The Point Reyes Reality Investigation Center (PRRIC) is hosting their third High Castle Dinner Club with Rudy as special guest.
Dinner is at 7pm on Friday, June 26th in Point Reyes.
You can learn more about this free event here.
This post is the edited text of an interview David Gill of PRRIC did with me last week. I may add some images later on, but I wanted to get this out before the dinner. This long post has three sections.
1. The New AI.
2. Bot Writers.
3. What is Reality?
Copyright © Rudy Rucker 2026. Last updated June 18, 2026..
Part 1. The New AI.
David Gill: How are you, man?
Rudy Rucker: I’m doing well. I’m feeling pretty happy. I’ve got a girlfriend. I’m doing a lot of painting.
Gill: You were just in Europe for your 80th birthday.
Rucker: Yeah, we went for almost a month to Venice, And it was it was really really nice to be there.
Gill: Have you been to Europe in the past? Like do you have any thoughts on how it’s changing?
Rucker: Well, I’ve been to Europe about 40 times.
Gill: Oh wow.
Rucker: My wife Sylvia, who died three years ago, her family lived in Geneva and so we would go there almost every year. And I would also get speaking gigs over there and this and that. So, yeah, I’ve been there a ton of times. And we lived in Heidelberg for two years. While I was writing White Light and Software.
But you know, when you’re over there, you’re you’re always on the outside. You never really know what’s going on.
I managed to get together with a couple of people in Venice. Like my Italian translator, Daniele Brolli. My recent book Juicy Ghosts came out in Italian. They wouldn’t publish it in America because it was partly about assassinating Trump.
Gill: Wow.
Rucker: I wrote it before Trump’s first election, too, and published via my Transreal Books press, before the election. I had some vain hope that I might slightly weigh against his chances. Thing was, I saw what was coming and—it’s working out like I thought it would. It’s kind of scary to have predicted it. In any case, there’s a nice classy addition of it in Italian, from a top publisher.
Gill: That’s great. Can you lay out sort of what you saw coming as we approached the first Trump term?
Rucker: Well, he was already talking about having three terms, you know. And about us no longer having to vote once he got things going. Supposedly in a a sort of joking way. I thought the third term thing was a red flag. And then the thing about his goons trying to commit treason. To prevent Biden’s inauguration.
And now the increasing polarization, and everybody’s on the ropes because the guy does something different and crazy every day. And maybe that’s okay, it’s just bullshit, but my big fear is that he might start a nuclear war and ruin the world for my grandchildren.
Gill: Yeah. That’s a fear.
Rucker: Anything else he does can be rolled back. You know, we can put back the environmental protections. We can makes the taxes fair. We can make them stop the gerrymandering. Just about all of that can be remedied. But, if you start dropping H bombs, you can’t you can’t roll that back.
Gill: How does this 2026 compare to what you were looking forward to 40 years ago as a cyberpunk in the mid-80s.
Rucker: Well, it’s funny. My first novel, Software, I set in 2020. I hadn’t heard that, as a science fiction writer, you shouldn’t really put in a specific year, because that’s a sell by date. But at that time, 2020 seemed so impossibly far in the future. It was like 1980 when I wrote Software.
Gill: Right. You were thinking like Orwell going from 1940 to 1980, right?
Rucker: It’s incredible. A huge jump. And I did in fact predict some big science things that happened. Mainly the notion of software immortality. I feel like I don’t get jack in the way of of credit for it. I’m not sure why it is that certain kinds of taste-makers ignore me. Refined literary types. There’s something about me that’s sort of improper or too punk. And my higher degree in math annoys them. I’m from the wrong team. Too anti. Too smart. Too nihilistic. Too cool for the room.
Gill: Too cool for the room. Yeah. I mean, your stuff is from from 10,000 ft high. It’s mindboggling that nobody ever came, that Hollywood never came knocking at your door,
Rucker: Well, some of them have come at times. And we get close but never quite, you know, take that last step. But they could still come back. I don’t know. I used to obsess about it. Now I don’t.
The thing about movies is that, what with the avalanching of deep fake LLM video, in forty years you’ll be able to turn any book into a full-length movie with the press of a key. In immersive 3D format if you like. All Rudy’s books!
Gill: But why not sooner? And with human actors. You look at Phil Dick, right? I mean, when he died, almost none of his work was in print and people were forgetting about him faster than they were picking him up.
Rucker: Well that’s the vintage career move. Die. They said that about Elvis. Phil wasn’t that old when he died. I made it to 80, man. Maybe I stayed too long. I never thought I’d get to 80
Gill: Well, looking back on Software one wondered.
Rucker: Like I say, there’s something I wrote about in Software that has really come to dominate the SF landscape. The idea of software immortality. That was an idea that nobody had worked out in detail before. Not in a science fiction context. And now it’s in almost every SF novel and movie.
I also predicted our struggles with converting the data into software immortality. I talked about something akin to the large language model thing. I call it a lifebox. I also wrote about in my nonfiction tome, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. You can get somebody’s mind by having all their memories. Store the memories with some incredibly good front-end software that turns the lifebox data into the simulation of the person.
