Gary Singh
Interview to Rudy Rucker
for Metro, a free weekly newspaper. San Jose, 7/20/2003
Q: You've said that working in Silicon Valley has been a great
opportunity for you as a writer, as if William Blake had worked in a
textile mill. Explain.
A: We just went through a revolution here as big as the Industrial
Revolution. It's been nice to get in on it and not be frowning at it
from the outside. Nice to know it from the inside as a programmer, a
teacher, a consumer, as a guy walking around seeing the Silicon Valley
types. Nice to ride the wave of change, yet at the same time to feel
cozy and at home in the midst of it. I think Y2K Silicon Valley is a
culture that will people will always be curious about, like Paris in
the Twenties or Pharaonic Egypt, and I was fortunate to be here to see
it happen.
Q: In the new updated version of The Hacker and the Ants, you said
that you made the main character of Jerzy Rugby a "more pleasant
person and gave him a more coherent emotional life." Why? Are you
getting more PC in your old age, or is it just that you, yourself, are
more pleasant and coherent these days? You also completely changed the
ending.
A: I thought it would be funny to change the ending. Like it’s just a
computer program. Walt Whitman kept changing Leaves of Grass for his
whole life.
And yeah, I'm mellower, a bit more serene, less bitter and angry, not
as much of a punk. I'm leading a cleaner life than I used to, also
I've gotten a certain measure of worldly success. I really only
changed one thing about the ending, I had Jerzy get back together with
his wife, whereas before he was getting divorced, and was chasing
after a young girl. But I want my readers to like Jerzy, and I think
the idea of him dating a young girl just seems too desperate and
gnarly. And I am in fact with my same wife Sylvia of 36 years, and it
seems more realistic to have Jerzy end up with his wife too. Maybe
fixing the ending this way is a kind of valentine to her.
Q. There's one scene where Jerzy is in a pay phone in the Fairmont
Hotel, calling a Vietnamese restaurant near the corner of Tenth Street
and Taylor. Then he goes through San Jose State, south past the dorms
(which are no longer there), and makes it over to where Super Taqueria
is and then finds the Vietnamese restaurant. But this is Tenth &
William, not Tenth & Taylor. What gives? Have you ever gotten a local
street or place wrong and had someone call you on it? Or, since this
is all so transreal — it's fiction, of course — does it even matter if
the streets are right?
A: Well, I'm glad you care enough to notice this. I wish I’d gotten it
right. Usually I look at a map when I write this kind of scene, but as
the SJSU campus area is so familiar to me, I omitted this customary
step. It would be cool if someday there were like literary walking
tours of San Jose and Los Gatos. Dude, I can be like Steinbeck for
Monterey! We'll tear down the Knight Ridder building and put up an
aquarium! Sell inflatable Rudy Rucker dolls!
Q. Why ants? Why not cockroaches? There's all this fuss about the fact
that cockroaches can last longer than anything else--that they can
supposedly survive radiation and/or gamma rays, etc. What do you think
would happen if cockroaches started using computers?
A: Ants are cute, cockroaches aren’t. Also I happen to know a lot more
about ants, I read these E. O. Wilson books about them. The fact that
ants are so highly social is a big thing, too, and I'm not sure if
cockroaches have the same kind of intricate colony thing going on.
And, hey, the ants are in fact “using” the computers in The Hacker and
the Ants, that's what the book's about!
Q. In Hacker and the Ants, Bety Byte and Vanna live in one of the
shoddy apartment complexes on San Salvador Street, right across from
San Jose State University. You've said that the city will no doubt
tear down those apartments one of these days, which brings us to the
next question. Downtown San Jose is a place where things are
constantly being constructed right next to things that are being torn
down. Places are going out of business right next to new ones opening
up. It's been that way for the last 30 years. The neighborhood is
constantly changing, but never actually goes anywhere. Would you say
that San Jose's redevelopment strategy for Downtown is functioning
like cellular automaton?
