{"id":13714,"date":"2022-02-03T14:21:37","date_gmt":"2022-02-03T22:21:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=13714"},"modified":"2022-02-03T20:09:29","modified_gmt":"2022-02-04T04:09:29","slug":"how-to-write-getting-ideas-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2022\/02\/03\/how-to-write-getting-ideas-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"How To Write: Getting Ideas, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

Where do I get my ideas for science fiction?<\/em><\/p>\n

This continues my earlier post<\/a> on the topic. The material is taken from interviews.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

That 3d plastic slug was 3d printed for me by Chuck Shotton.<\/span><\/p>\n

Interviewed by Heath Row for <\/strong>The National Fantasy Fan<\/em>, July, 2009. New York.<\/strong><\/p>\n

You asked how I between the value of expanding my consciousness by getting high verse the risks of excess. Ever since I turned fifty, I strike the balance by being clean and sober! When I was younger, like so many writers, I liked to think that getting high gave me creative inspiration\u2014and maybe, now and then, it did. At the very least, it brought me into contact with some colorful people. But at some point, the cost began seeming too steep.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve found over the recent years is that I don\u2019t actually need any kind of chemical input in order to have strange ideas. Come to think of it, I even had unusual ideas when I was an kid. That\u2019s just how my mind happens to work\u2014you might say that I\u2019m lucky.<\/p>\n

These days if I feel dry or uncreative, it helps to simply do something different. Go on a bike ride, go to the beach, see a movie, talk to people or, if I have the time and the money, take a vacation trip. And even if I don\u2019t do anything much, in a day or two the images and ideas come dripping back in. Sometimes it just takes a little patience. So far, the Muse keeps showing up.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Maximus Kim for <\/strong>3 AM Webzine<\/em>, November, 2010, Los Angeles<\/strong><\/p>\n

I was a big fan of pot when I was younger. But over time, pot and alcohol got to be more trouble than they were worth, and I got some help and managed to quit using them.<\/p>\n

I was rarely high when I was writing\u2014it tended to make the writing seem too hard. But there were times when I might pencil in some revisions while I was high. Or I\u2019d jot down some ideas about my work in progress, if I was high at a concert or walking in the woods, ideas for wacky dialog or bizarre turns of my plot. I\u2019d write them on the piece of paper that I always carry in my back pocket. Some of these ideas would be good, some not.<\/p>\n

Artists sometimes fear that they\u2019ll lose their inspiration or their edge if they sober up. And I worried a little about that. But over the years since I quit, I\u2019ve found that I\u2019m just as wild as ever. The weird ideas percolate naturally out of my mind. It was me all along.<\/p>\n

The upside of being sober is that I have more energy than before. And I\u2019m much less likely to get into depression and remorse. But I still worry a lot more than I\u2019d like to. That\u2019s how I am.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Although I have a Ph. D. in mathematics, I never took a course in computer science or in writing. So I am in many ways self-taught.<\/p>\n

Writing was the craft I wanted to learn the most, and I got my first start at it simply by writing a lot of letters to my college friends. I used a typewriter, just as I imagined professional writers would do. I had an Olivetti portable. Later, after grad school, I got a rose-colored IBM Selectric, a lovely machine, currently enshrined in my basement.<\/p>\n

Part of learning to write is a matter of learning to imitate the writers that you admire. I read a lot, and, over the years I imitated Hemingway, Kerouac, Terry Southern, Pynchon, Burroughs, Vonnegut, Phil Dick, Robert Sheckley and many others. Thanks to some fortunate fluke of my mental makeup\u2014and to years of practice\u2014I find it fairly easy to mold words into patterns that I like.<\/p>\n

If you read a lot, you develop a large inner library of words and phrases that you love, not to mention a repertoire of story twists, attitudes, and styles of thought. The inside of a working writer\u2019s head is like the backstage wardrobe room at a theater. In your apprenticeship you stock the wardrobe room, then you began assembling costumes from it, and perhaps at some point you\u2019re designing entirely new garments of your own.<\/p>\n

We place the greatest value on the things we discover ourselves. School is really a matter of teaching you how to go about your investigations. The real knowledge consists of the things you find on your own.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a good idea to lean too heavily on existing SF books and movies. Those are a pool of old ideas. For the new ideas, you need to look at the actual world. Pay attention to the things you see in your daily life, and the things you see in the media. If you notice something odd, imagine dialing up the oddity to a still higher level.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also good to let go of logic. SF stories are in some ways like fairy tales. Go ahead with any weird, surrealist notion that you have. You can always invent some bogus scientific justification later on!<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