I didn’t initially understand the difficulty of creating that front-end software. Turns out it’s too complicated for us to write. So I thought we might develop it by evolution. What they call genetic programming. In my novel Software, I had the moon robots evolve. The reproduce, and compete, and like that.
Gill: Yeah.
Rucker: In real world evolution, the world is running a billion peoples’ computations planetwide. It’s not practical do do this in software, and to emulate the evolution. It takes too long so simulate all those critters rushing around.
So we jump up a level. Think of a big tree of hyperlinks in your head. What we need is a way to generate those links. A process for adjusting the links inside a lifebox of memories. Melding all the separate notions that are in your head.
I could never quite see how it would happen. In the Ware novels, of course, I, you know, wave my hands. I talk about evolution, but, as I say, that’s really too slow, although at first I didn’t realize that.
But now we’re getting into the neural net thing and the large language model. And what you end up with a shit-ton of little intensity numbers. Fractional numbers between 0 and 1. Like settings on dials. Weights between different nodes in the neural net. Two billion nodes and a trillion intensity values. And you don’t understand in detail how the system work. And you never will. But it works.
The way we compute those trillion values is to blindly beat the problem to death. Our huge huge neural nets train themselves by looking at our planet’s entire network of information.
And the training method sounds completely trivial. Get your enormous neural net to be good at finishing sentences. Big effin’ deal.
Yes, your net of bots learns how to pick the next word. And, you know, that’s dull. That’s stupid. That’s nothing. But there’s this thing called a phase transition. When you go from having fifteen pool balls bouncing around to having, say, a billion of them, it’s different. The bouncing balls start to resemble the flow water. Instead of a drifting cloud of gas.
What speeds up the training is that the learning process is unsupervised. We don’t go and simulate a giant world for the bots to evolve in. We have them play a game with language. Ahd we don’t have people telling the neural networks, yes, you answered right, or no, you answered wrong. We’d never finish that task. It would take a trillion years.
Gill: Unsupervised learning.
Rucker: We tell the neural net to train itself. At a very crude level. We it does is to keep suggesting the next word for partial phrases. A ginormous stream of sample phrase, automatically generated from actual phrases. The net checks its guesses against the actual phrases. After each guess it adjusts some the trillion numerical weight factors that link its nodes together.
And somehow, on a big enough network, the process gives amazing results. It undergoes a phase transition. The AI problem is, as people might say, nibbled to death by ducks.
My friend John Walker, he and I had some talks about this. We did a joint blog post in December of 2025, “The Roaring Twenties.” He was referring to the advances occurring in the 2020s.
https://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/2023/12/07/the-roaring-twenties/
We wrote that only a few months before Walker died. He was a great computer guru, the guy who founded Autodesk. I went and worked for him after I moved out to Silicon Vallen in 1986. I didn’t know anything about computers. But Walker thought I was cool. He liked my science fiction.
Somehow I was at San Jose State teaching CS, learning it as I went along. I had a special interest in some dynamical graphics called cellular automata. They were kind of an addiction among hip geeks. I was writing CA programs in Intel assembly language. You needed the low-level language so the CAs would run faster.
Gill: What was Walker like?
Rucker: I had this plug-in card I’d gotten from some guys at MIT. They’d made them, like one at a time. Called it the CAM 6 card for “cellular automaton machine.” You could put one into a slot inside a generic IBM PC—I’m talking about their first consumer model PC.
With a CAM 6 card in a PC, you could watch cellular automata. They’re like the old game of Life. Every pixel on the screen is computing its next state based on what its neighbors look like. And you get these boiling patterns, and what they call Zhabotinsky scrolls, and melting rugs, fabulous things.
And our man John Walker figured out a way to do this in software without having to find a rare and expensive MIT CAM 6 board. He fully designed and evolved his cellular automata CA Lab in a week. That’s the kind of guy we was.
Getting back to our new wave of LLM bots, Walker had this thing he pointed out while we were working on our blog post in 2023. He says, “Well, you might think that it’s too crude to develop AI just by predicting the next word.” And then he says, “But that’s the way you program your own brain.”
When you’re born, you’re watching what happens. And people aren’t writing programs for you. They’re not drawing hypergraphs. You’re just seeing what happens next. And you build out from that in very subtle ways. And it’s not obvious the way this kind of process works. The neural nets in the new AIs, they’re sophisticated. They have hidden layers. Levels and levels.
As a maturing human, you work out this process of making things fit. You notice on your own how your mental network fits the world. Your brain keeps making your itself a better fit. Adjusting the connection strengths between your neurons. Nobody has to be training you, at least not all of the time. Parents and teachers do try to help, although what they say doesn’t matter all that much. In point of fact, despite parents’ worries, it doesn’t matter all that much where you go to school. You you can see the world and you can see if what you’re predicting is happening.
Gill: Rock on.
