Rucker: Mathematical modes of expression can provide shockingly simple explanations for the forms we find around us in the natural world. Light, electricity and magnetism compress down to Maxwell's equations on a T-shirt. Zebra stripes and leopard spots grow from trivial cellular automata rules. Book sales rigorously follow inverse power laws. Perhaps it makes us uneasy to see the Great Conjuror's tricks explained, and we feel a mixture of surprise and fear. So we release the tension with a laugh.
When I give readings or speak to groups, people tend to laugh at what I say, often a little more than I'd like them to. It's been that way my whole life, even before I studied math. People think I'm joking when I'm just pointing out the truth as I see it.
Math has a way of pushing to bizarre extremes, quite oblivious of any sensible considerations. Infinitely spiky fractals, higher-dimensional hyperspaces, incredibly intricate proofs—all very odd. I love these things and feel comfortable with them, and I want others to enjoy them too. Laughing about math is a way to get comfortable with it. And then, once you've relaxed, math can eat your brain.
The hero of Mathematicians in Love, Bela Kis, and his closest friend, Paul Bridge, are both math grad students, and their careers seem a wild mixture of pure inspiration and downright despair. How close is this to life—back when you were a student, and now?Rucker: Academia has rigorous status levels and pecking orders. Grad students are at the bottom of the totem pole, and professors at lower-ranking institutions aren't much higher up. To some extent, mathematical greatness is objective, like a chess ranking. But once you move a bit down from the summit, the field seethes with cliques and fashions like any other human enterprise.
Writing my Ph.D. thesis on the theory of infinite sets was somewhat nerve-wracking. Often I'd think I'd proved a really good result, only to find a hole in the proof a little later. My mathematical mentor Gaisi Takeuti advised me to knock off for the day whenever I thought I'd proved a big theorem, and then I could have at least one evening of happiness. Takeuti was at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton while I was writing my thesis at Rutgers University in nearby New Brunswick, New Jersey. It was partly thanks to him that I met the supreme mathematician Kurt Gödel.
Takeuti was like a surrogate thesis adviser to me, as I didn't get along all that well with my actual thesis adviser, Erik Ellentuck. My adviser was maybe a little paranoid, although nothing like Bela's adviser Roland Haut. By the way, that story about Haut not wanting to sign off on Bela's thesis unless Bela helps Haut break out of the psych ward is in fact a legend that I heard from a math friend about a now-deceased professor at Berkeley.
The love triangle which complicates the friendship of Bela and Paul in Mathematicians in Love, their galvanizing shared obsession with the beautiful Alma Ziff—does this accurately reflect how some mathematicians become inspired to achieve breakthroughs in their field?Rucker: I don't think it would be accurate to say that Bela and Paul are working on their math problems because of Alma. Usually mathematicians are working on things because they're obsessed with them. That's true for most kinds of creative endeavor, I think. It's pretty rare when you have this "Lara's Theme" moment where a woman awakes in an ice-crystal palace to find that her lover has poured his soul into a poem about her. Math in particular isn't very amenable to representing human emotions. That's one reason I prefer writing novels, as a matter of fact. In a novel, I can incorporate and come to understand my own emotional life.
The sensibility of Mathematicians in Love is countercultural, decidedly so. Does your work still consciously embody the influence of the Beats, whom you've often cited as your central inspiration? And have any subsequent cultural waves affected your work to a similar degree?Rucker: I never really got over the fact that in 1967 my government wanted to send me to die for nothing in Vietnam. I read the Beats a lot when I was in high school and college, but maybe the underground comix of the late '60s and early '70s years were an even bigger influence on me than the Beats. The Beats led the way, but the hippies were my crowd. And, of course, I loved the punk thing, too.
A basic principle of counterculture is that if most people believe something, it's probably not true. The news is a snare and a delusion. Live your own life; find God in your backyard and in your loved ones.
Bela's involvement in rock music in Mathematicians in Love—any allusions there to actual bands, actual musical trends?Rucker: Well, I was the lead singer for a short-lived punk band called the Dead Pigs in 1982. It was exciting, a real high point. In Lynchburg, Virginia, of all places, Jerry Falwell's hometown. The Dead Pigs is where I picked up a lot of those vibes for the book, not that we ever reached the level of Bela's band Washer Drop.
