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Click covers for info. Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker 2021.
March 24, 2015. Interviewed by Robin Ince for a BBC Channel 4 broadcast on the theme of the Hollow Earth. Tape made in my home by Mark Mollineaux. Doesn’t include Robin Ince’s prompts, just my statements about history of the Hollow Earth concept and about my novel The Hollow Earth.
So I’m about to launch a new book, my Journals 1990-2014 written over the last twenty-five years. The finished volume is as long as three or four novels combined. A long-running adventure. Kind of tour of my life.
Me in 2004 leading students in Geneseo, NY, on a “reality tour” including the house where my novel White Light is set.
Editing the Journals was a pleasant, nostalgic exercise—and it’s given me a clearer idea about what kind of person I am. The image above shows an early marked-up draft proof, which has a different cover from the final version. The final cover is more like the one in the image below.
As I often do these days, I’m publishing the new book via Transreal Books, and I’m running a Kickstarter drive to raise money for it. If you sign up there, you get an ebook, paperback, or hadback—it’s not so different from placing an advance order. The books will be going out in May or June.
I made a nice video for the drive.
One of my inspirations was The Diaries of Franz Kafka: 1910-1923. I love Kafka’s spontaneous surrealism and his intimate tone. Another model is the mammoth Andy Warhol Diaries. I found Warhol’s book hypnotic. A portrait of a certain time.
What’s in my Journals?
”¢ Introspection and philosophizing. I turn to my journals when I’m undergoing a personal crisis—I find it calming to write what’s on my mind. And I’m always looking for a easy path to enlightenment.
”¢ Journalism. I like to describe the things that I see going on in the daily world around me. I’ve always enjoyed Jack Kerouac’s practice of using words to sketching the scene around me as it’s going on.
”¢ Travel. I’m particularly likely to work on my journals when I’m on the road or on a day-trip. I have many series of entries in San Francisco, New York, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.
”¢ Writing notes. As a transrealist, I like seeing the world in terms of science-fiction, casting daily events as ideas for my books. It’s hard to keep writing year after year, and sometimes in my notes I’m encouraging myself to keep at it. Here’s a page listing my books and software whose creation is described in the Journals.
To give you a fuller overview, I’ve posted an extensive table of contents as well.
I don’t expect many people to read my hefty Journals straight through. Dipping in is fine. And of course the ebook versions of the book will be searchable.
Another approach might simply be for you to root around, subliminally guided by the muse. You’ll find what you need.
Sylvia and I were in Pinedale, Wyoming, for four nights, visiting our daughter Isabel.
You fly into Jackson Hole, and wham, you’re in the Tetons.
Isabel has a jewelry store in Pinedale. I love looking at all the stuff in her shop.
Nothing more fascinating than the studio of a working artist.
For me the high point of the trip was when I went cross-country skiing on virgin snow on a high mountain ridge above Fremont Lake with Isabel and her husband Gus. Such a feel of being on another planet.
On the trip I was reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 all the while. Alternating between feeling despair and hope about my own novel. He has lot of so-called terraria and aquaria, which are little worlds made from hollowed-out asteroids, in some ways like the basin worlds my characters will drive through. I like his focus on the different kinds of biomes, like alpine, rain forest, taiga, arctic, forest.
KSR excels at nature writing—staggering scenes on Mercury, Saturn, and Earth. And he gets into deep stuff about social history, quite serious and enlightening…when I do that, it’s more in a satirical Sheckley-style way.
It’s always fun walking around Pinedale. I like how this one guy has an old 1930s car in his front yard. Very R. Crumb, I think of the cover of Zap Comix #0 .
Another shot of me high up on the peak. I wear these things called gaiters around my ankles and my shins when I ski—they keep the snow from getting into your low-cut ski shoes. A tricky thing about my old gaiters is that, in order to fasten the snaps on their outer sides, I kind of need to push my knees in towards the center and twist my body.