Rucker: There’s an interesting historical angle here—on how people had this dream of finding the magic key for AI. It was a core belief among early AI workers, a notion that thinking was like a logical system that works out logical consequences. Like, if we could just get a good logic system, we could deduce everything.
But logic is bullshit. I say this as a computer science professor with a Ph.D. in mathematical logic. In the real world, logic iss doomed to fail. We have these results that Alan Turing and Kurt Godel proved in the 1930s. Alfred Tarski was in there too. It’s impossible to define truth. And this leads to a proof that it’s impossible to write a rule that will logically predict in advance what’s going to happen. There’s no way to compress the complicated computations that underly a real person.
To know where you’re going, you have to live through the process of going there. You have to live it in real time. There is no magic key. There’s no shortcut.
Suppose you say, “What am I going to be thinking about at noon tomorrow?” You can’t glance at a computer screen and say, “Oh, that’s what I’m going to be thinking about.”
So if there’s no magic key, how to create human-level AI? Well, as I mentioned, we might try genetic programming. Let our AI systems evolve. Bit first of all, that takes forever. And second of all—and this is subtle—it’s had to know what kind of system to evolve.
When I worked at Autodesk under John Walker, I wrote an educational software package called Artificial Life Lab. I had some colonies of virtual “ants” that crawled around on the computer screen. And they were using genetic programming to get better at eating each other.
I had several different behavior parameters, and he ants evolved by sliding their parameters up and down. But I was never sure if I had enough parameters. And my ants didn’t evolve all that well. I was hitting the deep AI problem of deciding what is the system I’m trying to evolve. Logic? Numbers? Maps? Links? Stories?
In the new AI, we simply punt on the problem of what the the elements should be like. We make them butt simple. We use a giant mounds of all-purpose neurons. A neural net.
It has a couple of billion nodes, and trillion strength parameters connecting the nodes. We dump the giant net onto the observed world and let the neuron-worms wriggle around, making trial guesses about how things fit—and eventually they’ll fit their network to reality.
And we won’t know how or why the details work. Never. It’s a meaningless mound a trillion little numbers
But that’s not a bad thing! It’s just how Godel and Turing and Tarski told us it has to be. Deep, tangled, incoherent, incomprehensible networks of arbitrary neurons. Shaping themselves to fit. Like toddlers learning to walk.
That’s how it is. It’ll never be tidy. Get used to it.
Part II. Writer Bots.
Gill: Whoa. Are you a materialist when it comes to consciousness? Do you think everything happens in the gray matter between our ears?
Rucker: No, not entirely. If you’re into writing or computing, you spend a lot of time looking at keyboards and words and you begin to think that’s reality. But then you go outside. And that’s why I called my recent novel Juicy Ghosts. Suppose that you’ve achieved software immortality by making a “ghost” or an animated lifebox pattern that imitates you. But it would be better if the version of you had some juice. Some living flesh. A biological body.
In ancient Egypt when someone died, they’d parcel the organs of their body into “canopic jars.” Important organs like the the liver, the lungs, the stomach, and the intestines. They’d leave the heart in the body because it’s so important, also it doesn’t rot so easily. But what about the brain? Well, they just thought that was snot. They’d clean it out of the skull and throw that crap away. The brain isn’t everything.
There’s this extra that we get from a physical body. A kind of buzz, emanating from the physical universe. Quantum mechanically speaking, scientists like to call the universe a pattern in Hilbert space. The meaning of that is a little unclear, unless you’re into quantum mechanics. I like to use the phrase in my science fiction. It’s one of those buzzwords that adds some class. Love that Hilbert space buzz. It’s like being high.
If you press me, I can tell you that Hilbert space is an infinite dimensional space holding patterns with endless amounts of information blah blah blah. As a more practical explanation, I’d say that Hilbert space is where your mind lives. You mind is complex and infinite and entangled. And it’s not especially logical. It’s the answer sheet for endlessly many questions.
Often when I’m thinking, I’m not I’m not using logic at all. I’m just feeling. If I’m relaxed. Feeling and drifting, and the images are going past me, and I’m merging into the All.
If I’m in the backyard, I’m one with the trees. I’m with the birds. We’re all one thing. The universe is like a giant Hilbert space jellyfish that includes us all. Why should we say we’re separate? I do seem to be covered in skin. But the higher skin, the jellyfish skin, the Hilbert space skin —it envelops us all together.
I’m making the point that consciousness is more of a distributed thing than we realize. Not just mine and yours. Ours. And I’m happy about that.
Thing is, I’m comfortable with mysticism. Everything is alive, everything is conscious, and all is one. Your precious brain doesn’t make all that much difference.
You don’t always fall in love with someone because of how they talk or what info they spew. It might be because of how they smell. The pheromones. The subtle glance. The touch of their hand, the curve of their cheek. Brains aren’t everything.
