Konrad Walewski
Interview to Rudy Rucker
for Ubik, a Polish science-fiction magazine. Warsaw, 5/23/2003
Q: You have developed successful careers both as a scientist and as a
fiction writer. Do you find these activities to be fundamentally
different, or do they share underlying affinities?
A: Recently I’ve been looking back on my life and trying to draw some
conclusions about my various activities. And I find I’m not inclined
to force everything onto a monistic one-size-fits-all Procrustean bed.
(The Greek bandit Procrustes was said to have a stone bed of a certain
fixed length, and if you were too long for it, he’d chop off your feet
or your head, and if you were too short he’d stretch you on the rack.)
My thinking these days is more along the lines of William James in A
Pluralistic Universe. Here James argues for pluralism rather than
monism — that the world is fundamentally Many things rather than being
a single overarching One. In other words, yes, I think doing science
is quite essentially different from writing fiction. In science you
wear blinders and work with one very limited set of ideas; in fiction
you try and expand your heart and mind so as to fit everything in.
Q: What has drawn you to writing SF, what was it about that genre that
appealed to you?
A: Sense of wonder, goofs and eyeball kicks, transformation of mundane
reality. Very early I picked up the trick of regarding my everyday
reality as science-fictional. I’d like to be amused by the daily news,
by the things I see in stores, and by the fashions on the streets.
Life is only tragic if you get manipulated into taking it seriously.
Q: Which areas of contemporary mathematics and computer science do you
find most stimulating both as a scientist and a SF writer?
A: I think there’s some good material in Stephen Wolfram’s book A New
Kind of Science. I just developed a website about this stuff, you can
link to it from my home page www.rudyrucker.com. Certainly there still
isn’t enough SF about chaos and fractals.
Recently I’ve been putting a lot of energy into developing a course on
programming computer games, see my textbook and downloadable C++
framework at www.rudyrucker.com/computergames/ I think computer games
are the most interesting area of CS nowadays. Everything comes
together here: artificial intelligence, graphics, simulation, 3D
modeling, virtual reality, art, sound. I’m working with some of my
Master’s degree students to develop games using chaos, fractals,
cellular automata, artificial life and other such glorious CS gnarl of
the 1990s.
As for writing an SF novel about a computer game — I almost feel like
this as been done badly so many times that it’s untouchable as a
topic. Like painting a sunset. Yet I really did like the recent
computer game novel Lucky Wander Boy. I guess I could maybe do a game
novel some day. My friend Marc Laidlaw is working on one called God
Mode. I’d like to maybe combine my game novel with something about the
Howard Stern show, which strikes me as wonderfully science fictional.
Bug Jack Barron come to life.
Q: While reading your Infinity and the Mind one could have an
impression that modern mathematics is no longer merely an analytical
tool but it gravitates towards philosophy...
A: Yes, when I was writing that book, I used to imagine that Set
Theory could serve as an exact theology. Back then I thought
everything was mathematics, in particular I though that everything was
an infinite set. But now I’m in my pluralistic non-Procrustean phase,
and I feel like there’s very little connection between abstract
mathematics and the funky true God that you might find glowing in the
chakra just above your prayerful scalp.
Q: You’ve had an opportunity to meet Kurt Gödel...
A: The great logician. Those meetings were a big deal for me, in the
early 1970s. I was lucky. Pretty much everything I remember is in
Infinity and the Mind.
Philosophers always ask me about meeting Gödel. In the Fall of 2003, I
was in Brussels for a semester, and when I gave a talk on “The
Philosophy of Computer Science,” I was billed as “the last man to
speak with Kurt Gödel.”
Q: Your Ware novels deal with such issues as artificial lifeforms or
intelligent machines. Do you think that contemporary science is
getting any closer to producing them, or combining human tissue with a
microchip, nanobot or any other artificial component, and do you think
that cyborgization of humans is a likely evolutionary step?