But this is a bad thing to do if you have artificial hips, you can pop your hip out this way. I have two artificial hips: one (less good) from 2011, and one (slightly better model) from 2012.
On my last afternoon in Pinedale, I popped out the old artificial hip on my left side by twisting, squatting, and turning my knee to fasten that button my ski gaiter. I was pitifully excited about taking another ski, this one was to be on the surface of the frozen lake.
A slow crunch and slide and it’s out. It’s the third time a pop has happened on that truly crappy left hip. The previous two times I went to a clinic and the people there sedated me, pulled really hard on my leg, and popped the hip back in.
But the medics in the Pinedale clinic were somehow unable to do this, although at first we didn’t realize that they’d failed. Long story short, I underwent a grinding level-eight-out-of-ten pain haze on a very long and much delayed air trip back to my regular hip doctor in Los Gatos. I was taking a pain pill every two or three hours, which leveled it out for me. Flatness of affect.
I did see one pain + meds hallucination, a guy at a table near us in a terminal during our endless airplane trip, the guy was wearing a dark beige parka, and for a moment the wrinkled hood shape looked like a creased face containing a single large eye. Everything’s of value if you’re an SF writer.
I’d hoped my Los Gatos doctor could just pop the hip back in, but he felt it would be better to do a full re-install—with a new fake hip. An “amendment” as they call it. Went to the hospital and pre-registered, which took a really long time, with lots of redundant filling out of very nearly identical forms.
As I was riding the pain pills, the very prolonged form-filling-out process didn’t bother me. Calm acceptance. At ease in the moment. Able to stare at a talking face without caring what it’s saying. But, it’s not like being high—it’s not satisfying. It’s more like being tired. I can use this mental quality for the state of mind of one of my aliens.
Driving back from the pre-registration, with the operation slated for the next morning, we stopped by the supermarket and I wondered if I might be about to die. I used a trick I like to do when in this situation, I looked for the beauty in the world around me. Fluorescent lights and reflected trees.
The next morning I went under the knife for three hours, with spinal tap anaesthetic for my lower body, and they dosed me with Michael Jackson propofol for my head. Eventually I awoke in fits and starts in a large room with at least a dozen or maybe twenty patients coming to. Like deep-sleeper starship troopers being resuscitated. Everyone is completely out of it. Like, “Huh?” and “Wha?” The surgery recovery room. No family members allowed in here, just nurses and aides, fully unintelligible.
Conversations around me, and I imagine the conversations are important and that they include remarks directed towards me, or instructions I’m supposed to follow, or opportunities I need to pick up on. I have the feeling that the conversations relate to surfing. I try to say something in response, but I’m not sure I really do. I keep nodding off, sinking back into deep inattention.
I spent a day in the hospital, and the doctor let me go home early. Lots of pills. On the nod. He scraped my bone away from the old socket like a diver using his knife to free an anchor fluke from fans of overgrown coral. And sliced and sewed my flesh.
These two pushy physical-therapy-counselor women kept coming by my hospital room right before I left. They wanted to lecture me about the importance of exercise and careful motion, and even though at some level I knew they were right, they seemed bossy, impatient, condescending. One of the women was threatening to block my release.
It was handy to be fully loaded on meds—so I that could vacantly and insolently stare at this talking face that annoyed me, tuning it out.
Back home now, with a solid new hip, recuperating pretty fast, already able to walk, and doing an hour of therapy exercise every day. With a fresh bundle of useful SF material. And none of the pain takes away the joy of skiing that high ridge. And the joy of seeing the Isabel Jewelry world headquarters.
I’m moving along on my next novel, Million Mile Roadtrip. I’m maybe 20% done, which feels like it’s enough so that I can act like I’m actually going to write the whole book. I already posted about the book on January, 11, 2015, talking about how I was thinking of this as a YA book, as my characters are 13, 17, and 18.
I’ve done three new paintings for the novel recently.
