{"id":13194,"date":"2021-04-14T17:28:18","date_gmt":"2021-04-15T00:28:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=13194"},"modified":"2021-04-14T22:00:30","modified_gmt":"2021-04-15T05:00:30","slug":"lots-of-book-covers-fantasy-hive-interview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2021\/04\/14\/lots-of-book-covers-fantasy-hive-interview\/","title":{"rendered":"Lots of Book Covers + Fantasy Hive Interview"},"content":{"rendered":"

In March, Jonathan Thornton of Liverpool, England, interviewed me for The Fantasy Hive <\/a><\/em>ezine. I\u2019m reprinting most of the interview here with one change\u2014I\u2019ve started calling my new novel Juicy Ghosts <\/em>instead of calling it Teep<\/em>. For illos, I dug out a buttload of old cover images.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Q1. You\u2019ve just finished your latest novel Juicy Ghosts<\/em>. Could you tell us a bit about it?<\/p>\n

A1. I started thinking about how digital models of people in the cloud could have more zap if they were in some way hooked into some physical living being. So they\u2019d be \u201cjuicy ghosts.\u201d\u009d I remember talking to Chris Brown about this after he did a reading in San Francisco, and he was, like, \u201cThat\u2019s a great idea, and only you could pull it off.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t see a plot. So I spent a year or two writing stories on themes that might relate to each other and to telepathy and to juicy ghosts. And in the back of my mind I was thinking that eventually I could collage at least some of the stories into what\u2019s called a \u201cfix-up novel.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In the end, I had three stories that fit together well. The first one I actually called \u201cJuicy Ghost,\u201d\u009d although now I\u2019m going to call it \u201cTreadle\u2019s Inauguration,\u201d\u009d as I need to keep \u201cJuicy Ghost\u201d\u009d for the title of the novel. And I did a story called \u201cThe Mean Carrot,\u201d\u009d that was vaguely about the time in the \u201d\u02dc60s when a CIA op was paying hookers to drug Johns with acid to see what happened. And then I wrote the longer and more humane \u201cMary Mary.\u201d\u009d The first two appeared in the free underground e-zine Big Echo<\/a>, in 2019 and 2020, and \u201cMary Mary\u201d\u009d is in Asimov\u2019s in March, 2021. Besides the three stories, I wrote five more story-sized chapters to produce my novel Juicy Ghosts<\/em>, which I finished early in March, 2021.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\"\"Two of the main ideas I write about in Juicy Ghosts <\/em>are, as I maybe said already, telepathy and digital immortality. I\u2019ve been writing fiction about digital immortality for forty years, starting with my novel Software<\/a><\/em>, which appeared in 1980. Seems like I tend to keep thinking about the same things forever. Digging deeper and deeper.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I seriously see the technology for telepathy being commercially possible in the not-too-distant future. It\u2019s not really all that much further out than cell phones with video calls.<\/p>\n

My take on digital immortality has to do with a thing I call a lifebox. See my nonfiction book The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/a>. The idea, which is fairly familiar by now, is that you might be able to emulate a person if you have a really large database on what they\u2019ve written, done, and said. And if it\u2019s SF, then we add some AI to the lifebox so it\u2019s an intelligent mind. Cory Doctorow also wrote quite a bit about the lifebox idea in Walkaway<\/em>, and others have written about it too.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In Juicy Ghosts<\/em> I delve still further into the lifebox thing. Do you have to pay to have your lifebox stored? What if the company who houses your lifebox rents it out as a gigworker? How about growing a clone to be run by your lifebox? And how do you interface a human brain with an online lifebox?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Juicy Ghosts<\/em> is also quite political. I was working on the novel from 2019-2021, and all along, in my mind, I was dealing with the possibility that Donald Trump might win a second term. In Juicy Ghosts<\/em>, to push it over the edge, a very similar type of President is about to be inaugurated for a third <\/em>term\u2014and, well, he gets what\u2019s coming to him. Big time.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Not to give too much away, but my characters kill the guy three different ways\u2014his body, his lifebox, and his clone\u2014and then they even topple the monumental statue of him at the Top Party headquarters. I was thinking of how, in the first Terminator <\/em>movie, they had to destroy the monster over and over and over. A metaphor?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

To make the synchronicity weirder, my plan for the novel\u2019s ending turned unexpectedly turned real with the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Fortunately in both worlds, the evil President lost. For now. So maybe you\u2019ve got me to thank!<\/p>\n