A: It would be fun to imagine zooming out and looking down at San Jose
and watching the changes in the grid. You could assign a color to each
block and then have an update rule where a block's contents next year
is a function of its neighboring blocks this year. But you'd see that
there isn't a local CA rule that is in fact emulating San Jose's
redevelopment. The reason is that higher authorities keep reaching in
and poking this or that cell. Instead of letting it evolve in organic
concert with its neighbors.
We're in such a rush to have our fair city get it together. When I
moved here, I read the hype, and I bought it, and I thought San Jose
would soon bloom. And it's nice to go there sometimes. But usually
it's so deserted. Certainly it's never going to turn into San
Francisco. What's the solution? Convincing a whole lot of people to
live downtown seems important. It's kind of hot and flat and loud
there, though. Lots and lots of big trees and greenery might help, if
we can get the water. Less lowflying planes. A lot more awnings and
shaded colonnades. Narrower streets. I think turning the Cargill salt
ponds back into wetlands will make a difference, make the air that
much sweeter.
Q: San Jose seems to be a place forever searching for an identity. Now
that the dot-com hysteria is finally over, who or what do you think
can possibly put San Jose on the map?
A: Well, I think all we've got is the capital of Silicon Valley thing.
But that's kind of diffuse. Don’t forget we used to be a big Hells
Angels town. And now we’ve got a fair number of ethnic gangs.
I've learned to enjoy our San Ho just for being what she is. I walk
the streets near the SJSU campus and I dig it. Sunny, dusty, dry. An
exact balance of Hispanics, Asians, and whites walking around. Palm
trees. Messy yards, old cars, a certain amount of trash on the
sidewalks. A few homeless people and nuts. Peace. It beats the hell
out of being in a mall. I enjoy the sleepy, frayed quality. It feels
free.
Q: I recently spoke with Caroll Spinney, the guy who's played Big Bird
for the last 34 years. Wherever he goes in public--without the
costume--no one knows who he is. He claims to be the most famous
unknown person in the world. Do you ever feel like the most famous
unknown person in San Jose?
A: Yes, I think that sometimes. I never get invited to rich people's
houses or anything, no patrons of the arts. Nobody reads, nobody reads
science fiction, and especially nobody read far-out literary science
fiction. It doesn't bother me. I have a peaceful life. I'm in no rush.
America has a tradition of unknown great men.
Q. D.H. Lawrence infuriated several acquaintances in his hometown of
Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, England by unfavorably mentioning them in
his books. Have you ever pissed off anyone around here by using him or
her as a character?
A: It's important to make clear that I don't really use people I know
as characters. The transrealist method is to model my characters on
real people I've seen. But these are only models, who end up behaving
very differently from my acquaintances. It's fiction, words on paper.
This said, people usually like it if they can recognize some bit of
themselves in one of my characters. It's a touch of free immortality.
My officemate Jon Pearce is proud that the character Ben Brie talks
like him.
The character Roger Coolidge in The Hacker and the Ants was inspired
by my former boss at Autodesk, John Walker. And John didn't like it
that "his" character dies at the end. So he wrote an alternate ending
where his character not only lives, but gets to give Jerzy a lecture
about how dumb he is!
Q. Lastly, what's on tap next for Rudy Rucker? Your novel Frek and the
Elixir is coming out next year. What's after that? Do you want to
concentrate more on writing or programming or teaching or all of the
above?
A: I'm trying to sell a proposal for a nonfiction book about computers
and the mind. I keep changing the working title. Today it’s The
Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: Computation and Reality.
I’m eager to write this book. I've been here in Silicon Valley for
almost twenty years and its high time to try and sort out the ways in
which computers have changed the way I see the world. Time for William
Blake to come out of that textile mill, dust himself off, and tell us
what he saw.
I might even be able to use the book in our Introduction to Computers
course at SJSU. But in any case, I’ll keep teaching for a few more
years. This Fall, 2003, term I’ll be teaching computer graphics and
two sections of our new course on programming computer games.