“Deep Space Saucers” oil on canvas, January, 2015, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.
This is, in a way, an abstract painting. An exercise in composition and hue. I was thinking of the painter Larry Poons, who flourished in the ’60s with compositions of ovals scattered across a large canvas. Of course I’d rather draw 3D saucers than 2D ovals. So I started out with the saucers, then found a nice background color that makes me think of deep space, very far from any nearby stars. Over several days layering hues onto the saucers, I slowly homed in on the colors for them. I was thinking of the colors of Populuxe ’50s cars. I see those ovals on the undersides of the saucers as being eyes.
This isn’t a direct prefiguring of anything in the novel—but I am in fact thinking about having a bunch of flying saucers in there. I’m seeing the saucers as organic living beings who are in a sense like vampires. They glom onto people and suck their blood. And if you get bitten often enough by a saucer-thing, you may turn into one yourself. Yeeek!
“Tree of Life” oil on canvas, February, 2015, 40” x 30”. Click for a larger version of the painting.
For this one, I started out by putting a lot of paint and gel medium in the top half of the canvas and finger painting with it. Doing that made my finger hurt—and Paul Mavrides was quick to tell me that paint is poisonous. So next time I fingerpaint on a canvas, I’ll wear a rubber glove.
Anyway, I decided this would be the foliage a tree, and that I’d put cool aliens under it—I needed mental images of aliens for Million Mile Road Trip. My characters were just driving into a night market in the alternate world where they’re gonna do their big drive. I used variations on a Picasso-style face that Jasper Johns included in his 1990 painting called, unhelpfully, Untitled. And then I put a little one of these guys in the tree with an umbilical cord. I think of this painting as showing parents awaiting the birth of their baby.
I didn’t much use the baby in the chapter I ended up writing, but one of those bobbly heads joined my characters and will go along on the road trip. She calls herself Meatball.
“Saucer Hall” acrylic on canvas with oil paint glaze, February, 2015, 30” x 24”. Click for a larger version of the painting.
I started this more or less at random, playing with the paint, using acrylic for a change. I was out in my back yard, painting with my twin granddaughters, each of us with their own canvas. And then the triangle made me think of the Supreme Court building, which suggested a “Saucer Hall” where UFOs gather. We ran out of yellow acrylic paint, so the painting was a little greener and bluer than I wanted, even after I worked on it the next day.
So the day after the next day (Feb 25, 2015) I did another session on the painting. Turns out its okay to glaze on oil paint layers on top of an acrylic painting, once the acrylic is good and dry, and with the proviso that the acrylic isn’t super glossy. So I didn’t have to go out for a tube of yellow acrylic paint. So I layered on some glazes and now the final version looks good/
Before I added the final oil-paint glaze layers, the painting had that dreaded “art school hallway” look, with all the color areas flat and monochromatic and raw. Nice and rich now. And in the final touchup, I had the idea of putting a sun/star/wormhole/eye in the middle of the triangle. The saucers have a hypertunnel inside of Saucer Hall, you understand…
And now I’m gonna put a Saucer Hall into my novel. All those nasty saucer-beings are gathering there, and if a human wanders in, they are in big trouble.
As always, these paintings are for sale. You can find more info on my Paintings page.
What else is new? I rode my bike 24 miles to Santa Cruz on Saturday, that was kind of awesome. Not the the ride was that stupendous—it was a foggy day, and the traffic was kind of heavy. But the fact that I could do this ride and not fall over dead made me feel pretty optimistic.
Synchronistically enough, when I rolled into downtown Cruz, I saw a street rod that looked like—a rolling coffin. But not for me, not this month.
And in the evening Sylvia and I went to see the Santa Cruz Derby Girls at the Cruz Civic Auditorium, a cozy old place, a good time.
One more derby girls shot. It was a round robin among the three SC teams: Redwood Rebels, Steamer Janes, and Organic Panic.