Gill: So much of what we do is automatic. The sense of being a mind in command, it’s like you imagine you’re this tiny little admiral with epaulets and brass buttons, standing in the conning tower and bored, but meanwhile the ship itself is like, “What’s that? He’s eating again. Open the hold.” And maybe then the admiral makes a string of noises as if he’s in command.
Rucker: Yeah. Let that he strutting general rant. Let him rave. Screw him. Nobody cares.
Gill: This is great. Let’s talk a little more about AI. Tell me what’s happening right now.
Rucker: It’s stunning how far things have come. When I was in high school, you know, there weren’t really any computers that you ever saw. In 1962, our class went to career day at the University of Louisville. And they had the proverbial giant machine in the basement that could, you know, with great effort, print out, like, the first five prime numbers as a bar graph.
I was interested in the idea of a computer mind, and of course I was reading science fiction. In science fiction it’s you can get things done very easily. You make up a word, and brandish it, and the robots live. Positroics!
Even though I didn’t know if I’d ever be able, I wanted to write about robots and aliens. Being a beatnik SF writer was the greatest thing you could possibly be. My hero was Robert Sheckley. He had a way of making his aliens or his robots be funny. There’s different ways of being funny in science fiction. One way is low, slobbering, and fannish. But Sheckley was funny in a cool way. Like a beatnik, yeah. He wasn’t pounding his his elbow into your ribs. His characters were humane and even cute although, let me reiterate, never in a slobbering way. I learned how to write SF from him.
Hollywood really didn’t pick up on the hip, beat version of SF. At least not to start with. If they wanted somebody to talk to a computer, the computer would use a strained monotone or, even worse, write its answers in all capital letters. Like this all-powerful machine can’t grasp how to use the shift key on a typewriter?
Back to computers, it’s astonishing how they’ve advanced in the last 75 years. A universal library in your pocket! Guessing where we’ll be in another 75 is hard. But that’s what SF writers are for.
I think biocomputation is going to be very important. There’s this one example I always think of. The skins of octopuses and squids and cuttlefish. These guys can make their skin display all these amazing patterns, and they’re swift. It’s an analog computation involving skin cells. The cephalopods are like living cellular automata.
So why wouldn’t we start using that biotech for our display screens? It seems obvious. It’s just a matter of designing an interface.
Gill: From my perspective as a reader, your great area is speculating on this sort of hybridization. I really love your biotech novel The Big Aha. There’s so much great stuff in there about genetically engineered bits and bots and weirdness. As you say, biotech is a frontier that we’re just about to crack, with things like the biotech CRSPR tool that can edit genes in real time.
Rucker: John Walker made the point that if you’re in exponential mode, continually doubling your progress, then on the second-to-last day, you’re only 50% done, and the next day you’re finished.
In terms of bots mimicking us, that’s not so far off at all. Talking to bots on the phone is increasingly less annoying. The bots understand you better, interact better. The old Turing Imitation Game thing is solved.
Writing like a person is a big issue—especially among authors. In generating text, there’s a parameter called heat. Has do do with how unpredictable you want the next word to be. In political speeches or in news stories, the heat is on the low end of the spectrum. Maybe one on a scale from one to ten. For boiler-plate scripts or fiction, the heat might be two. You can sort of hear that low-heat prose style. Always using an obvious next word, or phrase. And the stale witticisms are dead on arrival.
Gill: Stuff that truly can be written by a bot.
Rucker: Yes, the cruddier scripts cand speeches are now written by AIs. If the producers happen to be morons, they don’t see anything wrong. Writers are being laid off.
What about quality literature? I did an experiment on my own writing. I was working on my recent novel, Sqinks. Spelled with a Q. This could be my last novel, by way. Not necessarily because bots are phasing me out, but because I’m getting so old. Maybe I’ve said enough.
Anyway, Sqinks is about a a washed up science fiction writer who is living in a a shipping container on the San Francisco Bay, and his wife is dead. He’s living there with some young people he met through his kids, and he’s trying to find a woman. He’d like to write one more novel. Transrealism alert! Sqinks is about the main character writing Sqinks.
The guy meets up with a woman and, you know, starts having a life. And when I was writing Chapter Three, I thought, well, just for the hell of it, let’s see what Chat GPT would write for the second half of this chapter.
So I got a Chat GPT account, and I fed it the first half of my chapter as a big-ass prompt. I said, “Write the rest of this chapter in the style of Rudy Rucker.” And the bots knows my style because I’ve made a point over the years of putting almost every one of my books online in format or another, and the studious bots have read them all.
Gill: Okay. you’re talking about free browsing copies, and not necessarily the pirated editions. I did that with some of my books too. Using various ways to put them online. So you put yours out there intentionally. Can you just just sidestep for a moment to tell us why you did that as a as a writer?
Rucker: Main thing is that I want to be read. Aso I figure the best form of publicity is to put my pieces out there. Building my brand! As a practical matter, it’s a hassle to read something as a web page or as a as a PDF. So I figure that if the trial readers like it, they might go ad buy a legit copy
I saw the writer-bot thing coming. I mean I already saw it in 1979. I knew that eventually the bots would be imitating people, and I wanted to them to imitating me. More Rudy books, right? That’s a good thing.
