{"id":8462,"date":"2019-07-04T17:06:24","date_gmt":"2019-07-05T00:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=8462"},"modified":"2019-07-04T19:47:13","modified_gmt":"2019-07-05T02:47:13","slug":"mmrt-interviews-mashup","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/04\/mmrt-interviews-mashup\/","title":{"rendered":"Mashup of “Million Mile Road Trip” Interviews"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently did three interviews in connection with Million Mile Road Trip<\/a><\/em>. One was with the writer Jeff Somers<\/a> from B&N SciFi & Fantasy Blog<\/em><\/a>. One was a fixed list of questions (so call my interviewer \u201cBot”), from Shelf Awareness <\/em><\/a>webzine. And the third was a single-question interview by Chris Richards a pop music writer at the Washington Post, who publishes a rather amazing little zine called Debussy Ringtone<\/em><\/a> — in print only. As usual I’m putting in a surreal mix of recent photos, and I’ve included two recent paintings (with notes) as well.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jeff<\/b>. Night Shade Books calls this the \u201cYear of Rudy Rucker,\u201d\u009d which feels way overdue. You\u2019ve published 23 novels\u2014where would you recommend a Rucker newbie get started<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>Yep, Night Shade is issuing ten books by me this year\u2014nine reprints along with Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>. A matching set of print books with great covers. I\u2019m not sure I\u2019d say this is way overdue, but I\u2019m really glad it\u2019s happening. If you\u2019re an author, having your books in print is the blood of life. Which of my books to start with? Whichever one you get your hands on. I do like Mathematicians in Love <\/em>a lot..And Saucer Wisdom <\/em>is a hoot. But this week I\u2019m gonna say that Million Mile Road Trip <\/em>is a good place to start! Could be the best book I ever wrote.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

[This is the same pink IBM Selectric model that I wrote my first few novels of.\u00a0 Seen in the Milwaukee Art Museum Design section.]<\/p>\n

Jeff<\/b>. Your companion book, Notes for Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>, is actually longer than the novel! The idea of following up reading a novel with that kind of metadata is fascinating; can you tell us more about it?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>It\u2019s hard to write a novel. It takes a year or maybe two years of tickling the keyboard at your desk, or using a laptop in a cafe, doing that pretty much every day, even on the days when you don\u2019t know what comes next. This is where writing a volume of notes comes in. When I don\u2019t have anything to put into the novel, I write something in the notes. I might analyze the possibilities for the next few scenes. Or craft journal entries about things I saw. Or describe some the people sitting around me, being careful not to stare at them too hard. Or wheenk about how hopeless it is to try to write another novel, and how I\u2019ve been faking it all along anyhow. The more I complain in my notes, the better I feel. I publish the finished Notes <\/em>in parallel with with the novel, not that I sell many copies of the notes. Longterm, the notes will be fodder for the locust swarm of devoted Rucker scholars who are due to emerge any time now from their curiously long gestation in the soil.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[Fresnel Lens for the lighthouse at Point Arena, CA.]<\/p>\n

Jeff<\/b>. What\u2019s amazing about a book like MMRT <\/em>is how you take some pretty high-level math and science and turn it into a rollicking sci-fi adventure. How do you manage that balance?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>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 its 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

\"\"
\n \u201cCute Meet\u201d\u009d Acrylic, pair of 24″ x 30″ canvases, May, 2019. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

[I saw a diagram of a so-called Hele \u201d\u0090Shaw ferrohydrodynamics pattern formed by, I don\u2019t know, something like a rotating magnetic field under a fluid with metal dust in it. I don\u2019t remember the details. But I liked the cool pattern. I love when nature makes these chaotic, odd things that look like paleolithic cave-wall drawings. So I picked one pattern, and painted two versions of it, copying the pattern by hand each time. I liked doing it so much that I did it twice, so we have a diptych here. And the colors are kind of the opposites of each other. And if you rotate either of these patterns by 180 degrees, it\u2019s approximately the same as the other one. So they\u2019re the same species. But the butterfly one on the left is girl, and the yearning one on the right is a boy. And they\u2019re having a cute meet.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Debussy<\/b>. Most of your novels and stories are optimistic. Why?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>The media are awash with bad news. But this is a custom, and not a reflection of reality. My theory is that bad news (a) makes people more fearful and more likely to accept repressive rulers, and (b) makes them more likely to buy distracting expensive things. Media, the Man, and Mammon work in concert. It\u2019s not really true that the world is worse off than it\u2019s ever been. Flip back through history, and things are always <\/em>a mess. We\u2019re all going to die. That never changes. Why obsess on it? I prefer to have some fun in the time that I have. And to hell with the daily news.<\/p>\n

When I\u2019m writing an SF story, I\u2019m describing an alternate world that I\u2019m inventing on the spot. I want to see interesting characters, good dialog, rad mind warps, surprising plot twists, rich vocabulary, eyeball kicks, and unheard-of science. I\u2019m like a painter who prefers bright colors to blacks and grays. There\u2019s good as well as bad. Unknown natural laws await. Aliens might be friendly. A novel can have a happy ending.<\/p>\n

