think I got the
love interest working better in this one than ever before. And the
four dimensional stuff is really wild. It’s shows some things I’ve
always wanted to read about, and I ended up having to write it myself.
Q: Is there advice you might offer to young science/math buffs who
want to write science fiction?
A: For a beginning writer, I recommend using an approach I call
“transrealism.” This means writing SF about yourself, your friends,
and your immediate surroundings --- transmuted in some science
fictional way. Using real life as a model gives your work a certain
literary quality, and it prevents you from falling into the use of
boring clichés. Whatever you do, don’t model your SF on the crud you
see in movies or on TV. Model your SF on reality, not on studio hack
stuff. Sometimes people think that because SF is genre literature,
they can write it in a condescending style and not try very hard.
Wrong. You never succeed in any kind of literature unless you are
writing with everything you’ve got, with every fiber of your being. I
have a few more tips on my web site www.rudyrucker.com.