Surfing the Gnarl by Rudy Rucker

with the band of the same name. At the time, Peter rented an apartment upstairs from the apartment of my friend Eddie Marritz in New York City, which is how I happened to meet him. Eddie appears in the story “Tales of Houdini,” in the memoir “Drugs and Live Sex—NYC 1980,” and in the novel
Master of Space and Time.
    A funny Dennis story. When we moved to San Jose, it turned out Dennis lived here, so we started getting together a lot. I was supposed to give a reading at an annual San Jose SF convention called Bay Con in 1987, and the day before the reading I was in a bicycle accident and had a huge black eye. I didn’t want to appear in public looking so bad, so I gave Dennis my manuscript of
As Above, So Below
and told him to do the reading. I figured he would enjoy this free taste of fame, and I was right—remember that one of
Software
Sta-Hi’s big obsessions is how to become famous.
    Although I’d already made friends with the San Francisco SF writers, none of the fans knew at Bay Con knew what I looked like, so when Dennis appeared in a corduroy jacket and read my story, they assumed he was me. The funny thing was, when I came and did my own reading at Bay Con a year later, several people came up to me and said, “You know, I saw your reading last year and it was wonderful. You made the material so fresh and new … it was like you’d never even read it before!”

“LOAD ON THE MIRACLES AND KEEP A STRAIGHT FACE”
    RUDY RUCKER INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
    Your new book,
Nested Scrolls,
is an autobiography. Does that mean you’ve run out of ideas?
    I feel like I always have new ideas, but certainly some of them are beginning to look a little familiar. I get SF ideas by extrapolating, from speculating, and from imagining surreal juxtapositions.
    In 2008, I had a cerebral hemorrhage—a vein burst in my brain and I nearly died. Coming out of that, I decided that I’d better write my autobio while I still had time.
    One of my goals in writing
Nested Scrolls
was to get an idea of the story arc of my life—as if I were looking back on a novel. My conclusions? 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. I was a loner, I found love, I became a family man. When I was a kid, I felt like an ugly duckling, and over the years I grew into grace— thanks in large measure to my dear wife, Sylvia.
    Aren’t novels a rather messy exercise for a mathematician? Do you have the whole thing in RAM when you start, or do you make it up as you go along?
    In some ways mathematics resembles novel-writing. In math you start with some oddball axioms and see what theorems you can deduce from them. You have very little control over the course that your reasoning takes. In novel-writing, you start with an outré scenario and see what kind of plot emerges from the situation. Here again, the details of your work tends to come as something of a surprise.
    In science fiction, it’s useful to be able to think logically, which is something that comes naturally for a mathematician.
    But of course SF novels are more than logical exercises, and that’s why I love writing them. I like the possibility of expressing myself at various levels—sometimes it isn’t until later that I realize something I’ve written has to do with some deep obsession of mine.
    Frek and the Elixir
has been described as a YA (young adult) novel. Is this because it has a kid as a protagonist, or because only kids can understand it?
    Tor didn’t actually market this book as YA, although that might have been a good idea. When YA books catch on, they can sell very well. But in
Frek,
I wasn’t fully focused on teenage problems, as is usually the case in YA books. Although the thirteen-year-old Frek has some abandonment issues with his father, he’s