All this fall, here in 2011, I’ve been busy editing some twenty years of electronic journal files which I’m planning to publish as an ebook called Journals, 1990 – 2011, from my emerging Transreal Press in the early months of 2012. This book, Journals, 1990 – 2011, will weigh in at about half a million words, really too long to appear as a print book. It’s maybe five times as long as my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Certainly the autobio is more of a shapely book, but I am finding some interesting stuff in the old journals.

At this point I have rather a lot of unused photos that I wanted to post anyway, so I’m going to mix a couple of them in with journal excerpts from time to time. Today we have an excerpt written in 1994. My last Ramones concert. Even though you’re dead, you’re still my friends.

“On My Home Planet,” by Rudy Rucker, 20 x 24 inches, November, 2011, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.

It was the Ramones final tour, and on March 9, 1994, I went with my wife and children to see them at the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco. My son, Rudy, Jr. got thrown out during the first song for stage-diving, which seemed quite unfair, as he’d often stagedived at punk concerts before and everyone had thought it was fine.

I managed to stay in the pit till almost the end of the main set. Thanks to my fitness I could hang in there pretty long. Although today I like can’t lift my arms, they’re so tired from fending people off. Whenever it would be relatively quiet and I’d be near Joey, I’d yell “My Back Pages.”

The newest Ramone, C.J. the bass-player, is the one who sings that song, though I didn’t actually realize that when I was yelling to Joey. They were off key almost the whole time, but then Joey said, “Cheap acid, cheap show,” and, perhaps in reaction, their playing got better. They did about five more songs and left the stage and people are clapping, and C.J. and Johnny and Marky come out without Joey, and tear into yes “My Back Pages”.

I love the wall-of-sound quality to it. They’re like crucifying this old Dylan-folkie song on the wall of sound. And the words to the song are so great. “But I was so much older then,/ I’m younger than that now.” Too true!

For this encore, C.J. and Johnny had put on fresh dry t-shirts. C.J.’s T-shirt is like a circle with a picture of the Manhattan skyline. And over that is a big red SS in that lighting-stroke kind of jagged S. And Johnny is wearing a Charlie Manson T-shirt, and draped on either side of Charlie are his crazy woman followers, like Sadie Glutz, and Squeaky Fromme, and the t-shirt says “Charlie’s Angels.” Squeaky once tried to shoot Jerry Ford with a .45 automatic pistol, she’s still locked up. Charlie Manson and SS, ripping the sweet thoughtful sixties folksong “My Back Pages” to frikkin’ shreds.

It was one of the most awesome multimedia presentations I’ve ever grokked. I went back in the pit, and the wave threw me up near C.J. I had my glasses off so they wouldn’t get clawed off, but then I wanted to put them on to be able to see him, and there was a crowd-surfer over my head, and I was thinking, “I’m busy with my glasses, so just this once I’m not going to reach up and push the guy,” so of course he falls on my head. But I don’t think it did any lasting damage.

[You can’t really find a good video of the Ramones doing “My Back Pages,” although there is what looks to be an amateur video of it, with fairly weak sound, shot in Buenos Aires in 1996. Note again that Joey isn’t on stage for this number and C.J. is singing. But you have to imagine it about ten thousand times louder.]

At the end of October, the historical novelist Celia Holland got Terry Bisson and me to accompany her and her son-in-law John to a Raiders game in Oakland.

In Celia’s wonderful novels, such as Varanger, we often read about Vikings and warriors. Not such a far stretch from the types we found at the Raiders’ stadium.

I’d been a little uneasy about going there. But I had enough sense to wear a black shirt. Just about everyone else was wearing a numbered Raiders football jersey, but they were all friendly enough to me. The very fact that I’d bought a ticket to the game meant that I was on the right side.

I was of course impressed by the Raiderette cheerleaders. They had a separate group for each side of the field, and now and then they’d come down near the endzones. I made a video of them too.

The area where Celia had gotten us tickets was in the bleachers near one of the endzones. It turned out this was in fact the most fan intense area of all—the so-called Black Hole. Guys were dressed like Death or like pirates. Two ladies in front of me were cheerfully sharing a plate of nachos, and when for some reason the public address announcer mentioned the Girl Scouts, one the women said to her friend, “Eff the Girl Scouts!” Her friend echoed the sentiment.

When the opposing team—the Minnesota Vikings—was on the point of scroing a touchdown against us, nearly everyone in the Black Hole stood up to scream curses and give our enemies the finger.

In the fourth quarter, security guards began coming down into the Black Hole to handcuff and lead away those of our company who were considered to be too drunk.

We lost the game, but at the end, there was a calm, mellow feeling of mutual empathy. Together we’d weathered the storm. Note that the “5150” on this lady’s jersey is by way of being a Raiders code number—it stands for the number of the California legal statute for “involuntary psychiatric hold” under which people can be imprisoned if they’re considered to have a mental disorder that makes them be a danger to themselves or to others. That’s the Black Hole spirit!

A suprisingly fun and upbeat day.

