[Another excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls.]

Odd as it now seems, it was only in 1986, with Wetware—my thirteenth book—that I started writing on a computer. The previous dozen manuscripts were all typed, with much physical cutting and pasting. Sometimes, if I couldn’t face typing up a fair copy of the marked-up and glued-together final draft, I’d hire a typist.

[Our three cyberkids.]

But with Wetware I was ready to change. Sylvia, the kids and I went up to Charlottesville and visited the only computer store in the area. I ended up with what was known as a CP/M machine, made by Epson, with Peachtext word-processing software, and a daisy wheel printer. The system came with a Pac-Man-like computer game called Mouse Trap that the kids loved to play.

Although I knew a lot about the abstract computers discussed in mathematical logic, it would be several more years before I grasped how my kludgy, real-world computer worked—the whole schmear about copying software into system memory was a mystery to me. For the moment, all I knew was that I had to run two or three big floppy disks through the machine just to start it up.

While I was gearing up for Wetware, I’d started what I thought was going to be a short story called “People That Melt,” and I sent the story fragment to William Gibson, hoping that he’d help me finish it, and add some snazzy Gibsonian touches.

He said he was too busy to complete such a project, but he did write a couple of pages for me, and said I was free to fold them into my mix in any fashion I pleased. I think Whitey Mydol’s “ridgeback” Mohawk that extends all the way down his spine was Bill’s idea.

As I continued work on the story, it got good to me, and it ended up as the first chapter of Wetware. As a tip of the hat, I put in a character named Max Yukawa who resembled my notion of Bill Gibson—a reclusive mastermind with a thin, strangely flexible head.

Once I got rolling, I wrote Wetware at white heat. I think the actual keyboarding of the first draft took about six weeks. I made a special effort to give the boppers’ speech the bizarre beat rhythms of Kerouac’s writing—indeed, I’d sometimes look into his great Visions of Cody for inspiration. The book was insane, mind-boggling, a cyberpunk masterpiece. A couple of years later, it would win me a second Philip K. Dick award.

But no matter how fast and well I wrote, the money wasn’t coming in fast enough. I was going to have to leave freelancing and get another teaching job.

[Excerpts from my memoir, Nested Scrolls.]

I started getting mail from a younger writer in Texas called Bruce Sterling. He’d written glowing reviews of Spacetime Donuts and White Light in a weekly free newspaper in Austin—he was one of the very first critics to appreciate these books. Soon after this, Bruce began publishing a zine called Cheap Truth.

Bruce loved all things Soviet—it wasn’t that he was a Communist, it was more that he dug the parallel world aspect of a superpower totally different from America. He spoke of Cheap Truth as a samizdat publication, meaning that, rather than printing a lot of copies, he encouraged people to Xerox their copies and pass them from hand to hand.

Reading Bruce’s sporadic mailings of Cheap Truth, I learned there were a number of other disgruntled and radicalized new SF writers like me. The Cheap Truth rants were authored by people with pseudonyms like Sue Denim and Vincent Omniaveritas. I was too out of the loop to try and figure out who was who, but I took note of the authors being hyped: Bruce Sterling, Lew Shiner, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, John Shirley, and Greg Bear. I couldn’t actually find books by many of these people in Lynchburg, Virginia, although Bruce did mail me a couple of his novels, including Involution Ocean, a delightful take on Moby Dick which features dopers on a sea of sand. This work has some transreal qualities, and I liked it lot, including its unexpectedly maniacal ending…it’s a shame the book is currently so hard to find.

Sterling’s zine, Cheap Truth¸ didn’t have any particular name for the emerging new SF movement—it wouldn’t be until the next year that the cyberpunk label would take hold. I got together with Sterling, William Gibson, and Lew Shiner in September of 1983. We partied together at a world science fiction convention in Baltimore—they’d all read my new novel The Sex Sphere, which had just been published by Ace.

Gibson was an impressive guy from the start. He was tall, with an unusually thin and somewhat flexible-looking head. When I met him at one of the con parties, he said he was high on some SF-sounding substance I’d never heard of. Perfect. He was bright, funny, intense, and with a comfortable Virginia accent.