The story about how Bela's band got their name is supposedly true: Apparently in the late '80s or early '90s some Berkeley students threw a washing-machine off the roof of the Barrington co-op onto a complaint-prone neighbor's parked car.
The kinds of sounds I'm thinking about as models for Washer Drop are the West Coast punk groups NOFX and Rancid. And clearly the Scorpions are the model for Jutta Schreck's band AntiCrystal. That song they sing, "Crying Chainsaw Clown," it's so heavy-metal-as-written-by-non-native-English-speakers. I worship Jutta Schreck. I like the way she calls Bela "hound" instead of "dog," which is a joke off the fact that "dog" in German is "hund." Whenever I stick in German things, it's kind of an homage to Phil Dick, too. "Leise, man," as Baxter says. "Means 'be cool' in German." In
Mathematicians in Love, I had them do that line in Polish.
By the way, I hope to see Rancid in San Francisco next month with my fellow Dark Lord of Cyberpunk, John Shirley. The first time I saw Rancid play was a free concert during lunch hour outside the student union at San Jose State around 1995; it was an unexpected joy to learn that punk is not only alive, but better than ever.
Mathematicians in Love is an alternate-worlds novel, set mainly in three fairly similar versions of California; one difference is that Berkeley is known as Humelocke in Bela Kis' home reality, and as Klownetowne in another. ... Why Locke and Hume? And why (on the basis of your close knowledge of Berkeley) Klownetowne?Rucker: Locke, Hume, and Berkeley were the British empiricists. So why not name the town after the first two guys instead of the third? I don't actually know their philosophy all that well; most of what I know is at second hand from Jorge Luis Borges's essay "A New Refutation of Time."
Klownetown, yeah, that's a riff off the wacky Bezerkely image. I liked claiming the name comes from early pioneer Willem Klowne. Towns do in fact pick up very odd and arbitrary names. Kind of like freezing the shape of a water droplet in flight. Whatever was in someone's head at one particular moment gets canonized forever as the name of a given place.
Mathematicians in Love proposes two sorts of universe: docile ones, predictable by mathematical means, and ones like our timeline, which is "fierce, non-docile, and gnarlier." Bela prefers the second kind, calling our Earth "the best of all possible worlds," because it permits existential freedom. Is he being naïve? Given the actual state of our world? Rucker: I'm glad you mention the distinction between fierce and docile worlds, it's kind of subtle. It's not a distinction that anyone would have thought of 10 years ago. It has to do with Stephen Wolfram's philosophy of computation, as further expounded by me in
The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, my nonfiction tome which has, aha, a picture of a South Pacific textile cone shell snail on the cover, these beasties being a prominent kind of alien in
Mathematicians in Love.
Suppose our world is in fact a giant deterministic computation and that we can discover the underlying computational rule, and quantum mechanics be damned. Does this mean that the future is in practice predictable? Not necessarily. In a fierce world (such as ours almost certainly is), it would be, even in principle, impossible to actually carry out a future-predicting computation fast enough to arrive at a result before the future actually rolls around. But in a docile world, like the first two worlds in my novel, it could just so happen that the world's computational rule is so butt-simple that it allows for some efficient shortcut methods. And in these worlds you would be able to predict the future.
We're lucky to be in a fierce world. But, despite what you imply in your question, I still feel that our world may be deterministic, so we don't strictly speaking have the kind of "existential freedom" that would involve making utterly random choices. But it feels as if we do, because it's impractical to predict what will happen. Although we may well be deterministic, we are not in practice predictable.
Another subtle distinction there. I wrote about these issues at length in
The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul. To some extent both
Mathematicians in Love and my current project
Postsingular are novelistic thought experiments which exfoliate the theoretical ideas described in the
Lifebox tome. This is one of those times when I've worked out brand-new scientific ideas for my novels before writing them. Quite honestly, that's something that sets my work apart. "This isn't just some silly-ass SF book. This is philosophy of science!"
Regarding your naïve remark about Bela sounding naïve, I can do no better than to quote the ending of
Mathematicians: "There's still bad news in the paper, of course, and sometimes I quarrel with Alma. But that's in the nature of things. A rapidly flowing stream has ripples; chaotic motions have sharp turns; societies have pockets of pain; your moods change unpredictably; the old die to make room for the young; whaddaya, whaddaya. We've got it good."