Oddly enough, I happened to give two TEDx talks in the last couple of months. In my most recent post, I embedded a link for the talk on “Beyond Machines: The Year 3000,” which I gave in Brussels in November. Today I’m embedding a link for the TEDx talk, “Transreal in Los Gatos,” which I gave in October.

The “Transreal in Los Gatos” talk is a more autobiographical than the Brussels talk, and discusses some of the stories and events that are in my autobiography, Nested Scrolls.

Further promo for Nested Scrolls. The SF website io9 ran an excerpt called “The Death of Philip K. Dick and the Birth of Cyberpunk.”of Nested Scrolls.

Cory Doctorow gave the book a mention in Boing Boing.

Henry Wessells wrote an interesting review of Nested Scrolls for the New York Review of Science Fiction.

The Tor Books newsletter ran my description of the book under the title, “A Look Back at my Weird, Cool Life”

And SF writer John Scalzi’s blog Whatever ran my account of the book as “The Big Idea: Rudy Rucker.”

So I decided that I’d better write my autobiography before it was too late. What with death and senility closing in!

I didn’t want my autobio to be overly long or dry. I wanted it to read something like a novel. Unlike an encyclopedia entry, a novel isn’t a list of dates and events. A novel is all about characterization and description and conversation, about action and vignettes. I wanted to structure my autobiography, Nested Scrolls , like that.

The U.S. edition of Nested Scrolls comes out from Tor Books this week. You can order the hardcover or ebook Tor edition from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or direct from Tor. The Tor site has links for independent booksellers and further ebook formats.

Note that a more expensive collector’s edition is available from PS Press in England.

There’s a fashion these days for making video trailers for books. The following isn’t precisely about Nested Scrolls, but it will do. It’s a recent TEDx talk that I gave in Brussels covering a lot of the ideas that I touch on in my autobio.

And here’s a nice blurb from Regina Schroeder at Booklist :

This is a wild memoir, certainly as satisfying a read as any of Rucker’s novels… He knew from an early age that he wanted to be a beatnik writer, and in many ways, he has succeeded—in others, of course, he has surpassed his inspiration. It is, being the story of a life, not an easy road: there is trouble with his parents and with his wild-man lifestyle, and with work and sheer existence. By the end of the volume, though, the reader has a sense that it’s been an interesting and well-lived life, and it makes for a fascinating story, even the time he spends as a math teacher. This reads like Rucker’s novels, packed with adventures, filled with humor, and often quite surreal.

Here’s a photo of me in Jellyfish Lake in the South Pacific. Think of this as an image of me swimming around inside my mind—surrounded by ideas.

Another blurb, from Rick Kleffel, in his online site, The Agony Column :

What distinguishes Nested Scrolls is Rucker’s voice, which has this sort of steely, understated clarity. He writes in an almost flat, declarative style, which makes his rather amazing life all the more entertaining. He moves with equal ease through the halls of academia, science and science fiction. He effortlessly pushes the envelopes of math, technology, writing and art. He’s told us many stories chock full of verve and imagination, but his own story may be the most powerful he has to tell. … Perhaps, just perhaps, Nested Scrolls will change what people think, not just of Rucker but books.

This is a picture of me in the early 1980s, using my beloved IBM Selectric to write my novel Wetware, the cyberpunk classic that would win me my second Philp K. Dick award. At that time I was a freelance writer, i.e. unemployed. My family and I were living in Lynchburg, Virginia, of all places. I was the lone cyberpunk in evangelist Jerry Falwell’s home town.

I put a ton of other old photos online for Nested Scrolls.

The picture above shows me with a cone shell in 2004. I’m imagining that it’s sending alien thoughts into my head. For a more accurate description of how I wrote my autobio, see the free Notes for Nested Scrolls, a booklength PDF file of my writing notes, about 600 Meg.

And the plot for my autobiography? Well, okay, a real life doesn’t have a plot that’s as clear as a novel’s. But, as a writer, I can think about my life’s structure, about the story arc. And I’d like to know what it was all about. In writing my autobiography, I came up with a few ideas.

You might say that I searched for ultimate reality, and I found contentment in creativity. I tried to scale the heights of science, and I found my calling in mathematics and in science fiction. You don’t have to break the bank of the Absolute. Learning your craft can be enough.

As a youth, I was a loner. But then I found love and became a family man. I’ve spent a lot of time with my wife and our three children over the years. And now we have grandchildren. New saplings coming up as the old trees tumble down.

I’ve had a number of careers. Initially I was a math professor—math always came easy for me. Nothing to memorize! Then I took up writing, really that’s my core career. But, even with thirty-odd books out, writing doesn’t pay very much.

To make ends meet, I spent the last twenty years working as a computer science professor in Silicon Valley. Riding the wave. It was a blast. And eventually I even got good at teaching, mutating from a rebel to a somewhat helpful professor.

My autobiography’s title has to do with the notion of stories unfolding within stories—and the title also relates to a certain kind of computer graphic I did research on, cellular automata. An example appears above.

My book in a nutshell? Whatever I did, I never stopped seeing the world in my own special way, and I never stopped looking for new ways to share my thoughts.