[In the last three days, people have downloaded fourteen thousand copies of my new CC-licensed edition of The Ware Tetralogy. Go get yours!]

This week I went to visit my old pal Kevin Kelly at his house near Pacifica, a foggy town on the coast just south of SF. We took a long walk along the ocean, talking things over. (Some of the photos today are from Pacifica, a few are from my drive on Rt. 1 down the coast, like at Pigeon Point, and some are from San Francisco and Berkeley.)

Kevin was one of the first friends that I made when I moved to California in 1986. He was at the first Artificial Life Conference in Los Alamos, he edited the Whole Earth Review in Sausalito, he helped organize the legendary Cyberthon Virtual Reality festival in San Francisco, and he helped found Wired magazine. He still has a Whole-Earth-like website called Cool Tools, he created an amazing photo book called Asia Grace, and he’s ramping up to promote his nonfiction opus, What Technology Wants. You can find links for all these things, and more, on his concisely named website www.kk.org.

That last paragraph sounds kind of like an old-school Whole Earth blurb/review, doesn’t it? “This is fun, weird, crunchy, and it’s good for you!” The prose is infectious. It was great to see Kevin again.

While we were walking, Kevin kept coming back to a series of questions that seemed to be on his mind: “What kind of universe would you create if you were a god? Would it have evolution? Good and evil? Would the inhabitants worship you? Would they be immortal? How would you get information about its progress?”

I had a little trouble answering the question—generally, I’m more coherent when I can think things over and write down my answers, or excavate them from past things that I’ve written. The idea of designing universes can, of course, be taken science-fictionally. Now and then some physicists remark that they might someday be able to exploit some kind of subdimensional bosonic fluctuation in order to create a little “pocket universe” that looks small but which contains multitude.

There do seem to black-hole-has-no-hair kinds of physical reasons why you might not be able to see inside your newly-make pocket universe. But SF writers don’t worry about stuff like that. You just set up a telepathic ribbon-theoretic link with one of the minds in the new universe. Or maybe you, like, incarnate yourself down into it.

But I’m still circling around the question here, which is what I did in my conversation with Kevin. The reason has to do with my current location in my work cycle. The way I write an SF novel is to imagine a fresh universe that I’d like to inhabit, and then I go into it for about a year, in a waking dream, writing down what I see.

Restating the same thing: For me writing is a little like dreaming while I’m awake. That is, I see the scene in my mind’s eye before I write it. Sometimes I’ll nurse an image of a place or a situation for quite some time before I write about it, in fact I sometimes write a book simply to be able to mentally visit certain locales that I’ve dreamed up. I pretty much can’t write a novel unless I have an image of a fabulous place where I want to go. By writing about these scenes, I make them more real to myself.

My novels are usually about some quirky out-of-the-mainstream individual who finds his way into a completely different world. My hero has adventures in this wonderland and eventually makes it back to Earth. A couple of books back, I realized that, at a transreal level, this plot synopsis describes me¬ working on a novel.

Right now I’m between novels, and at this point, I have no idea what my next one will be about. I don’t know how to get out of here once again. So I was uncomfortable with Kevin’s question.

“I wish I had a wish,” as Andy Warhol once said.

There’s so many nice universes that I’ve already written novels about. Worlds with, variously, four dimensions, actual infinities, predictable futures, telepathy, levitation, races of intelligent robots, cosmic-ray-riding aliens, galactic civilizations, creatures inside the Sun, creatures inside the hollow earth. Where do I want to go next? I don’t know.

As the time between novels stretches out, I usually begin worrying I’ll never write another, worrying I’ll never think of another world of heart’s desire to explore. At some point the pressure grows so great that I settle on something and get started again. But each time I’m also thinking that maybe this time I won’t go back in and that maybe I’m done with writing novels. At times that seems like a pleasant thought, other times not.

It wouldn’t be out of the question to go back and write a sequel, I suppose. I’d always meant to do a sequel to Frek and the Elixir, with its aliens from the galactic core, and the year 3000 Earth with its funky biotech. There were still a lot of loose ends at the end of that book. Maybe I’ll see if I could get a contract for a Frek 2.

Or, maybe I’ll still think of some completely new world of heart’s desire.

But just for now I’ll be writing a few short stories. Little generation starships instead of complete worlds.

A free ebook version of The Wares Tetralogy is now online at www.rudyrucker.com/wares.

The Prime Books paperback is available in stores and from online booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s Books, and others.

And the commercial ebook version is available for purchase as well. Check out this awesome tome and leave a comment below.

Into the light, my friends, into the light…

The Ware Tetralogy is now in print! I have more info about it with an excerpt and a podcast on an earlier post, “Monkey Brain Feast…Southern Style.”

I’ll drop in some blurbs for the four component novels here:

Software.

One of cyberpunk’s most inventive works.
— Rolling Stone.

Wetware.

Delightfully irreverent. This is science fiction as it should be: authoritative and tightly linked with our real lives and our real future.
— Washington Post Book World.

Freeware.

One of science fiction’s wittiest writers. A genius … a cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers.
— San Diego Union-Tribune.

Eminently satisfying … intelligent and witty … the climax of what may well have been one of the most important SF series of the past 15 years.
— Washington Post Book World.

Much has been made of Rucker’s affinity with Dick, insofar as they both identify with and honor the common man, and both men write with a lucid simplicity that allows them to convey the weirdest ideas in the easiest to understand form. Rucker wishes — for himself, his characters, and everyone else — the maximum freedom that reality will allow.
— Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.