It goes without saying that science needs to push even harder on the problem of finding non-polluting sources for energy. It still could be that there\u2019s some wholly new kind of energy source we\u2019ve never thought of\u2014perhaps something involving dark matter, string theory or quantum foam. After all, two centuries ago, nobody knew about nuclear power or even electricity.<\/p>\n

Biotech or genomics seem like huge new frontiers for science. Just as computer chips have replaced gears, I see tweaked organisms of the future replacing chips. In five hundred years we may not have any machines at all. Everything around us will be, at some low level, alive.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Eduardo Almi\u00c3\u00b1ana, for<\/strong> Androide<\/em> magazine, October 2011, Valencia, Spain.<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a good idea to lean too heavily on existing SF books and movies. Those are a pool of old ideas. For the new ideas, you need to look at the actual world. Pay attention to the things you see in your daily life, and the things you see in the media. If you notice something odd, imagine dialing up the oddity to a still higher level.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll never stop being a cyberpunk, not that it\u2019s a commercially viable label to use anymore. We started writing cyberpunk because we had a really strong discontent with the status quo in science fiction, and with the state of human society at large.<\/p>\n

Two big thematic notions in cyberpunk are, firstly, the blending of human minds with machines, and, secondly, our psychic migration from physical reality into a web-based virtual reality.<\/p>\n

Mainstream thinkers still don\u2019t seem comfortable with the notion that digital reality and mental reality are points on a continuum. Another cyberpunk teaching that\u2019s not so widely known is that digital things can be squishy, funky, and smooth. Like my moldie robots in Freeware<\/em> that are made of soft, flickering plastic that\u2019s infested with smelly mold.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also good to let go of logic. SF stories are in some ways like fairy tales. Go ahead with any weird, surrealist notion that you have. You can always invent some bogus scientific justification later on!<\/p>\n

I got into chaos theory when I helped write a popular science software package that was meant to accompany James Gleick\u2019s book Chaos<\/em>. I think the fundamental insight is that you can have a completely deterministic system that, over time, generates outputs that appear really intricate, complex, and gnarly. People used to suppose that if something was orderly and logical, it would have to be boring and predictable. And that anything really interesting would have to involve randomness. But the chaotic zone lies in between the two. The secret is that if a computation takes a considerable amount of time to run, then its output can seem completely surprising\u2014because you can\u2019t mentally carry out that amount of computation in a tractable amount of time.<\/p>\n

***<\/strong><\/p>\n

I never really understood the ideas in economics, in fact I almost failed to graduate from college because I couldn\u2019t stand going to economics lectures. Hate, hate, hate the stuff. It\u2019s like studying Bible stories or pseudoscience\u2014economics has so little connection to daily reality. For instance, it\u2019s completely obvious that companies can\u2019t in fact grow forever, year after year, without hitting some debilitating limits. But the so-called value of a company is based on how much they grow from quarter to quarter. Economics as practiced by bankers is complete horseshit, but they\u2019ve bought out all the politicians, so nothing reasonable ever gets done. In the long run, of course, the situation will resolve itself. Meanwhile we\u2019re seeing a resurgence of the dystopic SF novel!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Brendan Byrne, for BoingBoing<\/em>, New York, January, 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although cyberpunk is now viewed as a successful subgenre of SF, it was indeed controversial when we started. But that\u2019s the way we wanted it. If nobody\u2019s pissed off, you\u2019re not trying hard enough.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Math is a great source of cool SF ideas. And the style<\/em> of mathematical thought is good training. Often in math you start out with a particular set of axioms and explore what you can deduce from these laws. Creating an SF world is a similar kind of thought experiment. You make whatever wild and crazy assumptions you like, and then see what follows from them.<\/p>\n

But, really, when I\u2019m writing SF, I\u2019m just as likely to work the other way around. That is, I\u2019ll start with some cool kind of special effect\u2014like, let\u2019s say, our Earth unfurling to become an infinite plane\u2014and then I\u2019ll dream up some relatively plausible hole in physics that makes my scenario possible.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re willing to jiggle the laws, you can fit everything together in a logical way\u2014and if you ponder the ensuing logical consequences, you come up with some gnarly extra effects for free.<\/p>\n

