An Interview with Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a science fiction author and mathematician, a pioneer of the cyberpunk movement, a subversive punk, and one of PRRIC’s favorite people. What follows is an interview between PRRIC’s chief troublemaker David Gill and Rudy Rucker conducted in early June 2026, during which Rudy cracks his skull open and lets us look at his big squishy brain!

Rudy Rucker: I'm doing well. I'm feeling pretty happy. I've got a girlfriend. I'm doing a lot of painting.

Gill: You were just in Europe for your 80th birthday.

Rucker: Yeah, we went for almost a month to Venice, And it was it was really really nice to be there.

Gill: Have you been to Europe in the past? Like do you have any thoughts on how it's changing?

Rucker: Well, I've been to Europe about 40 times.

Gill: Oh wow.

Rucker: My wife Sylvia, who died three years ago, her her family lived in Geneva and so we would go there almost every year. And I would also get speaking gigs over there and this and that. So, yeah, I've been there a ton of times, and once we lived there for two years. But you know, when you're over there, you're you're always on the outside. You never really know what's going on. 

I managed to get together with a couple of people in Venice. Like my translator Italian translator, Daniele Brolli. My my recent book Juicy Ghosts came out in Italian. They wouldn't publish it in America because it was about assassinating Trump.

Gill: Wow.

Rucker: I wrote it before Trump's first election, too, and published via my Transreal Books press, before the election. I had some vain hope that I might slightly weigh against his chances. Thing was, I saw what was coming and—

Gill: yeah,

Rucker: It's working out like I thought it would. It's kind of scary to have predicted it. In any case, there's a nice classy addition of it in Italian, from a top publisher. 

Gill: That's great. Can you lay out sort of what you saw coming as we approached the first Trump term?

Rucker: Well, he was already talking about having three terms, you know. And about us no longer having to vote once he got things going. Supposedly in a sort of joking way. I thought the third term thing was a real red flag. And then the thing about his goons trying to basically, you know, commit treason. To negate the meaning of the election he lost. And to prevent Biden's inauguration.

And now the increasing polarization, and everybody's on the ropes because the guy does something different and crazy every day.  And maybe that's okay, it's just bullshit, but my big fear is that he might start a nuclear war and ruin the world for my grandchildren.

Gill: Yeah. That's a fear.

Rucker: Anything else he does can be rolled back. You know, we can put back the environmental protections. We can makes the taxes fair again. We can make them stop the gerrymandering. Just about all of that can be remedied.  But, if you start dropping H bombs, you can't you can't roll that back.

Gill: How does this 2026 compare to what you were looking forward to 40 years ago as a cyberpunk in the mid-80s?

Rucker: Well, it's funny. My first novel, Software, I set in 2020. I hadn't heard that, as a science fiction writer, you shouldn't really put in a specific year, because that's a sell by date. But at that time, 2020 seemed so impossibly far in the future. It was like 1980 when I wrote Software.

Gill: Right. So, maybe  you were thinking like Orwell going from 1940 to 1980, right?

Rucker: It's incredible. A huge jump. But I did in fact predict a lot of things that happened. I feel like I don't get jack in the way of of credit for it. I'm not sure why it is that certain kinds of taste-makers like to ignore me. Refined literary types. There's something about me that's sort of improper or too punk. And my higher degree in math annoys them. I'm from the wrong team.

Too anti. Too smart. Too nihilistic.  Too cool for the room.

Gill: Too cool for the room. Yeah. I mean, your stuff is written from 10,000 ft high. It's mind boggling that nobody ever came, that Hollywood never came knocking at your door,

Rucker: Well, some of them have come at times. And we got close but never quite, you know, cross that last step. But they could still come back. I don't know. I used to obsess about it. Now I don't.

The thing about movies is that, what with the avalanching of deep fake LLM  video, in forty years you'll be able to turn any book you want into a full-length movie, in immersive 3D format if you like. All Rudy's books, aha!

Gill: But why not sooner? And with human actors. You look at Phil Dick, right? I mean, when he died, almost none of his work was in print and people were forgetting about him faster than they were picking him up.

Rucker: Well that's the vintage career move, right? Die. They said that about Elvis. Phil wasn't that old when he died. I made it to 80, man. I stayed too long. I never thought I'd get to 80

Gill: Well, looking back on Software one wondered.

Rucker: There's something I wrote about in Software that has really come to dominate the SF landscape. The idea of software immortality. That was an idea that nobody had worked out in detail before. Not in a science fiction context.

And I predicted our struggles with turning the data into software immortality. I talked about something akin to the language model thing. I call it a life box. You can get somebody's mind from having all their memories. Store the memories with some incredibly good front-end software that turns the lifebox data into the simulation of person. 