It is fast-paced, funny, and celebrates the complexity of the universe without dumbing it down. It adds up to a unique voice in SF, exuberant, vigorous and dense with strange but vividly realized ideas.
— Interzone.

Freeware is a fearlessly weird and very funny romp through a seedy, decadent 21st century America. Rucker’s evocation of the 21st century has an internal logic that provides a firm foundation for his gonzo inventiveness and dark humor.
— San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner.

Realware.

Rucker’s writing is great like the Ramones are great: a genre stripped to its essence, attitude up the wazoo, and cartoon sentiments that reek of identifiable lives and issues. Wild math you can get elsewhere, but no one does the cyber version of beatnik glory quite like Rucker. Rucker does it through sheer emotional force … it’s not his universes, it’s his people and how the relate to each other — and to the spiritual. That’s what Realware has going for it: healing and a calm sense of spirituality.
— New York Review of Science Fiction.

Strangeness is one of the main attractions of science fiction, and Rucker delivers plenty of it — exotic technologies, a funky future culture, mathematical head trips. Yet Rucker invests his main characters with surprising depth and complexity. From time to time the novel’s often madcap tone becomes unexpectedly serious, even tragic.
— SCIFI.COM

Rucker has written a generational saga that spans sixty years of mind-blowing change. Without sacrificing any of his id-driven wildness, Rucker has developed into a benevolent, all-seeing creator … Realware brings to a fully satisfying conclusion this landmark quartet.
— Isaac Asmiov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Yeah, baby! Be diggin’ on the electric pig!

This weekend we happened to be in the SF Civic Center, and the Juneteenth festival was going on. One of the bands playing was Sila and the Afrofunk Experience . The lead singer, Victor Sila, is from Kenya, the ancestral home of President Obama. The band was great, hypnotic.

Almost the only other white person at this event was the guy running the sound board. It was unusual for me to be quietly sitting with this crowd, kind of liberating. Hardly anyone was eating or drinking anything, not consuming, just relaxing and enjoying the festival.

Later that night we went to a completely different kind of event, the SF Opera’s staging of Wagner’s Walküre, fully four and a half hours long, counting intermissions. During act two, while I was sitting there in my dress shirt, I felt something moving on my skin under my shirt. The next morning I figured out that I’d brought back four ticks from my walks in the woods in Kentucky.

[Downtown Lagrange, Kentucky.]

Wandering around in SF in the afternoon, we went into the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park—if you actually live in the SF area, you tend not to go into this spot very often, as it’s something of a tourist attraction. But if you push through to the back, there a nice tiny Zen rock garden.

Near the garden was a statue of Buddha, with a spiderweb covering his face. That’s kind of where my writing muse is at these days, covered over, inactive. I’m still recovering from finishing the last novel, Jim and the Flims, I guess.

Another walled-off muse is in the Civic Center park—it’s this statue called “Three Heads Six Arms,” and the city has put a fence around it because people were writing graffiti on it, also they’re worried about people climbing on it. Supposedly the fence is temporary, and the web will blow away. Let’s hope so.

I grew up in the countryside east of Louisville, Kentucky. I went back last week to visit with my brother Embry, to attend the funeral of his dear wife Noreen, and to join in the accompanying reunion.

The ceremony was in the old St. Francis in the Fields Church where I went to school from nursery through the third grade. My brother Embry and I sang in the choir there as boys and were confirmed as well. Our father was the assistant minister there in the early 1960s. Our mother’s funeral was at St. Francis too, about twenty years ago. My own little family went to many of Christmas services there with Embry and Noreen.

It’s terrible to see a loved one’s remains go into the ground, and to feel how heedlessly the greater world spins on. A death leaves a hole that’s initially too big to take the measure of, too big and ragged for the bereaved to readily explore.

At the funeral I encountered unexpected faces from the past. A woman who’d been in our neighborhood gang of kids in 1949, and whom I’d admired like a star. One of my brother’s old friends, telling a story about how they’d drag-raced the friend’s Corvette on River Road in 1958. The doctor who had my spleen removed after I ruptured it in 1960.

Kentucky was lovelier than I’d remembered. The early evening sun on the rolling pastures with their tidy fences, the glare of light on the early morning dew, the burgeoning density of the vegetation. I took a few walks in the woods, astounded at the huge, floppy plants, pumped up with rain.

In California, where it hardly rains at all, the plants are fibrous, woody, glazed. In Kentucky, the plants are more like water balloons. Nearly every day we had a thunderstorm, often at night. The flash and boom, the rain falling in sheets.

Before and after the funeral, our assembled families ate endless meals, sitting on the front porch of my brother Embry’s farmhouse. Talking, sometimes laughing, reminiscing, slowly beginning the process of grief.

We had six grandchildren there in all—it was comforting to see the new shoots starting up, the saplings beside the fallen tree. I’m a mastodon compared to the grandchildren, an ice-age behemoth. The Reaper has moved down to my generation.

Funerals are really for the survivors. The departed isn’t there, at least not in any obvious way. But I’m always willing to entertain the long-shot thought that the deceased is on the scene in some form, perhaps as a butterfly, or as a puzzling light at night, or even as an invisible ectoplasm. But in any case, I doubt they’re worried about the formalities. It’s the people they would care about, the loved ones who are there.

We’ll miss you, dear Noreen. You were wonderful.