A: Having recently taught the Artificial Intelligence course in the CS
department here at San Jose State University, I currently feel that
human-like machines are really quite far away. Present day AI is a
random grab-bag of tricks, none of which is able to scale up well to a
wide range of large and realistic problems. We have essentially no
theory about how the human mind works, not even any tentative ideas
for how such a theory would look
Cyborgian computer enhancements of humans, on the other hand, seem not
so difficult. I don’t think its inconceivable that in a century you
could slap a patch on your neck which would act something like a web
browser which overlays its display onto the contents of your retina.
Indeed, I often mention such a device in my SF; I call it an “uvvy.”
Q: Unlike the New Wave writers of the 1960’s and 70’s, who were very
pessimistic about the effects of science and technology, in your
novels and stories technology and science are rather neutral (neither
good nor particularly evil), they are something natural, yet difficult
to control like, for instance, in The Hacker and the Ants... How do
you perceive science and technology nowadays, and do you think that we
may lose control over them one day in the future?
A: I like how you put that, Konrad. “Difficult to control.” A dry
understatement.
That’s the essence of complex systems. It’s not so much that they
resist being controlled as that it’s so difficult to predict the
effects of turning a given dial or flipping a certain bit. This
property of complex systems is what Stephen Wolfram calls
“irreducibility.” He feels, probably correctly, that pretty much any
system that isn’t obviously simple is going to be irreducible in the
sense that there’s no superduper shortcut way of predicting what it’ll
do when you turn this little knob here. All you can do is turn the
knob and watch what happens. And then if I don’t like what I see and
quickly turn the knob back, it’s already too late, as the system has
evolved into a new state, and is likely to go on and do something even
more surprising even though I turned the knob back.
Almost everything interesting is complex and unpredictable: nature,
society, other people, machines. We never did have control over any of
it.
Q: Your characters are frequently scientists. To what degree do you
draw inspiration from your own career as a scientist when you model
your protagonists?
A: I’m not a very typical scientist. I wouldn’t say that I’ve made
much of a mark in science. I’m more of a teacher and maybe a
philosopher of science. And I’ve had some fun tinkering with computer
programs, making gnarly things for people to look at and think about.
As for modeling protagonists, I do often draw on myself or on people I
know. That’s an aspect of what I call my “transrealist” approach. To
describe immediate reality in a science fictional way. I think
Stanislaw Lem did that too. He’s one of my favorite SF writers by the
way.
There’s a tradition of great minds from Poland; I’m thinking now of
such mathematicians as Banach, Tarski, Mostowski, and above all,
Stanislaw Ulam, inventor of the hydrogen bomb, measurable cardinals,
and cellular automata. Any chance of me getting a visiting academic
position there?
Q: On the other hand, many of your characters are very human, often
weak, or even losers, having to face all sorts of crises. They remind
me of Philip K. Dick’s anti-heroes. Has Dick had any influence on your
work?
A: When I first discovered Phil Dick’s work, I was really happy. He
often has this very relaxed, unstuffy way about him. Just folks. And I
like that his “folks” aren’t good patriotic honest workers, no,
they’re neurotics. On the other hand, if I read too much Dick, I get
sick of how desperately unhappy his characters are. He’ll set up some
really interesting world, and then have chapter after chapter of a guy
arguing with his wife about nothing. It’s realistic, but it’s not
necessarily what I want from an SF book. I want humor, sense of
wonder, eyeball kicks, reality warps, conceptual breaks. Dick can do
all of those, but I think sometimes his own demons took over and
you’re just getting page after page of purging. Dick is esteemed, I
think, for his sensibility as much as for his particular works, as so
few of them are fully successful.
Q: You have written some stories in collaboration with such writers as
Bruce Sterling, Paul Di Filippo, Marc Laidlaw or, more recently, with
your own son. What specific advantages does working with another
writer have, and have you ever been tempted to write a novel in
collaboration with another writer, just like Sterling and Gibson did?
