{"id":4966,"date":"2013-11-12T21:08:03","date_gmt":"2013-11-13T05:08:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=4966"},"modified":"2013-11-15T20:34:31","modified_gmt":"2013-11-16T04:34:31","slug":"ramp-up-for-the-big-aha-locus-interview-talk-about-it-may-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2013\/11\/12\/ramp-up-for-the-big-aha-locus-interview-talk-about-it-may-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"Ramp up for THE BIG AHA. Locus interview talk about it, May, 2013."},"content":{"rendered":"

My new novel The Big Aha <\/em>will be going live quite soon. Available in paperback and ebook via Transreal Books<\/a>.<\/p>\n

By way of building towards the official release, I\u2019m gong to post some background material. Here\u2019s excerpts of an interview taped by Liza Groen Trombi for Locus magazine in May, 2013. The complete interview appeared in the June, 2013, issue, and I recently added it to my \u201cAll the Interviews<\/a>\u201d\u009d document online.<\/p>\n

I also made a podcast of my tape of the interview. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So, okay, the rest of today’s post is me talking to Liza about The Big Aha<\/em> in May, 2013, when I was about 85% done with writing the novel. I\u2019ll put in some images of my paintings that I used as chapter illustrations for final version The Big Aha<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Big Aha <\/em>is set in Louisville, Kentucky, where I grew up, and I\u2019m enjoying that. If you stay in Louisville, then all the people around you are people you\u2019ve known your whole life, and you can pretty much say anything to them. Nobody cares. I\u2019ve been visiting Louisville lately, and it\u2019s strange.<\/p>\n

I enjoy writing books about genomics and the biotech revolution. I think that\u2019s going to be one of the really big technologies of the 21st century. We\u2019re still just barely wading into that. I don\u2019t think it\u2019s unreasonable to suppose that in a century or so, lots of our devices won\u2019t be manufactured machines anymore. They could be plants and animals that have been designed to behave in ways that we consider useful. Even things like a knife or a glass, it\u2019s easy enough to imagine plants growing such things for us. Primitive peoples drink out of coconut shells, but we could tweak it so it\u2019s more what we like. And for communication devices, there\u2019s all this interest in squid skin\u2014that would be a great visual display. Electric eels send out electromagnetic pulses, so that could be the basis of wireless communication. <\/p>\n

I wrote a book a few years ago called Frek and the Elixir<\/em>, set in 3003, where everything was biotech. I wanted to come back to a world like that. In The Big Aha <\/em>, I wanted to have a book where the technology is based on living things. It\u2019s not set too far into the future, more like 2100.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I was born in 1946, so the Summer of Love was the year I graduated from college. I really liked that period. It was over so quickly. It was getting really good, and suddenly it was over. I wanted to have a story where something like that was happening, but I didn\u2019t want it to be based on drugs. By now everyone has ossified opinions about drugs, they\u2019re for them or they\u2019re against them. It sort of closes the imagination. <\/p>\n

I wanted to have something to give people a cosmic experience. I thought, \u201cI\u2019ll use quantum mechanics.\u201d\u009d As a science fiction writer, there are various nebulous \u201cbogosity-generator\u201d\u009d tools I can use. Something about quantum mechanics that interests me is there are two modes in quantum mechanics. You can think of the world as evolving in a smooth wavelike pattern, but then as soon as you start measuring things, you find a choppy discrete pattern. It\u2019s what they call the quantum collapse, the collapse of the wave function.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In my own mind, I feel like there\u2019s a pulse, where I\u2019ll sort of merge into the place around me and then snap back. Say it\u2019s a nice day, and you\u2019re not really verbalizing to yourself, you\u2019re not really forming opinions in your mind, you\u2019re not doing anything consciously. And then you snap back and you think, \u201cThere\u2019s so-and-so, I have to ask them for something; it\u2019s such-and-such o\u2019clock, I have to get in the car and go somewhere.\u201d\u009d There are two modes, and I call them the cosmic mode and the robotic mode. It\u2019s almost like sonar\u2014you ping out with the cosmic mode and you pull back with the robotic mode.<\/p>\n

The gimmick in The Big Aha <\/em> is that people get quantum wetware. \u201cWetware\u201d\u009d is already an intriguing word\u2014it\u2019s what\u2019s going on in your body, your DNA, your chemicals. And then make it quantum, so you can consciously control how rapidly you do the oscillations between the cosmic mode and robotic mode. So my characters are party people, they just wedge their minds open to the cosmic, and they\u2019re cosmic all the time. It\u2019s like they\u2019re acidheads, but they\u2019re not taking any drugs. And they can teep each other. And instead of mechanical technology it\u2019s all biological, so instead of a car you have a road spider, and you ride on its back. The animals you create can have quantum wetware as well. You can get in the vibe with them, and make them change their form. And so the world becomes more spacey.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Then, of course, you always need something bad to happen in a novel. It\u2019s always good to have an alien invasion. So there are these things like mouths sticking into our world from another dimension, and they\u2019re eating people. I call it The Big Aha <\/em> because people always have the dream of getting a Big Aha experience! The big vision beyond the white light. My characters are seeking that. There\u2019s also the Zen idea: \u201cI was looking for enlightenment but it was here all along.\u201d\u009d Just for a moment, you feel it\u2014the big aha. <\/p>\n

At this point [that is, in May, 2013] I\u2019m not sure who\u2019s going to publish The Big Aha <\/em>. I\u2019m unsure about my chances with publishers. And I\u2019m starting to wonder if they\u2019re worth the months or even years of waiting, and the begging for such meager pay.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m putting a little more sex into The Big Aha <\/em> than I used to do for my Tor books. David Hartwell once said to me, \u201cIf you\u2019re talking about the 13-year-old audience, there are some 13-year-olds who are very interested in sex, and some who aren\u2019t. And you can guess which group is the one that reads science fiction.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Not that The Big Aha <\/em> is mainly about sex. But maybe it\u2019s hard for me to judge what\u2019s acceptable. Like I\u2019ve been out there so long that I don\u2019t even know what\u2019s supposed to be normal. In any case I\u2019m having a lot of fun with the book.<\/p>\n

I like using the classic tropes of SF\u2014I call them the \u201cpower chords.\u201d\u009d That\u2019s how I thought of cyberpunk, as a way of taking the classic SF things, like alien invasions, telepathy, giant ants, and making them rock a little harder. That\u2019s what I\u2019m doing in The Big Aha<\/em>.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m confident I can publish The Big Aha <\/em> with Transreal Books. Maybe I\u2019ll do a Kickstarter<\/a>. We\u2019ll see how it goes. [End of interview material.]
\n<\/em>
\n\"\"<\/p>\n

And it went good! The release is soon! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My new novel The Big Aha will be going live quite soon. Available in paperback and ebook via Transreal Books. By way of building towards the official release, I\u2019m gong to post some background material. Here\u2019s excerpts of an interview taped by Liza Groen Trombi for Locus magazine in May, 2013. The complete interview appeared […]<\/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-4966","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\/4966","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=4966"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4996,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4966\/revisions\/4996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}