The Ware Tetralogy - Rudy Rucker (popular ebook readers .TXT) š
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A couple of years later, in 1989, _Wetware _would win me a second Philip K. Dick award.
This award ceremony was at a smallish regional SF con in Tacoma, Washington. It wasnāt like the artistsā loft in New York at all. It was in a windowless hotel ballroom with a dinner of rubber ham and mashed potatoes.
I still wasnāt making much money from my writing, and Iād started working two day jobs, teaching computer science and programming in Silicon Valley. I didnāt have time to write as much as before, which was putting me into a depressed state of mind. Winning the award, I felt like some ruined Fitzgerald character lolling on a luxury liner in the raināhis inheritance has finally come through, but itās too late. Heās a broken man.
In my acceptance speech, I talked about why Iād dedicated Wetware to Phil Dick, and why, in particular, Iād added a quote from Albert Camus about Sisyphus.
āI see Sisyphus as the god of writers or, for that matter, artists in general. You labor for months and years, rolling your thoughts and emotions into a great ball, inching it up to the mountain top. You let it go andāwheee! Itās gone. Nobody notices. And then Sisyphus walks down the mountain to start again. Hereās how Camus puts it in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: āSisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that as to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.āā
As so often happens to me, nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. One of the fans invited me to come to his room and shoot up with ketamine, an offer which I declined. Outside the weather was pearly gray, with uniformed high-school marching bands practicing for something in the empty streets.
In 1995, Iād been laid off from my programming job, but I was still a computer science professor at San Jose State University, south of San Francisco. A year had gone by with no novel even started, and now it was time to get back on the One True Path. I decided to return to the world of _Soft ware _and Wetware, and I began work on Freeware, which would eventually appear in 1997.
I sometimes write well when I donāt feel particularly creative. On a given day, it can be good if Iām just doggedly trying to finish the next scene of another goddamn novel. If I feel like Iām crafting a masterwork, the language is more likely to get away from me. When nothing is at stake, Iām free to go wild with the effects and have my characters say brutally honest thingsāwithout losing control. I develop a deadpan, surreal tone that I think of as writing degree zero.
The meaning of āfreewareā in my novel is that, throughout the universe, alien minds are traveling from world to world in the form of compressed information filesāakin to the files you might download from the web. When these rays strike a sufficiently rich computational object, the object may wake upāand begin emulating the alien mind.
In Freeware there are indeed a lot of computationally dense objects on Earthāthese are descendants of the Software boppers, whose minds now inhabit soft bodies made of gnarly, mold-infested piezoplastic. I really liked the idea of having flexible, slug-like robots that stinkāas different as possible from the standard images of machine-men. The form of the moldies had a lot to do with the computer science research Iād been doing on chaos and on cellular automata.
My old character Sta-Hi is an ex-senator in Freewareāby now he calls himself Stahn. Due to various mishaps, Stahnās wife Wendy has her personality living in a piezoplastic ruff that she wears on her neck. And Stahnās drug and alcohol problems are seriously messing him up.
While I was writing Freeware in 1995, I was seeing a lot of my artist and cartoonist friend Paul Mavrides. Mavrides had created a number of images for a parodistic cult called the Church of the SubGenius, which has a not-quite-divinity called āBob,ā always spelled with the quotes. The Church, which manages to get people to mail in donations, is a complex, interactive bit of dada artāor rather ābulldada,ā as they would have it.
More recently, Mavrides had taken to painting on black velvet. But he wasnāt painting Elvis, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or dogs playing cards. He was painting the Kennedy assassination, the bodies at Jonestown, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS virus, and cockroaches.
Mavrides was a saturnine, puckish character, a little younger than me, and in some ways an inspiration for my character Corey Rhizomeā although I hasten to add that Paul doesnāt share most of Coreyās bad traits. I thought of Paul as an old-school beatnik, with his finely honed sense of the absurd and his espresso-dark cynicism. I liked taking a day off and driving up to San Francisco to hang in his studio, often smoking pot, later going out with him for coffee or tapas on nearby Valencia Street. During those peaceful afternoons, if we were in the mood, Iād read Paul the latest chapter of my novel-in-progress while he painted. A writer reading new work to his artist palāthat felt like the way life should be.
In January, 1997, I decided to write another Ware book, this one to be called Realware, with part of it set in the South Pacific island kingdom of Tonga, which my wife and I had recently visited. Realware continues along the thread I followed throughout the Ware series, that is, the process of expanding the range of things that we might regard as being conscious patterns of information. Ten years later, Iād push my expanding-consciousness thread yet another notch further in my pair of novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, in which ordinary, unprogrammed matter comes to life.
I structured Realware as a pair of love storiesāIād come to feel that itās a good idea to have romance at the heart of a novel. I also included a scene with my main character hugging his estranged father and seeing him off to something like Heaven. And old Cobb himself achieves an apotheosis as well. In writing these scenes, I felt as if I were partially laying to rest the specter of a painful argument Iād had with my father the last time Iād seen him, shortly before his death in 1994. One of the virtues of writing is that you get to revise your past.
I was happy with how_ Realware_ came out, I felt it had good tightness and focus. But by now I felt like Iād pushed the series as far as I couldā although I do sometimes wonder what kinds of adventures Cobb had with the Metamartians in their flying saucer. I got the idea for the very last line of the Ware tetralogy from Sylvia: āThe newlywedsā eyes were soft, their kisses wet, their hearts free, the big world real.ā
One of my other recent writing projects has been an autobiography, with the working title Nested Scrolls, slated to appear from PS Publishing and from Forge Books in 2011. Much of the material in this afterword is in fact drawn from my memoir. So seek out Nested Scrolls if you want to know what else Iāve been doing for all these years. And for ongoing information, you can always check my blog, http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog.
Iām very happy to see my Ware novels one volume like this, and to reach a new generation of readers.
Enjoy the adventuresāand seek the gnarl!
ā26 April, 2010, Los Gatos
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twiceāfor his novels Software and Wetware. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. He lives in Los Gatos, California. Paperback copies of _The Ware Tetralogy _can be purchased at Amazon and other book-sellers.
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