A: I lack self-esteem when it comes to short stories. I’ve had so many
of my short stories rejected over the years. If I write one, there’s
no assurance whatsoever that I can sell it, and even if I do sell it,
the payment is jack. In terms of my artistic career, writing stories
is a pointless activity. I tend to collaborate on them because (a)
somebody wants to do it and they goad me into writing a story
together, or (b) I think it would be fun to work together with someone
as it can be like a long and entertaining conversation, or (c) I
figure that if I link my name to someone else there maybe some hope of
selling the story. I think the story “Jenna and Me” that I wrote with
my son is really cool, but none of the print magazines would dare
publish it, as it mocks George Bush. You can read it for free online
at
www.infinitematrix.net/stories/shorts/jenna_and_me.html.
This said, I am right now writing a story alone, it’s called “The Men
in the Back Room at the Country Club.”
As for writing a novel in collaboration, no, I don’t think I would do
that. I’m able to sell all of my novels without much trouble. Spending
that much time collaborating with someone would be too much hassle, it
would make it more work.
Q: Your novel As Above, So Below is a fictionalized version of the
life of the Flemish painter Peter Bruegel the Elder. What made a
mathematician and a science fiction writer to write a historical book?
A: [Reprised from A87 and A100.] 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 shit. 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 think
I write like Bruegel paints.
I think As Above So Below came out well, in fact I think it’s a
masterpiece. I'd dreamed that As Above, So Below would be a cross-over
best-seller, and that I would write a follow-up novel about Hieronymus
Bosch, but in fact my book’s had very few reviews, so I’m not so
optimistic on that front anymore.
Q: What’s your latest project?
A: I just finished writing a long children’s novel called Frek and the
Elixir, and I’ve sold it to Tor Books for publication in Spring, 2003.
Here’s some draft for flap copy that I wrote about it for my book
website www.rudyrucker.com/frek/. Forgive the hype, but I really would
like to see this book do well.
Frek and the Elixir is a profound, playful SF epic. The central theme
is human individuality vs. the homogeneity of monoculture.
It’s 3003 and the biotech tweaked plants and animals are quite
wonderful — but there are only a few dozen of the old species left.
Nature has been denatured by the profiteers of NuBioCom. 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 lost species. At
least that’s what a friendly alien cuttlefish tells him the elixir
will do. But can you really trust aliens?
Frek finds himself in the midst of a galactic struggle for humanity’s
freedom, accompanied by his talking dog Wow, the downhome mutant
Gibby, and an asteroid-raised girl named Renata. The final liberation
depends on freeing Frek’s long-lost father from an all-seeing alien
known as the Magic Pig.
Frek and the Elixir is an archetypal saga reminiscent of The Lord of
the Rings, the Harry Potter books, and Phillip Pullman’s His Dark
Materials series — enlivened by my (ahem) trademark originality and
wit.
In order to give Frek and the Elixir a truly mythic feel, I modeled
the book on the “monomyth” template described in Joseph Campbell’s
classic The Hero with A Thousand Faces (as George Lucas is said to
have done for Star Wars.) Frek and the Elixir was designed from the
ground up to match the monomyth so as to give the book the greatest
possible resonance.
Campbell’s archetypal myth includes seventeen stages. By combining two
pairs of stages, I ended up with fifteen chapters. Here’s a little
table presenting the my chapter numbers and titles with the
corresponding Cambellian stages.
Chap Title Monomyth Stage(s)
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1 Middleville, 3003 The Call
2 The Thing Under Frek's Bed Refusal of the Call
3 In the Grulloo Woods The Helper
4 Stun City The Threshold
5 Professor Bumby The Belly of the Whale
6 Yunch! The Road of Trials
7 Renata The Goddess
8 Unipusk The Temptress
9 The Spaceport Bar Atonement with the Father
10 Orpoly Apotheosis
11 The Exaplex The Boon
12 All Hell Breaks Loose Refusal of the Return,
and The Flight
13 The Revolution Rescue from Without,
and The Return Threshold
14 The Shuggoths Master of Two Worlds
15 The Toons Freedom to Live
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