On the subject of math, it\u2019s also worth mentioning that, culturally speaking, mathematicians are about as close to living and breathing aliens as you\u2019ll ever see. Weirder than stoners, weirder than computer hackers, weirder than SF fans. My people.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve also gotten a lot from Silicon Valley. Cellular automata, or CAs for short, aren\u2019t as well-known as fractals, but they\u2019re equally beautiful. They\u2019re like self-generating videos. You can get a CA running on your computer screen and it\u2019s like watching a living oriental rug, or an out-of-control lava lamp with little bugs swimming inside. Over the years I spent hundreds or maybe thousands of hours staring at CAs. They ate my brain. A pure software high.<\/p>\n

Landing in Silicon Valley in 1986 was a real stroke of luck. I kept on writing, but I got into being a professor of computer science for my day job. And I did some work as a software engineer at a big company. I was riding the wave\u2014surfing those pixels for twenty years, out there in it every day, rain or shine. It was good. But now I\u2019m glad I\u2019ve retired from programming and from teaching CS.<\/p>\n

When I see an old movie, like from the 40s or 50s or 60s, the people look so calm. They don\u2019t have smart phones, they\u2019re not looking at computer screens, they\u2019re taking their time. They\u2019ll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think someday we\u2019ll find our way back to that garden of Eden. The machines will melt away.<\/p>\n

First we\u2019ll turn our devices into little plants and animals\u2014that\u2019s biotech. And then we\u2019ll get to what I\u2019m calling hylotech<\/em>. This means that we\u2019ll find a way to talk to objects and see that they\u2019re quantum-computationally alive. And then it\u2019ll be as mellow as the 50s again.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

When I was younger I was more attracted to immortality than I am now. I think I was worried there were various things I might not live to do\u2014travel, fatherhood, publishing. But now I\u2019m more accepting of death. Nothing lasts. The petals whirl, the leaves fall, the river flows. Why fight it? You get the one lifetime and it\u2019s enough. At some point you have to let go.<\/p>\n

I think people who obsess about becoming immortal are loses on an ego trip. They don\u2019t want to accept that the world will go on just the same without them. Certainly, as technology advances, we\u2019ll see people living longer. And, at the more SF end of things, you might look for injectable nanobots to repair your body, or the use of fresh tank-grown clone bodies, or the ability to upload your mind into an artificial android body. I wrote about the last of these in my novel Software<\/em>, thirty years ago. But in reality I don\u2019t see any of these things happening very soon.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The \u201csingularity\u201d\u009d means different things to different people. In a way, we\u2019re already well past a singularity, which was the coming of the computers. But in the early 2000s, people had a feeling that a much bigger change is coming very soon. There\u2019s a hope that if you can just hang on for, say, another thirty years, then the nanobot or clone-body or digital-upload version of immortality will be available. Note that many of those spreading this promise are also offering to sell you expensive vitamins to help you hang on. They\u2019re selling snake oil. It\u2019s a con.<\/p>\n

The reason I called my early 2000s novel Postsingular<\/em> was because I wanted to leapfrog past the current wave of bullshit\u2014and get out into the raw, energizing zone of all-new cutting-edge SF. There\u2019s still a lot of wonderful stuff to explore. We haven\u2019t come close to exhausting the riches of this world.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Nas Hedron, for <\/strong>The Turing Centenary<\/em>, Brazil, September, 2012<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been bored by the idea of rigid, clunky, machine-like robots. I wanted robots to be funky and wiggly and sexy. I think it\u2019s likely that if we ever have really useful and intelligent robots, they\u2019re going to be more like tentacled octopi than like brittle ants. Of course thirty years ago, when I started writing about flickercladding and piezoplastic \u201cmoldie\u201d\u009d robots in my Ware<\/em> novels, this wasn\u2019t at all a familiar idea.<\/p>\n

Having gotten used to the idea of soft machines, it became natural for me to turn things around\u2014and to have the cellular structure of human flesh become as malleable as the material of a computer display.<\/p>\n

