We visited Rudy, Penny, and the twins in Berkeley yesterday, and I caught a few street images for today’s illos, ending with a paparazzi pair of me trying to get my camera back from Rudy.

Hylozoic is going pretty good these days. I got a contract for it from Tor Books, which is encouraging. I’m always grateful that I can get novels published.

Here’s a draft passage of Jayjay, Thuy, and the not-so-evil-after-all hillbilly pitchfork arriving in the Hibrane. It’s our man Hieronymus Bosch’s home town, 1496, and everything in the Hibrane is six times as big as it is here.

Jayjay took Thuy by the hand, remembering the tower of loops that the pitchfork had taught him. The scale links were still in place: a helix spiraling from below the subbies to beyond the galaxy. Feeling light and nimble, Jayjay revolved the helix to aim its axis in the direction they flew. He reached through his heart to that one particular cell and carbon atom; he reached up past humanity to the Earth and the sky. He and Thuy sped forward as if in a particle accelerator.

And touched down upon a stone street in a town with no lights or teep. The mild, damp night air bore the smell of human waste.

A gentle thump sounded at their side: the pitchfork. Somewhere nearby, men were roaring a slow, deep-voiced song. A fat full moon hung low above the stair-stepped gables, the buildings oddly tall.

Looking up past the walls to the panoply of stars, Jayjay saw familiar constellations. He used the north star to find the points of the compass, noted that the low moon was in the west, recalled that a full moon sets near dawn, and drew the conclusion.

“It’s about 4 a. m.” he told Thuy.

“There’s no teep to check that,” said Thuy fretfully. “This place isn’t right. Last time, the Hibrane was almost like our San Francisco, and they had lazy eight. But this is some kind of primitive backwater with no silps. Everything’s mute. How do people live this way?”

“We’re free,” said Jayjay relishing the bucolic air. Already he was learning to ignore the bad smells. “It’s great here. No Peng, no voices in our heads, no realtime video shows of our lives.”

Dogs barked in courtyards nearby, perhaps annoyed by the pitchfork. He stood beside Jayjay, balancing on his handle, vibrating his prongs at an ultrasonic rate. Now he slid down a few octaves, sculpting his reverberant tones into a voice.

“I got a powerful belief my harp’s somewheres near,” said the aktual. “She’ll answer when she hears me. I know it’s gonna work out. We’ve done all this before.”

“We have?”

“The harp and me are manifesting as time loops. ‘Cept we’re outta synch. Seems like God and the Devil could manage to show up the same scale, place and time—but that harp, she always takes a wrong turn.”

“You’re really saying she’s God?” asked Jayjay.

“Oh, I’m God now,” said the pitchfork. “And the harp’s the Devil. We swap places all the time.”

“Like yin and yang?” said Thuy.

“Out the yinyang for true,” said the pitchfork and went hopping down the street, his handle rapping smartly on the stones. Someone lit a lantern in one of the great houses, the window impossibly high above the ground.

A slow, draggy squeal issued from a faintly visible alley. Horn-shod feet clattered on the stones; a massive bulk was shambling their way. The high window swung open, and the lantern light illumined a muddy hairy beast the size of a an old-style moving van.

“Run, Thuy!” cried Jayjay, and turned to flee. The cobblestones were inordinately broad and high-crowned, with gaping cracks between them. At his very first step, Jayjay, clumsy with exhaustion, caught his foot in a gap and fell.

The monstrous creature was coming closer, slow but ineluctable, snuffling his way through the fetid night.

“Help me, Thuy!” Jayjay moaned. “My foot’s stuck.”

A red-faced man in a nightgown was yelling from the window, but his speech was doubly incomprehensible. The voice was warped like a screwed audio clip, and the words weren’t in any language Jayjay knew. German? Old English?

“Poor Jayjay,” said Thuy, helping him to his feet. In the faint, jiggly light, Jayjay could see that she was smiling. “I’m happy because now I can tell this really is the Hibrane,” she explained. “That means we have an advantage here. It’s like we’re one foot tall, dense as steel, and faster than weasels. I’m gonna kick that hog’s butt.”

