Mark Dery
Interview to Rudy Rucker
for Salon. New York, 7/5/1999
Q: In _Saucer Wisdom_, you---or an alternate-universe doppelganger
with the same name---find God. I, for one, was stunned to hear pearls
of cosmic wisdom such as "God is love" on the lips of a man who once
used pages torn from a Gideon Bible for rolling papers and nearly came
to blows with Cal Thomas, then head of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority.
Can you offer any helpful hints for readers trying to reconcile the
wiseass, Church of the SubGenius-style skepticism of your earlier
works with the wide-eyed mysticism of _Saucer Wisdom_?
A: I have been interested in mysticism every since I first heard the
word in college. Mysticism in the sense of attaining some direct
contact with God, or the One, or with the divine nature of the
Universe. The eye on the top of the pyramid. The White Light. Any
problems I've ever had with organized religion have been caused by
political differences rather than religious or theological
differences. In and of itself, there's no reason why Christianity
should be associated with right-wing politics. Indeed, in the 1960s
some of the most dedicated anti-Vietnam-war activists were Roman
Catholic priests. So it always grates when one sees Christ used as a
poster-boy for right-wing political interests. It's comparable, in a
way, to how Apple has been systematically using pictures of great
thinkers to promote their style of machine. There's no intrinsic
connection between Einstein and the Macintosh, just as there's no
connection between Jesus Christ and the Republican party. This said, I
will also grant that, irregardless of anything having to do with
politics, I'm more comfortable with religion than I used to be. I've
always believed in a Cosmic Absolute, but only recently did I start
feeling like it could make sense to pray. I would, by the way, take
exception to your knee-jerk characterization of mysticism as "wide
-eyed." One can in fact have a quite practical and, if you will,
"narrow-eyed" reason for choosing to believe that God is everywhere
and that God will help you if you ask: this kind of belief makes it
easier to be alive.
Q: On that note, do you see yourself as part of the tradition of SF
mysticism that includes Olaf Stapledon (_The Star Maker_), Arthur C.
Clarke (_Childhood's End_), William Gibson (_Neuromancer_'s voodoo
cosmology), and, most obviously, Philip K. Dick (the _Exegesis_)?
A: In very many of my books you will find characters trying to break
through to the Answer. In my novel White Light, they're in fact very
specifically trying to climb an infinite mountain to reach God.
Science fiction allows us to try and do all sorts of counterfactual
things. I used to always wish I could find a good science fiction book
about what happens after you die, but I don't thing anyone yet has
managed to top Dante. Of the authors you mention, certainly my
philosophical views are the closest to Stapledon's. But I'd like to
think my humor and realism is closer to Philip K. Dick's. Philosophy
aside, I'd like my science to be as hard-core and accurate as
Clarke's, and I'd like my style to be as lovely as Gibson's.
Q: I was especially amused to find, among _Saucer Wisdom_'s
premonitions of "limpware engineering," do-it-yourself transgenic
tinkering, and mindfaxing, a savagely funny chronicle of a 1994 _Mondo
2000_ party in 1994, with publisher Queen Mu "inaccessible behind
starry eyes and rictuslike smile, her voice breathy and brittle, *stay
away*." In addition to being a _Pilgrim's Progress_ for _Zippy the
Pinhead_ fans *and* a head-spinning ride into the technological
future, _Saucer Wisdom_ is a wisecracking eulogy for the cyberculture
of the early '90s. Are we well and truly in the age of "post-cool"
computer culture, ruled by .com CEO's who've never heard of _Mondo_
and who harbor no illusions about the "countercultural" promise of the
Digital Revolution(tm)? If so, do you mourn the passing of the
cybertopian rhetoric of the early '90s? Or are you happy to be rid of
it?
A: People sometimes talk about an accelerated "Internet time," in
which a month is like a year. I had no idea in the late 80s and early
90s that we were roaring through a Golden Age. Most of the things that
people hoped for from the Net have come true. Anyone can publish
anything: text, images, music, or video. There's no censorship, no
bottleneck, you can set up your own pirate mind-station as easy as
pie. Of course speed and access still need to be improved. Web speed
needs to reach a point where jumping from link to link is as easy as
turning pages in a magazine. And Web access has to become truly
democratic, with everyone able to log on. I think the true
countercultural effects of the Web are yet to be felt. The complete
disappearance of network television and the establishment press might
be things one could expect.