Gill: Why do you think more writers don’t do like you do? Like they look at that kind of free material on the internet as something that’s dangerous to them.
Rucker: Maybe the fact that I am so intimately familiar with computers makes me less paranoid. Less anxious. Some writers might worry that posted pieces get this taint on them, and the work will be just totally stolen. But really you’re safe if you post a copyright notice. I published a free zine online for a few years. Flurb. And lots of writers were okay with that. But I don’t think they’d produce a free zine themselves. And on the dark side, you you can get any book you want in pirated form. It’s not hard. But, getting back to my point, I like it if the bots can legally find all my books, and learn how to write like me.
Gill: And that’s what you did. So, how did it go when Chat GPT looked at all your work and tried to finish a chapter like you?
Rucker: Well, it wrote a damn good section. It…it surprised me. I mean I was really surprised.
Gill: John Henry surprised.
Rucker: It wasn’t just my style. They even put in couple of new characters, with clever names. And a new twist, and a new device. They —brought in some aliens. They did these nature descriptions that were exactly like I might write, but they weren’t copies of my words. None of it was cut and paste.
People say that the AI chatbots are doing cut and paste, but that’s not how it works. They are not literally stealing our writing. They’re learning from it. Like I’ve been saying, they have this immense network of linked neurons. Like a spring-mattress the size of the New York City. Billions of nodes and a trillion springs connecting them. And we don’t directly program it. The giant bot programs itself.
Like the way a child might learn to imitate adults. The bot does what would-be authors do. Reads books and learns to imitate them. It’s not a crime. Some people can’t understand that. They don’t understand the power of an ultra-massive neural net. Thanks to its size, it undergoes a phase transition. Like steam turning into water.
Gill: When you say “some people” what do you mean?
Rucker: Let’s just say that I have some writer friends who are very paranoid about AIs. If you have your own style and plenty of ideas. you’re safe, at least for now. But if you’re writing low-brow, highly predictable, most-obvious-response, low-heat stuff, then your days are numbered.
And, strange to say, it could be that eventually the Reaper will come for you and me, David. They’ll have high-quality lifebox emulations of us, and they’ll be able to generate Rudy and David witticisms and jokes.
Oh well. There will be, as I already mentioned, the upshot will be that there are t0ns and tons of scintillating Rudy Rucker and David Gill novels in the year 3K. And, again, all of them will be available as immerxive 3D movies/videogames as well. “Have you played Rudy Writer?”
Gill: Yeah, baby. Binge-watch.
Rucker: And—I can’t say this often enough—the bots will not be collaging our work to make the imitation books. That’s not how it works. It helps to be a computer scientist to understand the process. The details are complex. I don’t fully understand them. And they’re changing all the time. Getting subtler. That’s what the new AI companies are all about.
Anyway, that big law suit against Anthropic is not because they’re cut-and-pasting our work. It’s about something low, and stupid, and dumb. Instead of buying copies of our books for study, they used pirated book copies. They shoplifted our books.
But they are not plagiarizing them. They’re emulating them. And that remains completely legal. But, yes,they do owe some money for stealing the actual copies of the books.
Gill: Oh, that’s an important key. That was what I was going to ask you next. Okay. Did you use the half-chapter that Chat GPT wrote? Did you not use any of it?
Rucker: Well, it was good, but it wasn’t good enough. I’m still the king. The writer bots may get there, but they’re not there yet.
I mean, to really make up new Rudy-ideas, it takes more than programmatically emulating me. It’s about getting something extra coming in. Something else.
Gill: Like what?
Rucker: Two things. One is the facts and experiences of my entire life. Of course a lot of that can be packed into what I call my lifebox. And the writer bot could be tweaked to add references to my life and like that. Fairly easily done.
The second edge I have is that I’m alive in a physical body with a human personality. I pay attention to the real world around me and I have emotional experiences. I call my style transrealism.
Part 3. What Is Reality?
Gill: Ttransrealism is on my list of things to ask you about. Fantastic.
Rucker: Transrealism is a good topic to discuss, you being the consummate Phildickian. I was initially encouraged by Phil Dick’s style and in particular by his novel A Scanner Darkly.
Norman Spinrad wrote a a blurb for the British edition of Scanner that says it’s a “transcendental autobiography.” And I latched onto the word trans. And realism means it’s about the the artist and their life. Like a beatnik novel, like William Burroughs in particular. Transrealism means you’re jacking it up with some kind of sci-fi twist.
And it’s hard to do all that. I doubt if today’s bots can do it in a convincing way, not that I’ve tried. Seems like a lot to ask.
And of course I’d like to think that, you know, my finely-tuned skills from studying literature for my whole life and thinking about it day and night—seems like that’s a step above today’s bots.
My fiction embodies my full transreal life, and this makes it richer. All the side references, emotions, dreams, and jokes woven together.