In my Ware<\/em> novels there\u2019s a drug called \u201cmerge\u201d\u009d that lets people melt together inside a tub called a love puddle. In my novel Turing & Burroughs,<\/em> a person who\u2019s a skugger can turn into something like giant slug. There\u2019s a scene where Turing and another skugger have sex by twisting themselves around each other while hanging from a rafter at Burroughs\u2019s parents\u2019 house. Mrs. Burroughs throws them out.<\/p>\n

Reading a draft of this passage, my wife said, \u201cOh, you\u2019re always doing this, having people merge together, it\u2019s so icky.\u201d\u009d And I\u2019m like, \u201cYeah, but that\u2019s sex, isn\u2019t it? That\u2019s how it is.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

We\u2019re biological organisms\u2014we\u2019re not computers, and we\u2019re not machines.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Aaron Marcus for UX<\/em>, December, 2012, Berkely<\/strong><\/p>\n

For a number of years I\u2019ve been writing about an interface device that I call an \u201cuvvy,\u201d\u009d which is pronounced to rhyme with \u201clovey-dovey.\u201d\u009d It\u2019s made of piezoplastic, that is a soft computational plastic. Thomas Pynchon had a substance like this in his novel, Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>\u2014he called it imipolex, and I use this word in, for instance, my novel Freeware<\/em>, which is a part of the Ware Tetralogy<\/em>, now available in a free Creative Commons edition.<\/p>\n

An uvvy sits on the back of your neck and interfaces with your brain via electromagnetic waves interacting with the spinal cord\u2014most users will want to stay away from interface probes that stick into them like wires. The uvvy functions like a smart phone, but it\u2019s activated by subvocal speech and mental commands. It sends sounds and images into your brain.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s absurd to see people pecking at their tiny smartphone keyboards. This is so clearly a bad user interface. It\u2019s unnatural, error-prone, isolating, and non-ergonomic.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Monica Byrne for Damien Walter\u2019s blog, <\/a> December, 2014, Durham, North Carolina<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the\u201970s, when I was trying to publish my very first novel, Spacetime Donuts<\/em>, I got a provoking comment from the SF master Frederik Pohl: \u201cThis is a fascinating read, but it\u2019s not science fiction.<\/em>\u201d\u009d Naturally my feeling was that SF had to change. Indeed, much of the SF of that time seemed flat and uncool to me.<\/p>\n

I was coming from a place where my favorite writers were Kerouac, Pynchon, Borges, and William Burroughs. I wanted to do the Beat thing of having my novels reflect my life; I wanted to have fabulous yet logical twists in my stories; and I wanted to use rich language. I believed in SF the same way I believed in rock\u2019n\u2019roll. Selling to the mainstream literary market wasn\u2019t something I even wanted to try.<\/p>\n

Eventually I was able to get Spacetime Donuts<\/em> serialized in an SF zine. And then, early in the \u201d\u02dc80s, with White Light <\/em>and Software<\/em>, I was able to start publishing my SF novels in paperback. And then cyberpunk hit, and I had a few good years. My cyberpunk novels had a transreal core. Like in Software<\/em>, the old man Cobb Anderson is modeled on my father. And the mad Sta-Hi Mooney, he\u2019s a guy I used to hang around with. Of course, to some extent, both of these characters are me. As Phil Dick wrote in the afterword to his transreal A Scanner Darkly,<\/em> \u201cI myself, I am not a character in this novel: I am the novel<\/em>.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

When I was younger, it made me uneasy to realize that I see the world differently than most people. Or at least I see things differently than most people admit<\/em> to. And my oddball impressions of reality are something that I happen to be eager to talk about. Even though, at times, it feels like society\u2019s forces are working to silence me.<\/p>\n

But I was never the only outsider. I always have few bitter, rebellious friends whom I can relax with. Generally these are fellow mathematicians or hackers or SF writers.<\/p>\n

At another level, I\u2019ve come to realize that pretty much everyone alive has strange, idiosyncratic views. People pay lip service to the mind-controlling propaganda imposed upon them by the media\u2014but deep down they don\u2019t believe much of it. And that\u2019s why there\u2019s an audience for those who dare to step forward and speak.<\/p>\n

Unconventional and transgressive ideas\u2014they resonate with people. Momentarily surprised and awakened\u2014an audience will laugh. It\u2019s a laugh of recognition. My books tend to seem funny. But I\u2019m not exactly a humorist. I\u2019m trying to tell the truth.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Would I have thought of transrealism without drugs? Oh, sure. It\u2019s not useful to try and reduce an artist\u2019s ideas to drugs. Like, was Hieronymus Bosch high? Would it matter? You don\u2019t really see other people painting like Bosch, no matter what they ingest.<\/p>\n