And she proceeded to do just this. Thuy trotted towards the giant animal—who was, yes, a twenty foot tall boar. She leapt into the air and gave the charging swine a smack on the snout with her fist. The boar veered ever so slowly to one side. Thuy ran around behind him and planted a volley of sharp kicks, dimpling his muddy hams. Bellowing like drunken molasses, the giant pig bucked his way past Jayjay and further up the street.

“We’re super-gnomes,” said Thuy.

“Or demons,” added Jayjay. “These people are bound to be superstitious.”

—quoted from Rudy Rucker, Hylozoic, draft of a novel in progress.

Last week I scrambled down to an inlet of the Lexington Reservoir near Los Gatos with my friend Vernon and we painted a little. We were looking for some ambient water. It was so hot and sunny that we had to go up into a shady gully to one side. We saw some egrets landing. I’ve gone back to the picture four times, and I think it’s done now.

I had to focus down on just part of the scene to get a picture. The two things I liked best were the wavy shoreline and the cracked mud.

I always think of math when I see things like this…

This is a model of an atom, I believe.

I got the image in an interesting email from a fringe science site devoted to John Worrell Keely’s “Vibratory Physics” of the 19th century. Matter as aether vortices with, I think, seven kinds of aether in seven dimensions! Sounds like how people get aktualized in Hylozoic…

My artist friend Hal Robins sent me a nice print of a classic Hollow Earth picture. It’s been a while since I did a Google search on the Hollow Earth; a rich haul.

My favorite link (as of 2007, although in 2010 the link was no longer active) describes how a man named Steve Currey was organizing a “Voyage to Our Hollow Earth” charter trip aboard the Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker Yamal—the plan was to nose around for the opening to the Inner World which is surely somewhere near the North Pole. The planned itinerary bears the caveat, “Please note that if we are unable to find the Polar opening, we will be returning via the New Siberian Islands to visit skeleton remains of exotic animals thought to originate from Inner Earth.” The trip was to take place this summer, but sadly the organizer died—and perhaps not many people signed up—so the trip didn’t take place. Another site indicates that a new organizer hopes to reschedule it.

David Standish recently wrote a very nice historical survey called Hollow Earth literature, with kind words about my own novel The Hollow Earth. [For some reason, the Amazon link for buying my book The Hollow Earth has the wrong cover image; the correct image of my novel’s new edition is below.]

The dream lives on! I myself dream of voyaging in 2008 with my brother to look for the entrance to the Inner World in the vicinity of Triton Bay in the Fak Fak Regency in the West Papua district of Indonesia, getting in some great diving while I’m at it. See Yung Yip’s image of a Triton Bay sea slug below from the always fascinating Sea Slug Forum.

Get back to your novel, Rudy, you’re wasting time!

Oh well. As William Craddock wrote: “Time? How can you waste time?”

In its original, intended meaning, wetware is the underlying generative code for an organism, as found in the genetic material, in the biochemistry of the cells, and in the architecture of the body’s tissues.

I was one of the initial popularizers of the word “wetware,” perhaps the third to use it in an SF novel, preceded by Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers and, I believe, Bruce Sterling’s Schizmatrix. I think I first saw the word in Sterling’s book.

I’m disappointed to see that over the years the meaning of the word is being watered down to mean (a) a human brain or, even worse, (b) a company’s employees.

(a) If “wetware” just meant “brain,” then we wouldn’t even need the word. The whole point of the word “wetware” is that it’s meant to make you look at the world in a new way, and to try and see biological systems from a computational standpoint. An organism is so much more than a brain.

(b) In the sense of employees, wetware might be used in a sentence like: “Yeah, we got the PCs, we got the Office software, now we just gotta hire us some wetware.” When I see people trying to reduce everything to corporate human resources issues, I think of someone giving a monkey in a zoo a crayon, and all he can draw is the bars of his own cage. But, crabbing aside, I can see the appeal to this usage for computer workers. “Why’s this keyboard all sticky?” “Wetware problem. Bill eats lunch at his desk.”