Q: You were a featured contributor to Bruce Sterling's canonical
cyberpunk anthology, _Mirrorshades_, and critics often discuss your
novels in the same breath as Gibson's and Sterling's. Even so, your
fiction has always struck me as more cyberdelic than cyberpunk. For
one thing, it's Day Glo rather than chrome and gunmetal, flaunting its
'60s roots in a way that most '80s SF did not. For another, it's
unabashedly personal, a fictionalized autobiography in the Kerouac-ian
mode. Also, there's an antic playfulness to your writing that's in
short supply in most SF, a Silly- Putty sense of the absurd that seems
to descend from underground comix and pothead humor on one hand and
the thought-experiments of physicists like Schrodinger and Feynman on
the other. Bubbling underneath it all is a cartoon-y sexuality,
somewhere between R. Crumb and Rabelais, that's conspicuously absent
in mainstream SF. Is this a fair characterization? Who are your
literary precedents---and descendents---in SF and outside it?
A: I've often said that my work might more accurately be termed
transreal than cyberpunk, "transreal" being a word that I coined to
mean science-fiction based on one's immediate life and daily
perceptions. But certainly I have a lot of affinity with the
cyberpunks. They're my friends, they're my favorite SF writers, I
collaborate with them, and so on. In self-aggrandizing moments I think
of us as an 80s version of the Beats. The Beats were indeed some of my
biggest literary influences, also Thomas Pynchon and Jorge Luis
Borges. Growing up, my favorite SF writer was Robert Sheckley. He
wrote wonderful short stories which were real and funny and had gnarly
science twists. And the main characters were often bumbling, flummoxed
men whom one sensed were very much like the author himself. I
eventually got to meet Sheckley; in 1982 he turned up in a camper van
at my house in Lynchburg, Virginia, and lived in our driveway for a
week. I can't remember exactly how he happened to come there, he'd
read my White Light and he liked me. It was like a miracle to have
Sheckley in my driveway, the great SF hero of my youth here in, as it
were, his space cruiser. In 1987 Sheckley and I went to visit Tim
Leary in L.A. A Venice, CA, screenwriter called Martin Olson had
cooked up the idea that "Ruckella and the Sheck-man" (as he termed us)
would start writing a TV show for Dr. Tim. Nothing came of it, but it
was a wonderful day.
Q: The shelves are groaning, these days, with books like Margaret
Wertheim's _The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace_, which considers the
mythologization of cyberspace as "a technological substitute for the
Christian space of Heaven"; Jennifer Cobb's _Cybergrace: The Search
for God in the Digital World_, a Teilhard de Chardinian sermon on the
"emergent" spirituality of intelligent machines; Jeff Zaleski's _The
Soul of Cyberspace: How New Technology is Changing Our Spiritual
Lives_; even a Christian book called _The Soul in Cyberspace_, by
Douglas Groothius. As someone who shuttles effortlessly between
metaphysics and physics, spiritual epiphanies and fractal geometry,
what do you make of this stuff? Ironically, your own spirituality
seems to spring more from your amazement---and amusement---at the
chaos and complexity of the physical universe than any revelations on
the other side of the screen.
A: My first reaction when I see these cyber books is that I wish I'd
get around to writing one myself! My second reaction is to look in the
index and see if they mention me. A few of them are good, but many
don't have much content. Some books about ideas are what I think of as
"Stations of the Cross" books. The author travels around and talks to
a bunch of experts, writes down what he or she thinks they said, and
then strains for an epiphany, which is normally some very familiar
received idea, written in italics. But I just finished reading through
Margaret Wertheim's _The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace_, and it was
terrific. She, for one, does have a clear, original, provocative idea.
She talks about how the invention of perspective in the Renaissance
gave people a mental tool for thinking of space as an undivided unity.
She points out that once we had the idea of space, it was possible to
develop physics. And this had the effect, says Wertheim, of crowding
God and the angels out of our physical cosmos. She feels that in
modern times we have begun to think of heaven as lying not in physical
space but in cyberspace. As an example of this tendency she talks, for
instance, about the science-fictional notion of uploading your mind
into a computer, as in my _*Ware_ books. I recently gave a talk at the
Public Netbase Project in Vienna in which I extended Wertheim's thesis
a bit to come up with the following analogy. _Perspective is to
Physical Space as Cyberspace is to Mental Space_. My point is that
hyperlinked web pages may serve as a good tool for creating models of
how the human mind works. Both the Web and the human mind have a
fractal quality; that is, if you start out to go from A to B, you tend
to end up detouring into C, and then into D, E, and on beyond Z. Maybe
I should write a cyber book about this idea! _The Dimensionality of
Cyberspace._ Any editors out there reading this?