I mean, face it, people are always gonna die, no matter what. If everyone lived forever, the world would suck. We'd have, like, George Bush as president for 100 million years.
The branch of mathematics Bela and Paul explore in Mathematicians in Love is called "universal dynamics"; through it, as you've mentioned, they discover ways of modeling reality with alarming predictive accuracy. To what extent is universal dynamics rooted in actual mathematical thinking, Wolfram's, et cetera, discredited or otherwise?Rucker: Every now and then some mathematicians come up with a concept that's touted as being able to explain everything. Four big ones in my lifetime have been catastrophes, chaos, complexity and Wolfram's "new kind of science." I think "universal dynamics" may be an actual phrase that you'll find in papers on chaos theory.
I love this stuff. It really changes how you see the world, even if, in the end, it turns out to be more a source of metaphor than of accurate quantitative prediction. The ideas tend to be a little hard to get across, particularly as asides in the context of a fast-paced science-fiction novel, so I hit upon the notion of describing universal dynamics in terms of making models of things using objects found in Dr. Seuss'
The Cat in the Hat. There I go, being "zany" again.
I'm not all that crazy about that word, by the way. To me "zany" sounds like someone who's trying too hard. If you're really funny, the humor seems organic and effortless.
In Mathematicians in Love you describe a kind of higher-universal crossroads called La Hampa, a remarkably imagined paradise and birthplace of worlds. What does "La Hampa" mean, and what helped inspire it? Brane theory? Modern art? Psychedelia? Rucker: Regarding the name, originally I was thinking about the underworld, like in Greek mythology, with an Orpheus-and-Eurydice riff. And then it struck me that this place should have a Spanish name, as do so many locations in California. Googling in an English-Spanish dictionary, I found "la hampa," which turns out to mean underworld in the sense of a criminal milieu. Like "gangland." By the way, although some of the Spanish language references decline the word as "el hampa," which is more typical for a word ending in a vowel, the majority of the Google hits call it "la hampa."
As for what the place is like, I'd recently been on a memorable diving trip to Micronesia with my big brother Embry. So I modeled the Nanonesia level of La Hampa pretty closely on the islands around Palau. And then I had the idea of putting island worlds in the sky, and then the idea of having the sky be the inside of a bubble which is a floating island world in a bigger bubble, and so on, up and down forever, as we mathematicians like to do.
For years I'd wanted to have a good reason to introduce "alien cockroach mathematicians from galaxy Z." It seems like if you did meet aliens, math might be one topic you'd be able to talk about. And in point of fact, high-powered mathematicians often are such odd people as to seem somewhat extraterrestrial.
In Bela's home timeline and its immediate successor, America's main political parties are the Common Grounders and the Heritagists, which resemble Democrats and Republicans. The Heritagist president, Joe Doakes, and his vice president, Ramirez ... any resemblance to actual politicians, actual ideological trends?Rucker: Yes, absolutely, Joe Doakes is modeled on our current President Bush. I knew
Mathematicians in Love would come out with two years of Bush's term still to run, and I'm hoping my book can help give people the strength to stand firm against him. As an artist, it's my duty to speak up in these dark times. It's my mission to give my companions strength, just like the underground comic artists did during the Vietnam War. Sure, I'm laughing, but I'm deadly serious. It's satire, not humor.
I particularly enjoyed writing the "Hundred Percent Heritagist" speech that Doakes delivers on the radio. Every time I mention Doakes, I find a different way of remarking that he's angry. Testy, peevish, like that.
Sometimes it takes the lens of science fiction for people to step back and see what's actually going down. A personal high point of the book for me is when Washer Drop and AntiCrystal are jamming together at the San Francisco baseball stadium concert, playing their anti-Heritagist song "Hundred Percent Asshole," and, by God, they bring down the regime. That's what I'd really like to see
Mathematicians in Love do!
Your portrayal of vlogging—video blogging—in Mathematicians is very funny, but has a serious undertone, concern with universal surveillance, etc. Are we yet close to the vlogging culture your novel describes?Rucker: I'm proud that I put in vlogging, I got in ahead of the curve. What with YouTube catching on, it's not gonna be long before a lot of people are doing full-time video blogs of their lives. The vlogging culture is happening right now.