This said, I\u2019m not above killing off a main character in any given book. You need chiaroscuro, that is, some dark against the like. It\u2019s nice to pump up a big operatic scene where a good person dies. But, do note that I do like someone\u2019s death to be a big deal\u2014and not just have a stranger shoot a person in the back of the head and have everyone be, like, \u201cOh, sigh<\/em>, that\u2019s the way it is in this boring vale of tears, and now let\u2019s parrot some media headlines.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

I think you said you only wanted three hundred words for my answer? Wow, that\u2019s not many! I\u2019d hoped I\u2019d be able to go on and write about\u2014erk<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bot<\/b>. Your favorite books when you were a child?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>I loved the world of C. S. Lewis\u2019s Narnia books. And Beverly Cleary books like Ribsy<\/em>, Henry Huggins<\/em>, and Ramona the Pest<\/em>. And a picture book by Robert Lawson, McWhinney\u2019s Jaunt<\/em>\u2014about a professor who rides across the country on a flying bicycle, held aloft by \u201cZ gas\u201d\u009d in is tires. I read all the Robert Heinlein novels, and especially liked Revolt in 2100 <\/em>and Tunnel in the Sky<\/em>. I was a huge fan of the SF master Robert Sheckley\u2019s Untouched by Human Hands<\/em>. And when I was fourteen, I got hold of the Beat author William Burroughs\u2019s Naked Lunch<\/em>, which I found on my big brother\u2019s bookshelf. Burroughs showed me that you can write about anything at all.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jeff<\/b>. You\u2019ve been called a groundbreaker in genre\u2014from your foundational writing in cyberpunk and transrealism, to being the winner of the first Philip K. Dick Award ever. What\u2019s your take on the modern state of sci-fi, and what do you see for the future of the genre?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>I\u2019m not much involved with factions and fashions in the SF community\u2014although I do have my old cabal of cyberpunks, transrealists, and the writers I published when I was running my webzine Flurb<\/em>. 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

[Above: Model of my character Groon from Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>. Model by Chuck Shotton, painstakingly 3D-printed, and with a sound chip inside. My painting of Groon in the background. Below: With artist Paul Mavrides at the Andy Warhol show in San Francisco. That’s Mrs. Warhola in the background.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bot<\/b>. What book do you most want to read again for the first time?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>A volume of stories by Jorge Luis Borges. Labyrinths<\/em>, say, or Collected Fictions<\/em>. When I first read Borges, I was stunned at the richness of the trove. \u201cTl\u00f6n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,\u201d\u009d might have been the very first of his stories I found. It\u2019s a crazy-sounding title, but that\u2019s as it should be. The tale is about the discovery of an encyclopedia about an unkown planet with \u201cits emperors and seas, its minerals and birds and fish, its algebra and fire, its theological and metaphysical controversies.\u201d\u009d All this in a single short story! And \u201cFunes the Memorious,\u201d\u009d where Borges describes a youth with a perfect memory. \u201cHe knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882, and he could compare them in his memories with the veins in the marbled binding of a book he had seen only once, or with the feathers of spray lifted by an oar on the Rio Negro on the eve of the Battle of Quebracho.\u201d\u009d Borges stories are my notion of what fantasy and science fiction ought to be. Truly other, and utterly wondrous.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jeff<\/b>. It\u2019s been thirty-six years since you published A Transrealist Manifesto<\/em>, and some argue that with the mainstreaming of sci-fi into popular-culture transrealism, we\u2019ve reached a turning point where transrealism will soon be the baseline for sci-fi stories. Do you agree, or is it more complicated than that?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>The idea behind transrealism it that you write in a fairly realistic way about your life and your feelings and about the lives of those around you\u2014but then you bring in SF elements that can stand for subtextual aspects of your mental life. Like time travel stands for nostalgia and hope. And uploading your mind to a computer stands for going to heaven. And telepathy stands for someone actually understanding what the eff you\u2019re talking about. And alien stands for people from different backgrounds. When you come down to it, everyone\u2019s background is different, and everyone you ever meet is an alien. Or maybe a zombie or a robot. The SF tropes are objective correlatives for things we have trouble writing about. And, yes, this transreal approach can be a baseline for present-day lit.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bot<\/b>. Books you\u2019d still like to write?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>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, \u201cWhy didn\u2019t we think of that before!\u201d\u009d I hope the muse shows it to me.<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[Detail from Peter Bruegel’s Het Luilekkerland<\/em>, also known as Schlaraffenland\u00a0<\/em> or The Land of Cockaigne<\/em>.]<\/p>\n