Who\u2019s going to publish Juicy Ghosts<\/em>? We\u2019re sending it out.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Q 2. You were part of the original cyberpunk movement, and your Ware <\/a>novels are classics of the genre. On a different front, you writing transreal SF novels in which the characters mirror yourself and the people around you, and the SF goodies symbolize aspects of your characters\u2019 psyches. How do you feel about cyberpunk and transrealism becoming popular modes of fiction in today\u2019s world?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A 2. How do I feel? \u201cWhere are the movies of my novels? Where are my Sunday book section front page reviews? Where\u2019s my adulation from high-brow lit- crit?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I tend to be irked when I see a non-SF-literate critic being totally blown away and wonderstruck when a mainstream author pens an uninspired \u201cspeculative novel\u201d\u009d based on some very well-known SF premise, such as a biotic robot who has a soul. The critics are, like, \u201cProfound and wildly original. Well beyond the range of crude, subhuman SF writers.\u201d\u009d And of course we subhumans been writing such books for forty years, and many of us dare to fancy ourselves as literary.<\/p>\n

Wheenk, wheenk, wheenk. <\/em>Wasting my breath. Bitter and old.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019m happy to have gotten forty books published, garnered good reviews, picked up a couple of awards, and recruited loyal fans. And just this month I optioned the film and television adaptation rights for the Ware Tetralogy <\/em>to a London-based production company. The deal was negotiated by Vince Gerardis and Matt Kennedy of Created By. Not the first time I\u2019ve optioned the Wares<\/em>, but maybe this time it\u2019ll go somewhere. The guys are English! Somehow that gives me confidence.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

All in all, I\u2019ve have a great career\u2014a lot better than I expected in my twenties. Back then I imagined I\u2019d die in my 40s, like Edgar Allen Poe and Jack Kerouac. It helps that I got sober when I turned 50.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Q 3. The Ware Tetralogy<\/em><\/a> novels feature a wonderful array of bizarre nonhuman life, from the boppers to the moldies to the Metamartians. Which ones did you have the most fun with?<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A 3. I really liked the Happy Cloak. It\u2019s a symbiotic or parasitic being, a bit like a coat or a scarf, and it plugs into the nerves in your neck and hangs down your back, and you get into an altered and somewhat ecstatic state of consciousness. Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore\u2019s 1947 novel Fury<\/em> introduces this notion, and William Burroughs read the novel during one of his drug-kicking treatments in a Tangier clinic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Later Burroughs incorporated material about the Happy Cloak into in his 1962 novel, The Ticket That Exploded<\/em>. As a teenager I read a lot of Burroughs. Not everyone realizes that Burroughs was, in his own way, writing science fiction. And that he\u2019s very funny. And I read Brian Aldiss\u2019s 1962 fascinating novel, Hothouse<\/em>, where a morel fungus attaches itself to a character\u2019s neck and begins helping him while controlling him. A bit like the Happy Cloak.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I always loved that expression Happy Cloak <\/em>because of the contrast between the upbeat, childish name, and the rather sinister nature of the being. I included a Happy Cloak in my novel Software<\/em>, both as an homage to Burroughs and because it was a very useful thing to have, in terms of the story. A Happy Cloak made of computational piezoplastic attaches itself to my character Sta-Hi\u2019s neck on the Moon, and wraps itself around him as a space-suit. Happy Cloaks play a part in the later volumes on the Ware Tetralogy <\/em>as well. I\u2019m always looking for chances to talk about them.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

As for the boppers, yes, they\u2019re great. In Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>, Pynchon mentions a pinball machine painted with jiving “robobopsters,” which I liked. Maybe I got the word from that. Or from an imagined fragment about the character Cobb Anderson, \u201c\u2026who taught the robots how to bop.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

And the thing of having the bopper skins flow with colors was a lucky inspiration. I might have been thinking of the blinking lights on mainframe computers, or about the then-new Game of Life cellular automaton. But I wanted lots more lights, like pixels.<\/p>\n