This said, in the old days I did like smoking pot after hours, and I took psychedelics three or four times. Part of the appeal of getting high may be that it makes reality feel like SF. We tend to maintain an ongoing subconscious narrative about the world\u2014naming and classifying the things we hear and see. When you disrupt that, you\u2019re in a position to see the world raw, rather than seeing it as you\u2019ve been taught.<\/p>\n

And, as you mention, it\u2019s possible to get into this mode of perception without being high. My writer friend Gregory Gibson terms this \u201cthe ongoing Venusian space-probe sensation.\u201d\u009d It\u2019s the sense that you\u2019re seeing the world as if you\u2019re a space probe sent by \u201cVenusian\u201d\u009d aliens, and you\u2019re observing humans and their customs from the outside.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by G. Brown for the fanzine nerds of a feather, flock together<\/em>, May 2015, Los Angeles<\/strong><\/p>\n

Another angle for changing SF from within is to start writing about a set of ideas that haven\u2019t really been touched upon yet. That\u2019s a true and hardcore kind of SF endeavor. It\u2019s not easy. You have to get yourself to look at the present day world with new eyes\u2014as if you\u2019re a Martian. You pretty much want to forget about all the SF plots and futurist-type prognostications. In the same sense that your characters shouldn\u2019t mirror characters in existing works, your ideas shouldn\u2019t mirror futurist ideas that you might read in magazines.<\/p>\n

A good rule of thumb here is that if most people believe something\u2014then it\u2019s wrong. Consider: a hundred years ago, the human race pretty much didn\u2019t know jack shit about science or modern technology. A hundred years from now, just about every single bit of tech that we\u2019re using today is going to be gone. What\u2019s going to replace it? Anything you want. Make up the weirdest shit you can think of. Be optimistic. Why not a new force of nature? Why not aliens from the subdimensions? Why not telepathy with every single object that you see?<\/p>\n

Pile on the bullshit and keep a straight face. As the immortal David Lee Roth said, \u201cIt\u2019s not who wins or loses\u2014it\u2019s how good you look.\u201d\u009d If you and your friends can make your books fun and quirky, then maybe the soggy, stodgy SF ship of state will change its course.<\/p>\n

Or maybe at this point it\u2019s impossible to change the commercial genre known as SF. In 2015, there\u2019s an alternate path. What if you sidestep the SF publishing niche, and shoot for mainstream publishing from the start?<\/p>\n

It could be that the whole SF publishing industry is on its way out\u2014or down. There will still be some great science-fiction books, yes, but they\u2019ll be called something else. Transreal, visionary, speculative\u2014like that. And the hidebound old trad SF label might really be fated to descend into subliterature. Maybe in ten years nobody will even consider publishing a good SF novel under the old SF rubric. Maybe the old category has been eaten by parasitic Martian blimps with electric news-crawl letters on their sides, or by institutional politics left and right, or, more simply, by cultural dynamics and the processes of media change.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a bit sad. For me, it\u2019s like I grew up in a nice small town\u2014cue the silo-fulla-corn nostalgia routine\u2014and I go back thirty years later and it\u2019s all strip malls, and the city core is stone cold dead. As the Pretenders put it in My City Was Gone<\/em>: \u201cAy, oh, where did you go, Ohio?\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

The big loss for us mad-scientist, freakazoid, pinpoint-pupil SF nut-cases is that the mainstream market is harder to break into than SF publishing. Here in the nest it\u2019s kinda okay for us to write funny. Me, back at the very start I was so daunted by the whole Brahmin Mandarin New Yorker<\/em> vibe that I never tried selling into that market at all. I liked the idea of being an SF writer. I liked the image of being a rock and roll musician instead of an orchestra violinist.<\/p>\n

But\u2026if the orchestras are trying playing rock and roll, however ineptly, why not try for a gig with them? If you keep your soul, you\u2019ll still be writing SF. Maybe better than before. Educating the squares. Showing them where it\u2019s at.<\/p>\n

Many paths, many futures.<\/p>\n

Write on.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Liz Argall for Lightspeed, February, 2016, Seattle<\/strong><\/p>\n