Bot<\/b>. A book you hid from your parents?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>I grew up in Kentucky, and in the University of Louisville bookstore I found a text on types of mental illness. As a budding young author, I had to consider the option of going mad as an early career move. I got the book, and I\u2019d look through it to find symptoms that I might be having, or that I might be able to convince myself that I had. It drove my parents nuts to see me do that. As if I weren\u2019t already enough trouble!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Two Lovers Walk Their Dog\u201d\u009d acrylic on canvas, June, 2019, 30\u201d\u009d x 24\u201d\u009d. Click for a larger version of the painting.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

[They had an En Plein Air painting festival in my town, and I was thinking I should do a quick painting of something I saw outside. So I went in my backyard and started painting the ivy leaves on the wall. And that got a little boring. So I started putting in critters. I made a spiraling black line, and then I put an eye in the middle, and that\u2019s how I got started on the figure on the right. I gave her pink flesh, and put in some 3D shading to round her out. the real stroke of inspiration was just filling in a crescent of orange-red for her mouth. And then I drew her lover on the left. His smile is even bigger. And the dog? Well, he was just a lucky hit. I made that red glob and put two things like ears on it, and then added another\u2014voila! And I made the background an insanely bright and saturated shade of yellow-orange. I love how cheerful the lovers look. And the ivy leaves turned out to be hearts. And, all in all, there\u2019s seventeen eyes bobbling around! This one is a gift from the Muse, an unexpected masterpiece. Not that it would ever be accepted by the En Plein Air festival. But who cares.]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Jeff<\/b>. You also paint, and have received notice for your artwork, which favors surreal sci-fi themes. Are there connections between your painting and your writing?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>I started painting in 1999 because I was writing a historical novel, As Above, So Below<\/em>, about the life of the artist Peter Bruegel. I wanted to get a sense of what it\u2019s like to paint. Over time I got to enjoying it more and more. I\u2019ve done almost a hundred and seventy paintings by now. I\u2019m not a great draftsman. But with paint, you can push it around and layer it until it looks like what you want. And then of course you ruin it, and fix it, and ruin it again, and fix it, and eventually you stop.<\/p>\n

I like how painting is completely analog. No keyboard and screen. Smearing paint on a canvas. I love it. When I\u2019m unsure about an upcoming scene in a novel, I do a painting that relates to it. Not an exact representation, more like an evocation. Like dreaming while I\u2019m awake. Writing is like dreaming, too. You get out of your way and type.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Bot<\/b>. What are five books you’ll never part with?<\/p>\n

A. Oh, let\u2019s just do one. A fat one. Thomas Pynchon\u2019s Gravity\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>. I reread it ever five or ten years, reveling once again in the man\u2019s wit, and the richness of his prose. I\u2019ve persistently been trying to write like Pynchon over the course of my twenty-three novels, and in Million Mile Road Trip<\/em>, I think I finally got close. Some Pynchonian elements: Write in the present tense, like a person describing a movie. Use close-in third person viewpoint where thoughts of the focus characters spill onto the page. Use some very long sentences, with phrase after phrase being added on, like you\u2019re a carpenter working your way out on an increasingly rickety scaffolding that you\u2019re assembling as you go along. And allow yourself an occasional fourth-wall-breaking exclamation, like, \u201cMaybe this is going a little too far.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"
\n[Work by the artist Rina Banarjee<\/a>.]<\/p>\n

Jeff<\/b>. You\u2019ve been a professional writer and a publisher for decades; how has the business of getting your words out there changed in that time?<\/p>\n

A. <\/b>The biggest new thing is the ebook. Ebooks are literary immortality; they don\u2019t ever go out of print. And writers can publish ebooks themselves for free. Not only that, writers can publish print books for free, too. And you can sell your self-published ebooks and paperbacks on big online sites such as Barnes & Noble. Personal freedom to publish to the world audience is a huge deal. No gatekeepers.<\/p>\n

The catch, however, is that if you self-pub, it\u2019s hard getting people to notice you. Including my nonfiction, I\u2019ve published about forty books. And the first thirty or so were from commercial publishers. But in 2012, the publishers temporarily turned their backs on me. Like, \u201cWe\u2019ve heard enough out of you!.\u201d\u009d But I wasn\u2019t ready to quit. And thanks to the new channels, I didn\u2019t have to. I learned how to self-pub my own ebooks and paperbacks\u2014I did my Collected Stories<\/em>, my Journals<\/em>, three novels, and an art book. I call my imprint Transreal Books. I ran Kickstarters for the self-pub books, which took the place of getting publishers\u2019 advances. It was a lot of work.<\/p>\n

And now, hallelujah, Night Shade Books has taken me into their fold. I\u2019m back in the tribe and off the ice floe. I\u2019m glad.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I recently did three interviews in connection with Million Mile Road Trip. One was with the writer Jeff Somers from B&N SciFi & Fantasy Blog. One was a fixed list of questions (so call my interviewer \u201cBot”), from Shelf Awareness webzine. And the third was a single-question interview by Chris Richards a pop music writer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-million-mile-road-trip","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8462","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=8462"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8462\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8478,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8462\/revisions\/8478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}