As for worries about universal surveillance, to some extent that's a paper tiger, a spookhouse bugaboo. Once it's here, it'll be, like, so what. Big deal if the cops can watch me having sex or taking a dump. I can watch them right back. We're all the same. Actually, the novel I'm just finishing now,
Postsingular, pushes universal surveillance to a total extreme. Every object on earth is blanketed with a mesh of nanomachines, so anyone can hear or see anything anywhere in the world.
Recently, you started your own SF webzine, Flurb (www.flurb.net), whose first issue featured some rather good stories. What led to your decision to found the 'zine, and how do you expect it to develop in the future?Rucker: Frankly I did it for expediency. As you know, I had written a story with Paul Di Filippo called "Elves of the Subdimensions," and I wanted to put it into my January 2007 collection
Mad Professor. There wasn't time to place it in a print magazine before my collection came out. So Paul and I sent the story to a couple of online webzines, and they had the nerve to turn us down. So I was, like, f--k it, I'll start my own webzine.
I took the funny-sounding name "flurb" from a word Paul had made up in our story. Turns out the word has some arcane computer-programming meaning, so flurb.com was taken and I registered the site as flurb.net.
To fill out the first issue, I asked some of my writer friends to send me unsold pieces they had kicking around. What about the second issue? I think I'm selfish and lazy enough to hold off issue two until I have another story I can't sell. But, knowing that I can get anything whatsoever into
Flurb is kind of liberating; it gets my zany countercultural juices flowing. It'd be nice to have a
Flurb #2 by the end of January 2007, making it a quarterly.
There's still a few writer friends I might tap for issue #2, and maybe for #3 in the spring open it up to submissions, although that seems like it could be a lot of work, and stressful to boot. After a lifetime as a struggling writer, I'd hate to be in the position of shooting down other authors. Writing those letters that begin, "Alas ..." Also, being a writer, I know how ungrateful and demanding we mean wretches are. It's not like an editor gets a lot of strokes and gratitude from his or her authors. Just whining and complaints. Maybe I'd need a co-editor to help with the dirty work.
You've had a couple of very interesting linked stories in Asimov's recently, "Chu and the Nants" and "Postsingular," leading up to your next novel, also called Postsingular ...Rucker: Yes, I finished the first draft of
Postsingular in September, and I'm currently implementing some suggestions from my editor at Tor, David Hartwell. I see the novel as the first of a trilogy.
My inspiration for
Postsingular was Charles Stross' fix-up novel
Accelerando. For several years, SF writers have been pissing and moaning and saying, "Gosh, we really can't see past the Singularity." And then Stross just goes in there and plows ahead. Machines as smart as gods? Why not? Hell, even the Greeks knew how to write about gods. You just do it.
At first I'd thought I might write
Postsingular as a series of stories, just as Charlie did with
Accelerando. But that took him three years, and I wanted to finish
Postsingular in a year. So I sold the first two chunks of the book as stories, but then I got into novelistic overdrive and the following pieces weren't well demarcated enough to sell as separate stories. I was particularly glad to have the story called "Postsingular" in
Asimov's, because, at least to me, the title seems so obviously great that I wanted to claim it before anyone else.
There are two elements of
Accelerando that particularly inspired me. One is the notion that it might be a reasonable idea to smash Earth into a huppagoobawazillion nanocomputers, fan those suckers into a Dyson sphere around the sun, and port all of Earth's former denizens into a gorgeous virtual reality supported by the network of nanocomputers. My novel
Postsingular is about some people who are trying very hard to prevent this from happening.
The second thing in
Accelerando that whetted my interest was Charlie's passing remark about "running a timing channel attack on the computational ultrastructure of spacetime itself, trying to break through to whatever's underneath." Even though I'm a former computer science professor, I had to look on the Web to find out what a timing channel attack is, but then I ended up having some of my characters use it as a method for learning the jump-code that'll take us from our familiar "Lobrane" world to a parallel universe called the Hibrane.
Something really weird occurs at the end of
Postsingular—it's like the whole world wakes up. I've always been partial to panpsychism, the notion that every object is conscious and in some sense alive. And in
Postsingular I found a reasonably logical way to make this come true. I'm eager to get started on volume two to see how it shakes out, although first I'll probably take a break and write some stories.
