Tom Georgoulias
Interview to Rudy Rucker
for Frontwheel Drive. Austin, Texas, 6/20/2002
Q: What kinds of gnarly computer research (Cellular Automata,
fractals, A-Life, etc.) are you actively doing these days?
A: I’m about ready to lay down my programming tools. I pretty much
shot my wad creating the Pop game framework for my textbook Software
Engineering and Computer Games.
http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/videogameprojects.htm I did
more programming on that than I’ve ever done. Writing science fiction
is a lot more fun. You want a frammistat in SF, then all you have to
do is describe it once, and if there’s a problem with it later on, you
just go back and change a few words. Quick revision cycles! The
“building a cathedral out of toothpicks” aspect of programming does
get old.
At SJSU I’m teaching more graduate courses now and advising more
Master’s degree theses.
http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/msprojects.htm This means I
can try to get students to do the programming work for things I’d like
to see. One interesting project I have right now, is that a student
named Wyley Dai is extending my Pop game framework to use four space
dimensions. He has a four-dimensional Space Invaders working pretty
well, and I hope he can get a four-dimensional Pacman. One of these
days I want to get a student to add cellular automata to the Pop
framework, so we can have surfing on a CA wave. I’d like to see chaos
in a game context as well.
Maybe I’ll give a talk on some of these notions at the Game
Developer’s Conference in San Jose next spring. That’s my favorite
conference these days.
Q: Now that Stephen Wolfram has released his long awaited book, A New
Kind of Science, which focuses on complexity and cellular automata,
what do you think the net effect of the book is going to be on the CA
field?
A: It should be a real shot in the arm. I was considering writing a
jump-on-the-bandwagon book along the lines of What Wolfram Said. But I
found out it’s already too late for that. Which is kind of a relief.
All I really want to do these days is write science fiction. As for
CAs, I’ll just settle for being one of the lesser-known “stations of
the cross” for CA popularizers’ Sacred Quest.
I read Wolfram’s book through once, quickly, and I like it a lot. Many
of the ideas are familiar to me from things he said back in the 1980s.
But he pushes them a bit further, and he’s really done the legwork in
terms of checking out examples. I’m (very slowly) working on a
longish, detailed review of the book for the Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society , and I hope to use the book as a text in a
course I teach at SJSU in Spring, 2003.
To rush and say much more now would be premature. John Updike once
compared critics to “pigs at a pastry cart.” Here’s this mammoth
volume that took a genius ten or twenty years to write, and people
want to rush out quick-draw sound bites on it? “Gobble, gobble, tastes
like prune!”
Q: Your computer science textbook Software Engineering and Computer
Games is coming out from Addison Wesley this fall. Are video games a
good way to teach computer science?
A83: IMHO, having students do computer games projects is absolutely
the best possible way to teach programming, graphics, software
engineering, object oriented programming, etc.
I used to be into photography, and I managed to get hold of this very
nice camera, a Leica M4. And I was constantly shooting pictures with
it. And then I wanted another lens, and I went to a store that carried
Leica stuff, and I found out that a lot of people were into collecting
Leicas, like keeping them in glass cases. To me, a camera is for
taking pictures. And a programming tool like Visual Studio or the JDK
is for writing programs. Not for collecting different versions of, or
for arguing about, or for comparing to other products. It’s there to
use. Writing a game is a nice big problem that makes you program a
lot.
To take pictures, you need to have something you like taking pictures
of. To learn how to write, you need to have something you want to
write about. And to learn programming, you need something you want to
program about.
It’s very easy for a student to get excited about making a game work.
A second win with teaching games programming is that the homework is
very easy to grade. The game works or it doesn’t; it’s playable or it
isn’t.
I’ve been teaching my sections of the Software Engineering course at
SJSU this way for about ten years. Over the years I built up the Pop
framework so that students can build on it to make games pretty
easily. I’m proud of the code, it’s been used for about a hundred
games now. I have some of the better ones up for download.
http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/computergames/halloffame.htm
The Pop framework is thoroughly OO, basically you just edit one file
to overload a few methods and you’ve got your game: Pacman, Asteroids,
3D Defender, Airhockey, Soccer, whatever. I used patterns and UML to
try and get the design right. Graphically, I designed it so you can
run the game inside a Windows window, instead of taking over the whole
screen (which I’ve always considered to be morally wrong!). You can
either use Windows graphics or OpenGL; switching between them is a
nice example of using the Bridge pattern. It’s all in the book. I
don’t think I’ll ever write a textbook again, though, it’s been an
insane amount of effort. I do hope the book sells well.
Q: I just finished reading Spaceland, your latest science fiction
novel, about a Silicon Valley manager who is invited into the fourth
dimension. Not only does the book nail the climate of the dot com
boom, the fourth dimension experience is described extremely well and
the story is funny to boot. What prompted or influenced you to write
Spaceland?
A: The book is inspired by Edwin Abbott’s 1884 book, Flatland. That
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.
Flatland is set on December 31, 1999. A Sphere from the higher (third)
dimension appears, passing through Flatland. So when that day rolled
around in reality, I wanted to have something amazing like that
happen, I wanted a 4D creature to enter our world. That’s the Y2K
event I was really waiting for, and since it didn’t happen in fact, I
wrote it into reality.
Another thing I wanted to do in Spaceland was to depict my native
Silicon Valley, kind of like the way I did in The Hacker and the Ants.
So far Spaceland seems to be doing pretty well. Just for fun I went
ahead and posted my working notes for it on my page for the book.
http://www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/spaceland.htm
The Hacker and the Ants will be reissued by Four Walls Eight Windows
this winter, by the way, complete with a cover by my daughter
Georgia’s New York design company, www.pinkdesign.inc.
Q: Was Realware really the final *Ware book, or can we fans begin
quietly speculating on the fifth installment?