Transrealism means writing fantasy or SF that is in some way based on your actual life. You\u2019re steering clear of received media ideas and trying to write about your daily reality in a warped way. SF tropes become objective correlatives for your psychic drives. At times, I\u2019ve based transreal novels on specific swatches of my personal history\u2014such as college, say, or my experiences working at a software company. But these days I\u2019m more likely to write what I call cubist transrealism. That is, I don\u2019t go for a full reality-encrypted roman a clef. Instead I shatter my daily experiences into surreal frags and tessellate them into a tale. The juxtapositions generate the story and plot.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I think it might be easier to write a sad ending than a happy one. Sad or meh<\/em> endings are a cultural default. People think a downer ending is tough, and hard, and realistic, and it\u2019s bravely facing facts. So when you write a happy ending, you have to do it with the right touch, or people might think you\u2019re corny or weak. But if you nail a happy ending, people like it. I almost always give my novels happy endings. People already know that life\u2019s a bummer. So why rub that in their faces? We\u2019re talking about escape literature, friends. Fairy tales. Entertainments.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Jeff Somers for B&N SciFi & Fantasy Blog, April, 2019, Hoboken<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m blessed with a knack for drawing on both sides of my brain\u2014the techy science side, and the dreamy literary side. I always wanted to be a writer. I was a huge fan of the SF master Robert Sheckley, and of the Beat author William Burroughs. And Jorge Luis Borges and Thomas Pynchon. And Flannery O\u2019Connor. I studied math in college and grad school. Math always appealed to me. So clear and so intricate\u2014the hidden machinery of the world. It is, as you say, a delicate balance to have a book be lively, with romance and fun characters\u2014and also to have it be based on logical science ideas. In studying math, I learned about starting out with some set of assumptions like, say, Euclid\u2019s postulates or the axioms of transfinite set theory, starting out with a set of rules and then deducing what follows from them. In my SF novels, I\u2019ll make some wild, far-out initial assumptions. But from then it\u2019s logical, and I get to see what ends up happening. I don\u2019t really know in advance, not before I write the novel. That way it\u2019s surprising and fun. I\u2019m not trying to teach<\/em> things to my readers. I want them to be amazed and to laugh and to be carried away.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

An odd recent phenomenon is that lots of mainstream authors are writing SF. But they won\u2019t admit it\u2019s SF. Lifelong literary-SF writers like me find this … irritating. It\u2019s like the upper crust authors can dip down into our world\u2014but they don\u2019t want to let us out. Even if we\u2019re writing high lit. I always think of Kurt Vonnegut\u2019s line, \u201cI have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled \u201d\u02dcscience fiction\u2019 … and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s talk about the thought-experiment aspect of science fiction. When you turn your speculations into an SF story or novel, you go deep. You live in that imaginary world with your characters for weeks or months or even years. You unearth unforeseen glitches, and you move to higher levels of strange. Before I write a novel, I need an idea for something odd that I want to see happening.<\/p>\n

One thing on my mind lately has been telepathy\u2014I call it teep. I think it\u2019s technically close enough that I could write about a teep biz startup. And I see a way to make it new. Another beckoning theme is politics. It\u2019s stressful to write about that stuff. But these days, there\u2019s a feeling that authors should speak up. So I plan to edit a special political SF issue of Flurb<\/em> later this summer.<\/p>\n

Looking further ahead, I want to write about a heretofore unnoticed force of nature. It\u2019s at the subquantum level. It relates to dark energy, and to consciousness. And once we get it tune with it, we\u2019ll have all the free energy we need, and we\u2019ll be able to live inside electrons, like in my novel Jim and the Flims<\/em>, and to predict the future from soap films, like in Mathematicians in Love<\/em>, and to levitate, like in Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>, and to talk to rocks, like in Hylozoic<\/em>. But I know there\u2019s something more than even that, something wilder and deeper, something super new that will, in retrospect, seem obvious and natural. We\u2019ll be, like, why didn\u2019t we think of that before! I hope the muse shows me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Robert Penner for Big Echo<\/em>, July 2019, Indiana, Pennsylvania,<\/strong><\/p>\n

Mathematics is a rich storehouse of shapes and processes and forms. You don\u2019t necessarily have to be a trained mathematician to appreciate these riches. But you do have to read some popular math books.<\/p>\n