In the Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge (Harper-Perennial, New York 1992), I defined “Wetware” as follows. (By the way, I attributed this entry to Max Yukawa, who is in fact a character in my novel Wetware. As a kind of homage, Yukawa’s physical appearance was in fact modeled on William Gibson’s, that is, Yukawa has a long, thin, and somehow flexible-seeming head. When I was starting the book, I’d sent a few pages to Gibson and he’d kindly rewritten them for me, punching them up a bit.):

“Suppose you think of an organism as being like a computer graphic that is generated from some program. Or think of an oak tree as being the output of a program that was contained inside the acorn. The genetic program is in the DNA molecule. Instead of calling it software like a computer program, w call it wetware because it’s in a biological cell where everything is wet. Your software is the abstract information pattern behind your genetic code, but your actual wetware is the physical DNA in a cell. A sperm cell is wetware with a tail, but it’s no good without an ovum’s wetware. A fertilized seed is self-contained wetware, and a plant cutting is wetware, too, as plants can reproduce as clones.”

— Rudy Rucker, R. U. Sirius, and Queen Mu, eds., The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide.

Since then, I’ve come to understand that a body’s wetware is more than just its DNA. The autocatalytic system of biochemicals in each cell is a kind of wetware itself. So the seed wetware is really the entire seed cell.

At a higher level, the arrangement of a body’s cells—and the all-important tangling of the cortical neurons—is a kind of wetware as well. The body and its high-level wetware are, of course, implicit in the low-level wetware of the original seed cell which contains the initial DNA and biochemicals. But it can be useful to regard the body as a high-level wetware system on its own, just as one might prefer looking at a program as expressed in some high-level language like Java, rather that trying to decipher it in low-level assembly language or machine code. That is, we can use “wetware” to refer to the underlying initial cell’s patterns, or to the emergent patterns of the body.

(By the way, on May 31, 2007, I made some corrections to the Wikipedia wetware entry. I hadn’t bothered to log in, and was “anonymously” there as an IP code starting with 68.)

All this sounds kind of dry and academic. But the cyberpunk novel Wetware was anything but that. I wrote it at white heat in six weeks in 1986, at the tail end of four years without a formal job—I was a freelance writer working out of a rented office in an abandoned building in the crumbling seedy core of Jerry Falwell’s Lynchburg, Virginia. This was the first of my novels to be written on a word processor—I’d gotten an Epson CPM machine with PeachText software. I didn’t know it then, but I was just about to move to Silicon Valley.

The setup for the book is that humans have built a race of robots called boppers. The boppers live on the moon, where they reproduce by building new robots in factories, often merging two boppers’ codes onto a single new body. Given that they have self-reproduction, “sex,” and mutation, they’ve evolved. But now they want to move from plastic bodies into meat bodies. They’ve figured out how to program human DNA so that a newborn baby might include some particular robot’s personality.

Humans designed the robots, and now they’re turning the tables and designing humans. The first human born with bopper code in his wetware is called Manchile. His sperm carries two tails, one with the human DNA and one with the robot-mind upgrade. He’s starting a Messianic movement on earth, mainly by sleeping with as many women as possible. Like Phil Dick’s precog mutant, the Golden Man, Manchile is irresistibly handsome. I modeled his speech patterns on those of the drummer in our short-lived Lynchburg punk rock band, The Dead Pigs.

“All the boppers really want is access. They admire the hell out of the human meatcomputer. They just want a chance to stir their info into the mix. Look at me—am I human or am I bopper? I’m made of meat, but my software is from … the Moon. Let’s all miscegenate, baby, I got two-tail sperm!”

—Rudy Rucker, Wetware.

The ten Wetware cover shots above are, left to right and top to bottom, from US Avon (1988 edition), US Avon (1997 edition), Japan, Italy, Germany, the UK, Russia, Finland, Live Robots: the US Avon 1994 double edition including Software, and Moldies and Meatbops: the US Avon Science Fiction Book Club edition including Freeware as well.

Although I suggested the “Moldies and Meatbops,” title, I’ve come to regret it. For some reason I was echoing the sound of the utterly irrelevant title of “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” I recall another (non-starter) title suggestion I’d made as well, lifted from an S. Clay Wilson one-panel cartoon: “Crazed Junkies Fight It Out With Killer Robots.” Probably just plain Wares would have been best. Note that there never was an omnibus with all four of the novels.

Added October 30, 2016.

The four-novel omnibus Ware Tetralogy appeared in 2010 from Prime Books with an intro by William Gibson. You can get it as paperback, commercial ebook, or as a free CC ebook.