I didn’t initially understand the difficulty of creating that front-end software. Turns out  it's too complicated for us to write. I thought we might develop it by evolution. What they call genetic programming. I had my Software moon robots evolve. The reproduce, and compete, and like that. 

Gill: yeah

Rucker: In real world biology, you're running a billion peoples' computations and the world is  planetwide but, as it turns out, it’s not practical do do this in software. It takes to long so simulate all those critters rushing around. So we jump up a level. Think of a big  a tree of hyperlinks in your head.  What we need is a way to generate the links.  A process for adjusting the links inside a lifebox. Molding all the separate notions in your head.

Gill: right?

Rucker: I could never quite see how it would happen. In the Ware novels, of course, I, you know, wave my hands. I talk about evolution, but that’s really too slow. But now we're getting into the neural net thing and the large language model. And what you end up with is a shit-ton of little intensity numbers. Fractional numbers between 0 and 1. Like settings on dials. Weights between different nodes in the neural net. And you don’t understand how they work, but they do.

Turns ot what we are doing is to beat the problem to death. Get really huge huge neural nets, trained on our planet's entire network of information. The training methods sounds completely trivial. Get your enormous neural net to be good at finishing sentences? Big effin’ deal. 

Gill: Yeah.

Rucker: And your bot learns how to pick the next word. And, you know, well, that's dull. That's stupid. That's nothing. But there's this thing called a phase transition. When you go from having fifteen pool balls bounding around to having, say, a billion of them, it's different. The bouncing balls start to resemble a fluid. Instead of a gas.   

What speeds it up is that the learning process is unsupervised. You don't have a person grading the system’s responses  and telling the neural network, yes you did that right, or no you did that wrong, I mean you'd never finish that task. It would take a trillion years.

But there's a way of having the neural net train itself, and at a very cruddy level. Just have the nets suggest the next words for phrases. And it compares its guesses to the words used in known phrases.. And somehow, on a big enough network, the process gives amazing results. Like that phrase, “nibbled to death by ducks.”

My friend John Walker, he and I had some talks about this. We did a joint blog post in December of 2023, "The Roaring Twenties." 

We wrote that only a few months before Walker died. He was a great computer guru, the guy who founded Autodesk. I went and worked for him after I moved out to Silicon Vallen and I didn't know anything about computers but Walker thought I was cool. He liked my science fiction. Somehow I was at San Jose State teaching Computer Science, about which I knew nothing, and I was working with these graphics called cellular automata, and they were kind of like an addiction among some of us ultra geeks.

Gill: What was Walker like?

Rucker: I had this plug-in card I'd gotten from some guys at MIT. They'd made them, like one at a time. Called it the CAM 6 card for "cellular automaton machine." You could put one into a slot inside a generic IBM PC — we were on the very first model back then.

With a CAM 6 card in a PC, you could watch cellular automata. They're like the old game of Life. Every pixel on the screen is computing, based on what its neighbors do. And you get these boiling patterns, and these Zhabotinsky scrolls, and melting rugs, fabulous things. And our man Walker figured out a way to do this in software without having to find a  rare and expensive MIT CAM 6 board. He fully designed and devolved his cellular automata CA Lab in a week. That's the kind of person we was. 

Getting back to our new wave of AI LLM bots, Walker had this thing he pointed out while we were working on our blog post in 2023. He says, "Well, we think that it's too crude to learn just by predicting the next word." And then he says, "Well, that's the way you program your own brain." 

When you're born and you're living, you're in an environment and you're just watching what happens. And people aren't writing programs for you. They're not drawing hypergraphs. You're just seeing what happens next. And you build out from that in very subtle ways. And it's not obvious the way this kind of process works. The neural nets in the new AIs, they're subtle. There's levels and levels and levels. 

As a human, you work out this process of making things fit. A process of making your mental network fit the world. Making your mind fit reality. And you can notice on your own how things fits. And nobody has to be training you, at least not all of the time. You might call it semi-supervised learning.

You can see the world and you can see if what you're predicting is matching what's happening.

There's an interesting side angle here on how people had this dream of finding the magic key for AI. It was a core belief among early AI workers, the notion that thinking was like a logical system that works out logical conclusions. Like, if we could just get a good logic system, we could deduce everything.

But this approach is doomed to fail. We have these results that Alan Turing and Kurt Godel proved in the 1930s. Alfred Tarski was in there too. Turns out that it's impossible to define truth. And this leads to a proof that it's impossible to write a rule that will logically predict in advance what's going to happen. There's no way to compress or to speed up the complicated computations that underly a real person.

