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 âTales of Houdini,â in the memoir âDrugs and Live SexâNYC 1980,â 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 didnât 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 rightâremember that one of
Software
Sta-Hiâs big obsessions is how to become famous.
Although Iâd 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, âYou know, I saw your reading last year and it was wonderful. You made the material so fresh and new ⦠it was like youâd never even read it before!â
âLOAD ON THE MIRACLES AND KEEP A STRAIGHT FACEâ
RUDY RUCKER INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON
Your new book,
Nested Scrolls,
is an autobiography. Does that mean youâve 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 hemorrhageâa vein burst in my brain and I nearly died. Coming out of that, I decided that Iâd 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 lifeâas 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 graceâ thanks in large measure to my dear wife, Sylvia.
Arenât 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, itâs 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 thatâs why I love writing them. I like the possibility of expressing myself at various levelsâsometimes it isnât until later that I realize something Iâve 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 didnât 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 wasnât 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, heâs
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