Of course most of us writers imagine there’s something special about what we d0.
Gill: I’ve been really inspired by your transrealism. I’d already thought about the idea of writing about yourself, and the idea of making the literal figurative through science fiction tropes. But to hear your description of transrealism really drove the idea home for me. Can you speak about why it seems to make sense to look at our lives through science fiction tropes?
Rucker: William Gibson says science fiction enables us to get a little bit of distance on the world. You can see more clearly if you can back off.
That’s part of the motive for SF transrealism. Another part is that if you only look at cruddy entertainment that could have been written by a low-heat LLM—if you do that, you’re missing out on the strangeness of the real world around you.
I mean, the people that you know, they’re all strange. Go and ask anybody, “What’s your family like?” And they’ll always say, “They’re not normal.”
Gill: Right? Like Tolstoy’s line. Every happy family is the same? Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
[Last Updaated to Here]
Rucker: The concept of “normal” is a scam. A whip our would-be masters use to beat us down.
Something I like about the world is its richness. This connects to my interest in computation and chaos. It’s not not widely recognized that the view you see out your window is probably not exactly duplicated anywhere else in the entire history of the universe.
Proof? Suppose you have a tree with a hundred leaves, and each leaf can be in ten positions. The number of possible arrangements is ten times ten times ten … a hundred times. Ten to the hundredth power. Sometimes knows as “googol.” A very large range of options from just a few leaves.
Matter of fact, a mere ten to the eightieth power may, according to some cosmologists, be the total number of particles in the universe. All that choice from one scrawny tree. And add in the full motions of the bushes. And the thoughts of the people around you. And the shapes of the clouds.
Youri personal daily world is unique. One of a kind. Reality is chaotic and rich. So why do people keep writing about the same stupid-ass cliches?
My point is that reality is not a cheap collage of stock chracters, standard situations, and shop-worn tag lines. We’re not living in a beige mall. Not in an airport food court. The range of our our daily experiences is vast beyond measure.
Make it new, tell it like it is, let your freak flag fly, and make your robots funky. Badda boom.
Gill: Funky. What’s that mean to you? Funky.
Rucker: What’s a funky robot? Oh, it curses. It stinks. It takes drugs in the form of crooked electrical waveforms. It laughs at things, but the laughter is backwards. It changes the subject six times in one sentence. It’s questions your reality. It hates the Pig.
Gill: What do you think about Isaac Asimov’s robots?
Rucker: Well, they were a start. Of course my bopper robots would utter a hearty FU to any “three laws.” But the laws were a nice gimmick for setting up stories. I met Isaac once. He was a good guy. Jovial. A genius.
Gill: Yeah. Did he snap your bra?
Rucker: From what I saw, he could be quite charming. Very into himself. Maybe a little like a stand-up comic on break.
At one point Isaac was angry at me because Charles Platt did an interview with me and I mocked Asimov a little bit. I said, “Well, you know, I like to write about people that talk the way my actual friends do. And if I’m explaining something to them, it’s not like an Asimov book where they say, ‘Please tell me more. professor.’ They say, ‘Screw that. Let’s do something else.’”
Gill: Like, you’re boring me.
Rucker: Yeah. And somehow Isaac latched onto this and and he wrote a column railing against, “this Rucker person, whoever he is.”
Gill: Really? Would you be able to find that column anywhere? Do you think you have a copy of it somewhere?
Rucker: I don’t know.
Gill: Point me to it. I would love to read that. That sounds amazing.
Rucker: Well, he used to write columns in the Asimov’s SF magazine.
Gill: Yeah. I’m gonna put my researchers on that task.
Rucker: But then I wrote him a letter apologizing and he wrote back a very nice note. So it was all okay. I mean, I did greatly admire a lot of things about his work. Even if he was a little uncool.
Gill: I also liked his books a lot when I was growing up. That brings me to another question. What got you into science fiction as a kid?
Rucker: Well, I liked Heinlein a lot better than Asimov. He was funkier, you know. And noir. Though sexually so strange—this jumped out when I reread The Door Into Summer, which I’ve always admired for its superb treatment of time travel. But it has a Lolita number at the end. And he dos that in Farnham’s Freehold too. A seriously repellant book. Homer nods.
Heinlein’s treatment of curved space and hyperspace travel in Starman Jones was a huge influence on me, as was Tunnel in the Sky. And my novel Master of Space and Time was greatly influenced by Heinlein’s The Puppet Master.
Going from Asimov to Heinlein involved a shift from SF written for 12 year olds to SF written for 20 year olds. Even Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels feel grown-up. He had a great narrative voice. Kind of wordily wise, jaded, open to new kicks, and sardonic. Maybe a little like Raymond Chandler.
For reasons unknown, I once was assigned to write a double-hearer book-review for the LA Times: Ed Sanders, The Family (the Manson family) and a re-issue of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, said to be one of Charlie’s fave reads.