To know where you're going, you have to live through the process of going there. There is no magic key. There's no shortcut. Suppose you say, "What am I going to be thinking about at noon tomorrow?" You can't glance at a computer screen and say, "Oh, that's what I'm going to be thinking about." 

And so if there’s no magic key, how to create human-level AI? Well, as I mentioned, we might  try genetic programming. Let our AI systems  evolve. Bit it’s had to know what basic system we’ll be evolving. Also it takes too long.. 

When I worked at Autodesk under John Walker, I wrote an educational software package called Artificial Life Lab. I had some races of virtual  “ants” that crawled around on the computer screen. And they were using genetic programming to get better at eating each other. I had several different behavior parameters, and the ants evolved by sliding their parameters up and down. But I was never sure if I had enough parameters. And my ants didn’t evolve all that well. As I was getting at just now, a deeper problem in evolving AI is to know what are the parameters that are being evolved.

And, as I’ve been saying, the new approach is to use giant mounds of all-purpose neurons. We simply punt on the deep problem of what the AI system should  be like. We dump this immense pile of a billion live worms on top of the observed world and let the neuron-worms wriggle around and wiggle around some more --- and they'll somehow figure out how to fit their network to the actual world.

And we don't know how. We don't know why, but it works. But that’s not a bad thing. It’s just how Godel and Turing and Tarski told us it should be.  Deep, tangled, incoherent, incomprehensible networks of arbitrary neurons. Shaping themselves to fit. Like toddlers learning to walk. That’s how it is.  And it’ll never be tidy.

Gill: Whoa. Are you a materialist when it comes to consciousness? Do you think everything happens in the gray matter between our ears?

Rucker: No, not entirely. If you're into writing or computing, you spend a lot of time looking at keyboards and words and you begin to think that's reality. But then you go outside. And that's why I called my recent novel Juicy Ghosts. Suppose that you've achieved software immortality by making a "ghost" or lifebox program pattern that imitates you. But it would be better if the version of you had some juice. Some living flesh. A biological body.

In ancient Egypt when somebody died, they'd parcel organs of their body into "canopic jars." Important organs like the liver, the lungs, the stomach, and the intestines. They'd leave the heart in the body because it's so important, also it doesn't rot so easily. But about the brain? Well, they just thought that was snot. They'd clean that out of the skull and throw that away. The brain isn't everything. 

There's this extra thing we get from a physical body. A kind of buzz, emanating from the physical universe. Quantum mechanically speaking, scientists like to call the universe a Hilbert space. The meaning of that is a little unclear, unless you're a quantum mechanic. I like to use the phrase in my science fiction. It's one of those buzzwords that adds some class.

If you press me, I can tell you that a Hilbert space is an infinite dimensional space holding patterns with endless amounts of information blah blah blah. As a more practical explanation, I'd say that Hilbert space is where your mind lives. You mind is complex and infinite and entangled. And it's not especially logical.

Often when I'm thinking, I'm not using logic at all. I'm just feeling. If I'm relaxed. Feeling and drifting, and the images are going past me, and I'm merging into the All. If I'm in the backyard, I'm one with the trees. I'm with the birds. We're all one thing. The universe is like a giant Hilbert space jellyfish that includes us all. Why should we say we're separate? I do seem to be covered in skin. But the higher skin, the jellyfish skin, the Hilbert space skin  --- it envelops us all.

I'm making the point that consciousness is more of a distributed thing than we realize. Not just mine and yours. Ours. And  I'm happy about that. I'm good with that.

Like when you eat something, your stomach knows there's something coming, and it produces juices to work on what's coming ---  whatever it is. And you yourself don't consciously think about all that. That is to say, your precious brain isn't involved, is it?

You don’t necessarily fall in love with someone because of how they look or what they say. It might be because of how they smell. The pheromones. The subtle glance. Or the touch of their hand, or the curve of their cheeks. Brains aren’t everything.

Gill: So much of what we do is automatic. The sense of being a mind in command, it’s like you’re supposed to be this tiny little admiral with epaulets and brass buttons, standing in the conning tower, bored, but meanwhile the ship itself is like, what's that? He's eating again. Open the hold. And maybe then the admiral makes a string of noises as if he’s in command.

Rucker: Yeah. Let that strutting general rant. Let him rave. Screw  him. Nobody cares.

Gill: This is great. Let's talk a little more about AI. Tell me what's happening right now.

Rucker: It's stunning how far things have come. When I was in high school, you know, there weren't really any computers that you ever saw. And in, like 1962, our class went to career day at the University of Louisville. And they had the proverbial giant machine in the basement that could, you know, with great effort, print out, like, the first five prime numbers as a bar graph. 