A: Hey, a series is never over till the author dies, and even then it
might not be over. I’m as curious as you are about what happens to
Cobb Anderson after he leaves Earth in that flying saucer.
But, remember, there were nine years between Wetware and Freeware, so
I’m not severely due for another *Ware till 2009. And maybe by then
the market for a book of that nature will be stronger. And, no, I’m
not telling anyone yet what I would call it. Jinx, you know. Make up
all the silly Ware names you like, but you won’t get the True Name out
of me. Vaporware, Shovelware, Stoneware, Silverware, Underware,
Earthenware, Senileware, Noware --- I’ve heard ‘em all.
In the near term, I don’t plan a sequel partly for reasons having to
do with the publishing industry.
Harper Collins, owner of Avon, the publisher of the *Ware books, was
bought by a megacorporation called News Corporation, which is the
creation, I believe, of Rupert Murdoch. If you’re an author, over the
years you find yourself being “bought and sold” a countless number of
times. A mid-list author like me isn’t exactly the juiciest part of
any acquisition; I’m more like a piece of chewing-gum stuck to the
bottom of a shoe, something you pick up by accident. The News
Corporation is bottomline-oriented, and I’m not viewed as a strong
enough profit-generator. My books earn out, and then some, but I’m no
Stephen King.
This means that Avon has been quite resistant to books by me of late;
they turned down Saucer Wisdom, Spaceland, and my forthcoming As
Above, So Below. All of these were picked up by Tor Books, whom I now
consider my primary fiction publisher.
Another bad sign from Avon is that they may be letting my *Ware books
go out of print. I know Wetware is out of print, for instance. I find
this especially galling, as a guy called Craig Nova recently published
an SF novel called Wetware that in fact treats my pet themes. (Nova’s
publisher is owned by the Bertelsmann AG megacorporation, which seems
to independent of the News Corporation, so I can’t get totally shrill
and paranoid here.)
In short, my problem with writing another *Ware in the next few years
would be that I’m not at all sure Avon would want buy another *Ware
just now, and I don’t know if Tor would want to publish an “orphaned”
series book. And they might both be right. When you drag a series on
too long, I think the readership can drop.
Sooner or later, a movie of one of the *Ware books may get made. And
then it would certainly be easy for me to sell another sequel,
assuming I’m still alive.
On the film front, Phoenix Pictures had an option on Software for
about ten years, but that died. I was annoyed when Phoenix turned
around and then released a Schwarzenegger movie, The Sixth Day, using
some of my themes, complete with a yuppie mad scientist called Drucker
(as in “Dr. Rucker”)! But I’d rather not rant about that.
Even as I type this interview, I’m inking a nice option agreement for
Freeware with a Seattle outfit called Directed Evolution Networks.
A Brooklyn-based director named Mark Mitchell just optioned Master of
Space and Time as well.
Hope springs eternal in the human breast.
Q: Spirituality is on the rise in your later works, while mysticism
was more a focus in the earlier stuff. Is this new found relationship
with God closely tied with your sobriety, or just another step in the
evolution of your religious leanings?
A: God, that’s a minefield of questions.
Yeah, man, I’m a reformed alkie lay-preacher standing waist deep in a
river hollering, “Ask God for help and you’ll get it!” Veins standing
out in my forehead, eyes popping from my head.
Not. Never fear, I’m not going to get all born-again or flakognostic
on you.
I’m an Episcopalian; my father was an Episcopal priest. Since my
twenties I’ve been a mystic as well, someone who believes the Universe
is One, the One is Unknowable, and the One is right here. An
additional belief that I tacked on when I turned fifty is that you can
actually ask the One for help. That’s a standard teaching of ordinary
religion, of course, but I’d never much tried it before.
It’s been my experience that, for whatever reason, asking for help
seems to work. I get the help right away, not for things like winning
a lottery, but for things like staying sober, being kinder, and
feeling less uptight. Maybe there really isn’t a God, maybe asking for
help just sets off some neurochemical process in my head. Whatever;
for me it works.
Some of this experience seeps into my books, but it’s not something I
would want to make central. I’m well aware that, for very many people,
any hint of religion is a turn-off. A science fiction novel is
supposed to be entertainment, not a textbook or tract.
Q: Is there any other projects or novels underway that you want
mention before we wrap this up?
A: I’ve written a historical novel about the sixteenth-century Flemish
painter Peter Bruegel. It’s called As Above, So Below, and it’s coming
from Tor Books this fall. I think it’s a masterpiece. No SF, though, I
didn’t want to drag this one in the gutter!
Bruegel has always fascinated me. His early paintings of Hell are
somewhat science-fictional, his later paintings of peasants are
wonderfully real. He often includes something vulgar, such as someone
taking a dump. None of his works ever hung in churches. His landscapes
show a profound sense of the cosmic divinity inherent in the world.
His technical mastery is fabulous. He’s deep and funny. He’s one of my
main men. His life isn’t very well documented, so I got to make up a
lot. I used reverse transrealism to deduce his life from his
paintings. I’d like to write like Bruegel paints.
Currently I’m working on a longish SF novel with working title Frek
and the Elixir. It’ll take me maybe another year to finish writing it.
It’s an epic, light-hearted SF novel of biotechnology, suitable for
young and old. I imagine flap copy something like the following:
“The year is 3003 and the tweaked plants and animals are quite
wonderful --- but there’s only a few dozen species left.
Nature herself has been McDonalds-ized. It’s up to Frek
Huggins, a lad from dull, sleepy Middleville, to venture out
into the galaxy to fetch an elixir to restore Earth’s
biosphere. At least that’s what a friendly alien cuttlefish
tells him the elixir will do. But can you really trust
aliens?”
For that matter, can you trust me?