Later I did a lot of computer work on cellular automata, including (a) John Walker\u2019s Cellab <\/a>package for discrete-valued CAs, and (b) my own Capow <\/em><\/a>package for continuous-valued CAs, which have many, many possible values in their cells. They generate gnarly, flowing patterns like lava lamps or like Belusov-Zhabotinsky scrolls.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s worth mentioning that the imaginary piezoplastic substance Imipolex which makes up the flickercladding or skin of the boppers is lifted from Gravity\u2019s Rainbow <\/em>as well. A lot of my career has been devoted to learning to write more and more like Pynchon did in Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>, and I think in Million Mile Road Trip <\/em>and Juicy Ghosts<\/em>, I\u2019m getting close.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The moldies, who first appear in Wetware <\/em>and come into their own in Freeware<\/em>\u2014they\u2019re even better. Although I didn\u2019t initially realize it, in some ways the boppers and moldies play the social role of people of color. The moldies happen to be made of flickercladding with a nervous system that\u2019s based on fungi.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In the early 1980s, between Software <\/em>and Wetware<\/em>, a Texas fan who called himself Dusty Limestone mailed me a crate of brown rice with a culture of \u201ccamote\u201d\u009d truffles growing inside it, and I foolishly ate some of them, and ended up staying up all night playing pool on the second-hand slate-bed table in our basement, and with a strong sense that I had a giant lizard tail like a T. Rex. The next day I destroyed all the rest of the camote to be sure I didn\u2019t take it again. My friend Henry was mad I haven\u2019t saved him any. Those were the days!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I wrote Wetware <\/em>in six weeks in 1986, just before we moved away from Jerry Falwell\u2019s Lynchburg, Virginia to\u2014the San Francisco Bay Area. Both Software <\/em>and Wetware <\/em>won the Philip K. Dick award. In the late nineties, I came back to the Ware <\/em>series with Freeware <\/em>in 1995 and Realware <\/em>in 1997. They\u2019re largely set in Santa Cruz.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Concerning the Metamartians in Realware<\/em>, that name amused me. They\u2019re not Martians<\/em>, man. They\u2019re Meta<\/em>martians. You didn\u2019t want them around, but here they are! Their freeware minds\u00a0 arrived as cosmic rays. They come from a part of the universe with 2D time. Writing about that kind of idea is where SF can be like a thought experiment. I mean, it\u2019s so hard to even begin to imagine 2D time, but if you try and work it into your story, then you\u2019re forced to do the heavy lifting to get it started even a tiny little bit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Q 4. I was fascinated by the idea of the vast \u201cmetanovel\u201d\u009d that your character Thuy Ngyuen is working on in Postsingular<\/em><\/a>. Tell me more about it.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A 4. Yeah, I had a lot of fun with the metanovel. And I really liked my character Thuy Nguyen. For about twenty years my day job was being a Computer Science professor at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley, and about half of my students were Vietnamese men and women, and I got used to seeing them and talking to them and helping them with their team projects and being friends. In Vietnam, Thuy Nguyen is a really common name. Like Jane Doe.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Thuy Nguyen in Postsingular <\/em>is a very cool woman, with a lot of attitude. If you\u2019re a writer or a musician or an artist, and you\u2019re good at what you do, then you know that, and you don\u2019t necessarily care about what people think of you as a person, nor do you have to care if they like your work. You know from the inside that you\u2019re doing it right. You\u2019re in the groove, and with the Muse.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Thuy calls her giant metanovel Wheenk<\/em>, which is kind of a joke word for me. Years and years ago I maybe have read about a rabbit being caught in a trap and making a desperate noise that was written out as, wheenk, wheenk, wheenk<\/em>. Maybe it was in the SF novel Brainwave<\/em>. Or maybe I saw wheenk <\/em>used to represent the sound made by an agitated pig.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Anyway, I started thinking that this word is funny<\/em>. And I say it or yell it at various times, like if I\u2019m uneasy, or maybe if I\u2019m enthused. It\u2019s as if I have this faint, borderline touch of Tourette syndrome, in that, if a certain word or phrase enchants me, I might say it or ten or twenty times on some given day. And I\u2019ll try to fit it into whatever I\u2019m writing. Like a magpie tucking a shiny wire or a scrap of bright cloth into her nest. Caw<\/em>!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Over time, when talking about my writing process, I began using wheenk <\/em>to stand for a character\u2019s repetitious inner thought loops. Like: \u201cWill I ever find love?\u201d\u009d \u201cWill I get a job?\u201d\u009d \u201cDoes everyone hate me?\u201d\u009d And when a character is thinking that, they\u2019re bascially going wheenk, wheenk, wheenk<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It\u2019s very common for a bestselling novel to have lots of scenes where the hero or heroine is repeating some worry to themselves. And it can get boring, at least to me. By way of dissing a book like that, I say it has too much wheenk<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

At the other pole, I myself have to beware of writing a thrilling superscience adventure so rife with gimmickry, incidents, and jest that my characters never pause to reflect on what\u2019s happening to them, nor to ponder where they\u2019re trying to go. In this case, I say my draft needs more wheenk<\/em>. And I try to work some in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I remember discussing this with my younger friend Richard Kadrey some years ago, when he was still starting out, writing the first of his hugely successful urban fantasy novels, and I was telling him that it\u2019s good to include a romance plot as well as action.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cYou need the wheenk<\/em>,\u201d\u009d I told him. \u201cDo you have wheenk <\/em>in the book?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Richard paused, thinking it over. \u201cWell, okay, I have my guy out in an alley behind a bar, and he\u2019s just killed a demon, and then, in his head, he wonders how this woman he likes is doing.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a start,\u201d\u009d I said. \u201cBut more wheenk<\/em>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

Which brings us, via a commodious vicus of recirculation, back to Thuy Nguyen\u2019s metanovel Wheenk<\/em>. Here\u2019s two bits of description lifted from Postsingular<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