I don’t really remember my review, probably I was joking about the whole thing. But I do remember an angry letter to the editor, protesting that a punk like Rucker shouldn’t be allowed to write about the Master. “It’s like letting a member of (the band) Quiet Riot review Beethoven’s Ninth,” Oooh-kay.
Gill: When did Phil Dick enter the picture?
Rucker: The King. I’ll get to him in a minute. But first I want to talk about Robert Sheckley. He was my shining light. My true mentor. I was a sophomore in high school when I got hold of his first anthology of stories. Untouched by Human Hands. Later I got to know him as a personal friend. He was working as fiction editor at OMNI magazine, and he wanted to buy a story from me, but then the top editor Ben Bova wouldn’t let him. Sheckley loved my work; he wrote a funny intro for my first story collection, Seek! He was a very hip guy. Like a beatnik. Apartment in Manhattan. He smoked pot with me, and he had lots of women friends and he was a wildman in his own way.
At one point he came and stayed at our house in Lynchburg, Virginia. He had a camper van and was with his then-wife Jay Rothbell. He plugged his van’s wire into my house and connected his water hose to my faucet. It made me so happy. The Sheck-man, hero of my youth.
Not to go too far onto tangents, at one point Timothy Leary, of all people, wanted Robert and me to write the scripts for a Carl-Sagan-type TV series he wanted to host. Science for freaks. Robert and I went over to Tim’s house in Hollywood and talked, and he thought we’d be prefect. Whispered to his agent, “These are the guys.”
I took Tim’s PC computer apart and installed a CAM 6 cellular automata board so he could see the pretty patterns. Goot times.
Gill: What’s the connection for you between science fiction and math? You were getting into that a little bit when you mentioned chaos theory and computation.
Rucker: Mathematics is what I majored in at college. My father told me, “Don’t major in literature. You can read books. Major in something hard. Be a Renaissance man.”
Gill: Good advice, right?
Rucker: It was. And it was good to study mathematics. I was a terrible student in college. I was drinking as much as I could, and smoking pot, and doing very little studying. Subjects like History, Economics, and Political Science—out of the question.
Gill: Living the dream, man.
Rucker: Yeah. In the mid ‘60s, And I did like math, even though I missed a lot of my classes. Math comes easy to me. I like that way of looking at the world. It’s a built-in twist of my mind. I like to see stark underlying principles that explain how the world works. And math is a treasure trove for science fiction. The fourth dimension! As soon as I heard of that, I wanted to know more. Eventually I published three non-fiction books about the fourth dimension. And I have my novel Spaceland that’s about a guy going into the fourth dimension.
Gill: Is that a rip-off of the book Flatland?
Rucker: Well, I wouldn’t call it a rip-off. It’s, you know, a riff. Not a rip. And the main character is a middle manager in Silicon Valley. You might say he stands for A Square from Flatland.
Gill: Yeah. Is that another thing that you get from Phil Dick? The interest in a main character who’s a zhlub, a loser.
Rucker: Well, writing about the downtrodden comes naturally to me, given that I have not been the most highly regarded person at any point in my life. At the beginning, I called myself Mister Nobody from Nowhere.
Gill: I think that worldview sets itself up for a special kind of greatness, you know.
Rucker: I had a lot of trouble getting teaching jobs, and often it was hard to get published. I really relate to Phil Dick. I like the everyman quality of his characters. Although a lot of the time, they were depressed. And I did sort of get tired of that. I want them to to have a more fun. In Scanner Darkly they’re having fun, in a way, even though things are terrible.
One bit cracked me up. This blown-mind guy thinks aphids are infesting him, and he’ll look at you across the room, his eyes slitted, because he knows you’re an aphid-carrier person. Or when our hero Bob Arctor is freaking out, and his car engine is dead in the pull-over laree of a freeway, and the parts of the dashboard are calling out to him in “high horrible thin voices,” and his tormentor Barris runs his finger over the engine block and holds he finger up to Arctor’s face and says, “Look, Bob, it’s dog shit. Your engine is coated with dog shit” Or when Arctor’s friend Luckman is choking to death on a piece of food, and Barris watches Luckman twisting on the floor, and then Luckman manages to cough out the food and, and he glares at Barris and says, “Why didn’t you help me? What were you doing? Jacking off?” And Arctor is watching all this through a police surveillance scanner that he may have installed himself. Full, rich humor.
Gill: I’ve had friends who, you know, after a certain number of Phil Dick books, they say, “I just don’t want to read mean people sniping at each other anymore.”
Rucker: Yeah, exactly. But he can be so funny. And, like I say, I worship A Scanner Darkly. I’ve read that so many times. Not everyone understands that it’s funny. Maybe you have to be a stoner or a former stoner to get it. The stoner humor is so incredibly perfect. Like in Freak Brothers comix, and in William J. Craddock’s supernal masterpiece, Be Not Content.
Phil is great at dialog, a whole level above Heinlein. He captures this flat style of speech. Ironic, paranoid, despairing, and whatever. So California. I used to call it “language with a flat tire.”