Back home in Lynchburg, I spent a day at my downtown office as usual and drove home in our black and white Buick, resplendent in the Hawaiian shirt that Sylvia had sewn for me. And there were Gibson, Sterling and Shiner on our front porch, along with Bruce’s wife, Nancy, and Lew’s friend, Edie. They’d decided to drive down after the convention.

These guys were all a bit younger than me—I was thirty-seven by now. To some extent they looked up to me. I was thrilled to join forces with them, it felt like being an early Beat.

I’d meet the other canonical cyberpunk, John Shirley, two years later, when we were both staying with Bruce and Nancy Sterling in Austin, Texas, in town for a science fiction convention that was featuring a panel on cyberpunk. John was a trip. When I woke up on Sterling’s couch in the morning, John was leaning over me, staring at my face.

“I’m trying to analyze the master’s vibes,” he told me.

The antic SF personage Charles Platt was there in spirit, he’d mailed Bruce a primitive Mandelbrot set program that he’d written in Basic. We’d set the program to running on Bruce’s primitive Amiga computer, and a couple of hours later we’d see a new zoom into the bug-shaped fractal—chunky pixels colored in blue, magenta and cyan.,

As we walked around Austin together talking, John had a habit of picking up some random large stone from a lawn, lugging it over to me, and putting it into my hands. Sometimes I’d be so into the conversation that I’d just carry the rock along for a few steps before noticing it.

Naturally we’d get high in the evenings. I recall driving a rented Lincoln around town with John. He was riffing off my book Software, leaning out of our car window to scream at the Texas drivers, “Y’all ever ate any live brains?”

The writers on the Cyberpunk panel were me, Shirley, Sterling, Lew Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Greg Bear. Gibson couldn’t make it. The moderator—whose name I’ve forgotten or never knew—hadn’t read any of my work, and was bursting with venom against all of us. He represented the population of SF fans who are looking for a security blanket rather than for higher consciousness. For his ilk, cyberpunk was an annoyance or even a threat. He’d slid through the 1970s thinking of himself as with-it, and cyberpunk was yanking his covers.

To my eyes, the audience began taking on the look of a lynch mob. Here I’m finally asked to join a literary movement, and everyone hates me before I can even open my mouth? Enraged by the moderator’s ongoing barrage of insults, John Shirley got up and walked out, followed by Sterling and Shiner. But I stayed up there. I’d traveled a long distance for my moment in the sun.

“So I guess cyberpunk is dead now?” said Shiner afterwards.

I didn’t think do. Surely, if we could make plastic people that uptight, we were on the right track. That’s what the punk part was all about.

[Read more about cyberpunk in Nested Scrolls online.]

[More from my memoir-in-progress Nested Scrolls. By the way, my four Ware novels are out of print now, but I'm working on a way to get them back onto the stands again.]

Mom and Pop completed their divorce—and they never spoke to each other again. Pop and his new woman friend came to visit us in Heidelberg. It was a mournful, uncomfortable encounter. Pop was a mess—he was consumed with guilt about leaving Mom, and he was drinking more heavily than ever before. His woman friend was stiff and brittle with us. She disapproved of me.

After a few long days, I put them on a train for Paris. They were planning to stay in a good hotel and live it up. Poor Pop. He’d done his duty all his life. Now Death was stalking him and he was trying to have some fun. Seeing his train pull away, I stood there sobbing as if my heart would break.

What to do? I started work on another science fiction novel. I figured I’d write a transreal novel as before—but without using myself as a character. I sensed that this move would open up the vibe.

One character, called Cobb Anderson, would be an old man modeled on my father in his current state. To some extent I could project myself into this character too. For all our disagreements over the years, Pop and I never were all that different. Another factor in my writing about Pop was that I was in some sense trying to inoculate myself against ending up like him—besotted, afraid of death, and on the run from my family.

The other character in my novel was a young guy called Sta-Hi Mooney, based on my wild and wacky friend Dennis—the guy who used to turn up in Geneseo to visit his big brother who was teaching there. What I liked about Dennis was that he seemed to have no internal censor. He always said exactly what he was thinking. He was relatively uneducated, but he had a fanciful mind, and a hipster, motor-mouth style of speech.