“Thuy was working on her own metanovel, an as-yet-untitled combine of words, links, video clips, images and sounds\u2014she meant for it be a bit like a movie that a user could inhabit, the user coming to feel from the inside how it was to be Thuy, or, rather, how it was to be a version of Thuy leading a more tightly plotted and suspenseful life.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThuy was making Wheenk <\/em>into what she termed a transreal lifebox, meaning that her metanovel was to capture the waking dream of her life as she experienced it\u2014while sufficiently bending the truth to allow for a fortuitously emerging dramatic plot. Thuy wanted Wheenk <\/em>to incorporate not only the interesting things she saw and heard, but also the things that she thought and felt. Rather than coding her inner life into words and real-world images alone, Thuy was including beezie-built graphic constructs and\u2014this was a special arrow in her quiver\u2014music. The goal was that accessing Thuy\u2019s work should feel like being Thuy herself.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Welcome to my world.<\/p>\n

Q 5. What\u2019s next for Rudy Rucker?<\/p>\n

A 5. Whenever I complete a novel\u2014and I just finished writing Juicy Ghosts<\/em>\u2014after a long haul like that, I say enough\u2019s enough, I\u2019m too old and tired, don\u2019t make me cross the Pacific Ocean in a rowboat again. But then some months go by, or even a couple of years, and I start missing having a novel to live in.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m busy with a novel, I\u2019m inside it a lot of the time. Thinking about the scenes and the characters. Sitting down to work on it nearly every day. The characters become my friends, and they make me laugh, or mist up, or worry. And it\u2019s nice to have this illusion of an emotive social life.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The granular craft of writing is something I relish more and more\u2014the matter of choosing the right word, having a tasty rhythm in the phrases, and knowing how to swerve\u2014so as to keep the reader alert and off balance.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I love the subtle, indescribable way that the scenes and the dialog come to me. I don\u2019t exactly get there by trying<\/em>, as all followers of Yoda know. But I do have to keep showing up. And while I\u2019m waiting for the Muse, I work on my writing journal, with notes about possible ideas or what I\u2019m doing or how I feel. And when the Muse kicks in, I stop thinking and I do<\/em>. The process turns subconscious. I\u2019m just typing it out, chuckling and rocking\u2014a grinning idiot. And as the novel goes on, I dive deeper and deeper. It\u2019s paradise.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Before I can start a novel or a story at all, I need to have a place that I want to go. When I was younger, there was that default space-opera future that SF was supposed to be about. And cyberpunk was about breaking out of that. I never had any interest in being a hereditary aristocrat in the Space Navy! Misfits doing crazy things, that\u2019s what I like. Mad scientists.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

What might I do next? Maybe <\/a>space travel as long as we don\u2019t use a boring metal spaceship or, please no, not a generation starship. In Million Mile Road Trip <\/em><\/a>I had them travel across the galaxy in a car. In Frek and the Elixir <\/em><\/a>I had them do huge hops in a living UFO. And of course Robert Sheckley\u2019s characters had space hoppers in their driveway, or they bought one at something like a used car lot\u2014maybe I could go back and do that. Sheckley is forever the great hero of my youth.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Biotech has endless possibilities, and I touched on some of them in Saucer Wisdom<\/em><\/a> (which is a “novel” in the same way that Nabokov\u2019s Pale Fire<\/em> is a novel), and in Postsingular<\/em>, and again in Juicy Ghosts<\/a><\/em>. I\u2019m also fascinated by the notion of ubiquitous physical computation, and the \u201chylozoic\u201d\u009d notion that things might be conscious and alive. I ran with that in Hylozoic<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always liked the 1940s or 1950s stuff, with the mad scientist in his or her garage. Gyro Gearloose! It would be fun to write about that totally new thing that a lone mad scientist might discover in the next thirty years, a fun idea like a new wind-up toy I can put through its paces.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nThe science news is eternally a holiday parade that doesn\u2019t end. Grab hold of anything you see. Tweak it a little bit, and make it your own. Connect it in some way to your actual personal life\u2014that\u2019s the transreal move. And go a little meta\u2014that\u2019s a tricky tactic I\u2019m forever trying to master\u2014flip your idea up a level and into something having to do with states of consciousness, or with the nature of language, or with the meaning of dreams.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

There\u2019s still so much. We\u2019re just getting started. We\u2019re doing it wrong. We\u2019re getting better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In March, Jonathan Thornton of Liverpool, England, interviewed me for The Fantasy Hive ezine. I\u2019m reprinting most of the interview here with one change\u2014I\u2019ve started calling my new novel Juicy Ghosts instead of calling it Teep. For illos, I dug out a buttload of old cover images. Q1. You\u2019ve just finished your latest novel Juicy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13194"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13194\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13208,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13194\/revisions\/13208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}