The biggest new technique for exploring math is computer simulation. Realtime self-generating graphics. I\u2019m an avid devotee of continuous-valued cellular automata. They\u2019re like gnarlier, funkier versions of Conway\u2019s classic Game of Life. I put these into my early cyberpunk novel Software<\/em>\u2014as constantly moving patterns within the piezoplastic skins of my robots.<\/p>\n

Chaos, fractals, and Stephen Wolfram\u2019s work have changed the way I see the world, and the way I think about it. I wrote about this in my non-fiction tome The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul<\/em>.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s kind of hard to explain the ideas in just a few words. A key insight is that that any interesting natural process\u2014like an ocean wave, or a leaf twitching in a breeze\u2014a process like this is fundamentally unpredictable. It\u2019s too complex and gnarly for there ever to be a quick, short-cut way to know in advance what it\u2019ll do next. But, and here\u2019s the kicker, these processes are not random<\/em>. Unpredictable, but not random.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also the nature of your mind. You don’t know what you\u2019ll do next. But that doesn\u2019t mean you\u2019re mentally flipping a coin. You\u2019re like a chaotic, incompressible computation. Things emerge. You\u2019re dancing with nature\u2019s gnarl.<\/p>\n

A mathematical idea or a story is elegant if it looks simple and clear, but a lot of deep thought that was needed to create it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to do this because you can\u2019t think faster than you can think. Especially if you\u2019re doing something like writing a story or designing a math gem. You\u2019re running at the maximum possible flop. Your only hopes of a happy outcome lie in experience, patience and grace. And if it comes together\u2014it\u2019s elegant. A gift from the Muse.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Cody Goodfellow for Forbidden Futures<\/em>, November, 2020, Portland<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was younger, there was a certain default space-opera future that SF was supposed to be about. And cyberpunk was about breaking out of that. Fuck the Space Navy! Misfits doing crazy shit, that\u2019s where it\u2019s at.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve done pretty well. Better than I expected as a raw youth. I used to nurse that less-than-famous writer\u2019s dream of future veneration\u2014a dream that\u2019s like believing in Heaven, or Santa Claus. I\u2019ve let that dream go. Even if it happened, what good would it do me when I\u2019m dead?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m just glad I can still write at all, here and now\u2014and be read. And if I get a real publisher with a real advance that\u2019s great. And if not, I\u2019ve learned how to do a Kickstarter to get some money for the book, and how to self-pub paperback and ebook editions. I don\u2019t know if everyone realizes that you can actually do that for free. It took me awhile to figure it out. I call my imprint Transreal Books. So either way, I get my books out there. I won\u2019t shut up.<\/p>\n

For me, stuff like space-travel feels used up. Unless you were to do the space travel in a car instead of in a spaceship\u2014like I did in my recent Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>. But there\u2019s so much that\u2019s untouched. Biotech has endless possibilities, and there\u2019s ubiquitous physical computation, and the hylozoic notion that everything is alive. See my pair of novels Postsingular<\/em> and Hylozoic<\/em> for more about that.<\/p>\n

And I keep wanting to write about that totally new<\/em> thing that we know someone is going to discover in the next hundred years, and I keep not quite getting there, but by dint of making the effort to think that hard, I\u2019m finding new stuff. Not actual \u201ctrue scientific theories,\u201d\u009d but fun ideas like new kinds of wind-up toys. The store is big.<\/p>\n

For decades I read Scientific American <\/em>to keep an eye on what\u2019s new. But sadly they\u2019ve turned to shit\u2014small fonts and articles about\u2014gak<\/em>\u2014sociology and political policy and economics? As if. Nowadays it\u2019s enough to keep a loose eye on Twitter, and see the wonders trundling past\u2014like a holiday parade that never ends. Grab hold of anything you see\u2014and tweak it a little bit, and make it your own. Connect it in some way to your actual personal life\u2014that\u2019s the move I call transrealism. And go a little meta\u2014that\u2019s a trickier tactic I\u2019m always 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. Go further out. There\u2019s still so much. We\u2019re just getting started.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Where do I get my ideas for science fiction? This continues my earlier post on the topic. The material is taken from interviews. That 3d plastic slug was 3d printed for me by Chuck Shotton. Interviewed by Heath Row for The National Fantasy Fan, July, 2009. New York. You asked how I between the value […]<\/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-13714","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\/13714","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=13714"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13726,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13714\/revisions\/13726"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}