Q: It’s been said that any real city should have a local bard who
fictionalizes the place in several novels, and that sometimes a city
isn’t a great city until that happens. Do you want to do for Silicon
Valley what Tennessee Williams did for New Orleans, what Paul Bowles
did for Tangier, or what Naguib Mahfouz did for Cairo?
A: That has a nice sound to it, sure. And I certainly plan to set more
novels in and around San Jose. But San Jose and Silicon Valley are too
big a job for any one bard. San Jose’s already a real city, anyway.
It’s what it is, not what anyone wants it to be. Life isn’t about
control.
Q: The whole, gosh-darned dot-com bubble. It’s on everyone’s minds
these days. At least around here. How did it all start? How did the
bust happen? Who do you blame it on? What can we learn from it all?
A: The bubble was basically caused by how easy it is to make a solid
-looking web page. Instead of making something, a company could get by
with HTML, Java and bullshit. A web page is almost literally like a
bubble. Shiny, pretty, light. But with a few bitmaps and some shading,
you can make a web page look like its made of metal. Play a recording
of a heavy thunk, and you’ve got the safe at Fort Knox!
Everyone could go look at the web pages for themselves. That made a
big impression. People kind of confused viewing a website with going
to inspect an Intel chip fab or an Arco refinery. Show me some
animated graphs with a positive slope and, hey, where do I send my
money?
What to learn? I don’t know if we really can learn. We’re dogs,
lemmings, gnats. I’d always remembered that story about the financier
in 1929 saying that he knew it was time to get out of the market when
a shoeshine boy asked him for stock tips. But when everybody was
talking about stock in early 2001, even though I remembered the
shoeshine boy, I went ahead I bought into the top of the bubble. Got
some Sun right before it set. It was just so hard to resist seeing
those numbers going up, with my boring savings account pulling in like
one percent.
I think the Y2K mania played into the dot-com bubble too. We had this
feeling that the world was fundamentally going to change when all
those nines rolled over. Thinks weren’t going to be the same. We were
free of history. I remember having that same feeling in 1969, not
about finance, but about society. That we’d somehow come free of all
the old rules. Remember Wired magazine’s cover story on “The Long
Boom”? And then Wired themselves started marketing a mutual fund? So
much hype, so much con. Maybe Metro should start a fund. Be sure to
include pho parlors. One of these days pho is going to be so big.
As for blame, I’m not sure there really has to be blame. Dot com gave
the Valley more visibility, and ramped up the electronic
infrastructure.
Certainly a lot of us lost some money. Where the heck did that money
go? Who got it? Who actually made money off the bubble? That’s a
question for the journalists to figure out. If I had to blame anyone
for California’s downturn, I’d certainly want to point a finger at
Enron. They took our whole surplus in like three weeks. And of course
you can’t forget 9-11 and all the terrible things spinning out of
that.
Q: What is the future wave of Silicon Valley, now that the hysteria
has subsided and the traffic has dwindled somewhat? Will there be more
people walking around with Ruckeresque notions of the world?
A: Silicon Valley has a bright future. We make interesting stuff that
everyone wants. Nobody knows how to get as crazy as Californians.
Nobody knows as much about computers as we do, they’ll never catch us.
In another year or two, everyone’s nice new machines are finally going
to start wearing out. Downloadable movies are a huge killer app just
over the bandwidth horizon. Computer games are huge, and growing.
Wireless interactive movies/games could be big.
As for Ruckeresque notions, my next project is to write that
nonfiction book to explain exactly what these are. And there’s a
couple of movie options for my books that could spread the word far
and wide. But you never know with movie options. Sometimes it takes a
really long time to finally hit.
One important thing about computers is to realize that at some point
you can let go of them. The actual world is more interesting than any
machine can ever be. Nature, face-to-face conversations with real
people, enjoying the sensations of your physical body. My feeling is
that the real value of computers is in giving you a bunch of metaphors
for better appreciating daily life. Turn off the buzz and go outside.
It’s a nice day. It’s always a nice day here. Even when it rains.