In a different vein, another Dick book that I love is Time out of Joint. I read that in college. I hadn’t known there could be science fiction like that.
And I’ve gotta mention Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? More thoughtful and philosphically engaged than the two Bladerunner movies. Not that those movies aren’t great. The giant hologram of a sexy woman nudging a tiny human in Bladerunner 2049, such a wonderful transreal representation of us vis-à-vis the media.
I want to mention a key birth-of-cyberpunk moment. I was in NYC to receive the very first Philip K. Dick award. For my paperback novel Software. And right before the ceremony some of us went to see Bladerunner at a theater in Times Square. It had just opened that week. Bam.
Gill: I want you to tell us more about SF and and math. I don’t want to waste this chance to hear about that.
Rucker: There’s a specific aspect of math that inspires me. Logical consistency. I hold to that. One way you sometimes do math is to start with a theory, and see what comes out of it. You get some basic rules, like Euclid’s postulates for geomery or the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms for set hteory—and you see what logically follows from these.
So when I’m writing a novel, I like to develop certain rules about the universe we’re in. But I might adjust the rules as I go along. If something that really I want isn’t consistent with the rules as they stand, then I’ll tweak the rules. Or change the thing that I really want.
At the end, I want the whole thing to hold together and be completely logical and air-tight. Kind of a hard-SF thing.
Another aspect of this is that as I study my rules, I may find consequences that weren’t evident to me at the start. This part is fun. It sets up extra action for the later chapters. It’s like I’m doing a thought experiment. Studying a new world by living in it. And scoring fresh kicks.
I love when my novel surprises me. If it doesn’t surprise the author, it’s not going to surprise the reader. You shouldn’t come on all godlike and act like you know everything. You don’t want to be pompous, boring windbag.
I love when the big special effects emerge from what was already there. Cool things that emerge spontaneously. Like orchids growing from sand.
In Sqinks, which I finished last year, I somehow got the point where the SF Giants baseball stadium is packed with literally a billion rubbery sqinks. And a few hundred million bad-ass Mu9ers descend, and they zap the sqinks with rays. And then an immense talking potato appears. Pure logic at work, you gotta believe me.
Gill: So science for you is an important part of science fiction. It’s not just like a blank slate where you can play with those tropes willy-nilly. You have an over-arching plan.
Rucker: That’s how I roll.
Gill: I love it. All right. Last question. How do you define reality.
Rucker: Reality. It’s rich. It’s Hilbert space. There’s one thing I learned recently that I should have known, but I didn’t. The stars are shining all day long. I mean, they’re up there shining and you don’t see them because the sky is bright from the sun.
Gill: Yeah.
Rucker: And I think your dreams are like the stars. You see your dreams at night because your bright daylight mind is isn’t in the way. But the dreams are playing in your head all day long. Always there. Deams are part of reality.
That’s something I tell people when they ask how I write. “It’s like dreaming while I’m awake. All I do is write it down.”
Now take it a step higher. Your dreams and my dreams are shared a little bit. They’re in this mental Hilbert space where there’s no barriers. Our dreams are bumping into each other. Entangled. I think reality is a huge shared thing. Sleeping and waking, all of us together.
And always there are connections and synchronicities. In my life, they seem to come in waves. More of them in certain times and situations…maybe when I’m paying more attention? Or finding my way around a new city. Or at times of great emotional upheaval, like after a death in the family, or a birth. Or during a passionate romance. Or when concentrating very hard on some intellectual task.
The world around me goes wild with coincidences when I’m working on the end of a book. Reality is dancing with me. I’m in a different mode.
But stuffy, dullard spoilsports say synchronicities are random, or that people imagine them, or that they’re a symptom of mental illness. But synchronicities can feel very real, especially when you get these runs of them.
How can it be? Suppose we think of our world as a supreme work of art. Compare it, say, to a painting or a statue or novel. If you’re going to write the biggest and best novel ever, you’d want to put in lot of cool connections. Not just the “vertical” links of cause-and-effect, but with “sideways” connections happening too. Strangers unexpectedly meeting, strokes of luck, curious frags in your message feed—coincidences weaving it all together.
I’m saying that some coincidences are not random and accidental. They’re an essential part of the grand design that we live in. It’s okay to have exist connections that are not based on conventional cause and effect. The phenomenon is subtle, but real. Why wouldn’t it be? Why would the world be chintzy? As opposed to rich and multi-layered.
Reality is this incredibly rich and precious thing that we happen to be part of. And we’re never going to find out the answers. All you know is that you’re here now. In the middle of it.
Gill: As a mathematician, does that bother you that at the end of the day there’s nothing on the other side of the equal sign?
Rucker: It doesn’t. When I was younger, I imagined I would figure it out. And now I realize I’m not going to. I’m just enjoying being in it. It’s a wonderful place to be.
Gill: Oh, what a fantastic place to end, Rudy. Honestly, I think that was an incredible interview. You are a fountain of great amazing insights and thought. I really enjoyed this.
Rucker: Well, thanks. I did too.