In the opening scene, Cobb is sitting on a beach in Florida, drinking sherry, and he’s approached by his double. At first I thought I was writing a time-travel novel, but then I hit on the notion that Cobb’s double could in fact be a robot copy of him.

To make this work, I developed the idea that it will become possible to extract a person’s personality from their brain, and that it will then be possible to run the extracted human software on some fresh hardware, for instance on a robot resembling the person’s former body.

Software. In 1979, this was a technical and little-known word—I’d picked it up from an article in the Scientific American. I decided to use it for the title of my book. I finished Software near the end of our stay in Heidelberg, and I had no trouble selling it to Ace Books in the wake of selling them White Light.

My idea of copying a person onto a robot was a fresh concept in those days, and my book gained power from the intensity of its father/son themes and from the colorful anarchism of my robot characters, whom I called “boppers.” Also I had an unforgettable scene where some sleazy biker types are about to cut off the top of Sta-Hi’s skull and eat his brain while he’s still alive. They wanted to extract the software, you understand.

I participated in a group Steampunk reading a couple of weeks ago, and Rick Kleffel made a podcast of me reading from The Hollow Earth. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

And now another excerpt from my memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls. Note that you can buy White Light at this link.

In Heidelberg in 1978, I wrote seven short stories—and then White Light, a science fiction novel about infinity. With White Light I got serious about being a novelist.

I began writing the book in longhand one weekend while I was alone with the kids. Sylvia was visiting her relatives in Budapest. I called my novel White Light, in memory of a memorable vision I’d had at Rutgers. And I gave it a subtitle lifted from a paper by Kurt Gödel: What is Cantor’s Continuum Problem?

The main character of White Light was a math professor, closely modeled on me, and the setting was very much like Geneseo. The practice of writing science fiction about real life is what I came to call transrealism. In White Light, my life in Geneseo was the real part, and the trans part was that my character in the novel leaves his body and journeys to a land where Cantor’s infinities are as common as rocks and plants.

White Light was influenced by the Donald Duck and Zap comics that I loved so well one chapter features Donald and his nephews, in another chapter objects start talking, as they sometimes do in R. Crumb strips. I also used the papers by Cantor that I’d been reading—and included the man himself as a character.

Over the years, I’ve often worked by alternating between writing science fiction and writing popular science. So it was fitting that I was working on a popular nonfiction book about infinity at the same time that I was writing White Light. Each endeavor was feeding the other.

I got into a very pleasant and exalted mental state during this period of time. I remember having a magical dream in which I was climbing onto the ridge of a mountain. The stone underfoot was slippery pieces of shale, and among the stones I was finding wonderful polyhedral crystals the size of walnuts or croquet balls. Even within the dream, I knew that these treasures represented my wonderful new ideas.

I finished the manuscript for White Light late in 1979, when I was thirty-three. I tried sending it to a big-time agent—who charged me a couple of hundred bucks to read my manuscript, disliked it, and refused to submit it to any publishers. So I started trying to sell it by myself.

I sent it off to Ace Books, getting their address from the title page of Ian Watson’s Miracle Visitors, a book written on the same wavelength as White Light. While I was waiting for my book to work its way through the Ace slush pile, I went to my first science fiction convention, Seacon in Brightontaking the train and ferry from Heidelberg.

The atmosphere at mathematics conferences had always been rather frosty. There weren’t enough jobs to go around, and newcomers weren’t particularly welcome. But the science-fiction folks were, like, “the more the merrier.” I loved the vibe.

Some well-dressed hippies from London (including Gamma) got me high and introduced me to a hipster called Maxim Jakubowsky. Maxim was editing a new line of books for the Virgin record company. Their first book was going to be about the punk band The Sex Pistols, but they were looking for radical SF novels as well.

I’d brought along a single Xerox of the White Light manuscript, and I handed it to Maxim on the spot. And a few weeks later he made an offer to buy the British rights for the book. A month after that, Ace made an offer for the US rights. I felt like a plant pushing out from the soil into the sun and air.