But even so I was interested in the idea of a computer mind and, of course, I was reading about that in science fiction. In science fiction it's you can get things done very easily. You make up a word, and brandish it, and the job is done. Positronics!

Even though I didn't know if I'd ever be able to, I dreamed of writing about robots and aliens. My hero was Robert Sheckley. He had a way of making his aliens or his robots be funny. There's different ways of being funny in science fiction. One way is low, slobbering, and fannish. But Sheckley was funny in a cool way, Iike a beatnik. It wasn't like he was pounding his his elbow into your ribs. His characters were humane and even cute although, let me reiterate, never in a slobbering way. And I learned that from him.

Hollywood really didn't pick up on the hip, beat version of SF. At least not to start with. If they wanted somebody to talk to a computer, the computer would use a strained monotone or, even worse, write its answers in all capital letters. Like this all-powerful machine can't grasp how to use the shift key on a typewriter?

Back to computers, it's astonishing how far they’ve come in the last 75 years. And guessing where we'll be in another 75 is hard. But that's what SF writers are for.

I think biocomputation is going to be very important. There's this one example I always think of. The skins of octopuses and squids and cuttlefish. These guys can make their skin display all these amazing patterns, and they're very swift. It's an analog computation involving skin cells. The cephalopods are like living cellular automata.

So why wouldn't we start using that biotech for our display screens? It seems feasible. It’s just a matter of designing an interface.

Gill: From my perspective as a reader, your great area is speculating on this sort of hybridization. I really love your biotech novel The Big Aha. There’s so much great stuff in there about genetically engineered bits and bots and weirdness. As you say, biotech is a  frontier that we're just about to crack, with things like the biotech CRSPR tool that can edit genes in real time.

Rucker:  John Walker made the point that if you’re in exponential mode, continually doubling your progress, then on the second-to-last day, you’re only 50% done, and the next day you’re finished.

In terms of bots mimicking us, that’s not so far off at all. Talking to bots on the phone is increasingly less annoying. Its AI understands you better, interacts better. The old Turing Imitation Game thing is solved.

Writing like a person is a big issue --- especially among writers. In generating text, there’s a parameter called heat. Has do do with how unpredictable you want the next word to be. In most political speeches or in news stories, the heat is on the low end of the spectrum. Maybe one on a scale from one to ten.  For boiler-plate scripts or fiction, the heat might be two. You can sort of hear that low-heat prose style. Always using an obvious next word, or phrase. And the stale witticisms are dead on arrival.

Gill: Stuff that truly can be written by a bot.

Rucker: The cruddier scripts and speeches can now be written by AIs. If the producers happen to be morons, they don’t see anything wrong. Writers are being laid off.

What about quality literature? I did an experiment on my own writing. I was working on my recent novel, Sqinks. Spelled  with a Q. This could be my last novel, by way. Not necessarily because bots phasing me out, but because I’m getting so old. Maybe I’ve said enough.

Anyway, Sqinks is about a a washed up science fiction writer who's living in a a shipping container on the San Francisco Bay, and his wife is dead. He's living there with some young people he met through his kids, and he's trying to find a woman. He’d like to write one more novel. Transrealism alert! Sqinks is about the main character writing Sqinks.

The guy meets up with a woman and, you know, starts having a life. And when I was writing Chapter Three, I  thought, well, just for the hell of it, what with Chat GPT in the air, lets see what the bots would write for the second half of this chapter.

So I got a Chat GPT account, and I fed it the first half of my chapter as a big-ass prompt. I said, "Write the rest of this chapter in the style of Rudy Rucker."  And the bot knows my style because I’ve made a point over the years of putting almost every one of my books online in one format or another, and the studious bot has read them all. 

Gill: Okay. you’re talking about free browsing copies, and not necessarily the pirated editions. I did that with some of my writing too. Using various ways to put it online. So you put yours out there intentionally. Can you just sidestep for a moment to tell us why you did that as a as a writer.

Rucker: Main thing is that I want to be read.  Aso I figure the best form of publicity is to put my pieces out there. Building my brand!  As a practical matter, it’s a hassle to read something as a web page or as a PDF file. So I figure that if they like it, they might go ad buy a legit copy

Also I saw the writer-bot thing coming. I mean I already saw it coming in 1980. I knew that eventually the bots would be imitating people, and I wanted to them to imitating me. More Rudy books, right? That’s a good thing.

Gill:  Why do you think more writers don't do like you do? Like they look at that kind of free material on the internet as something that's dangerous to them.

Rucker: Maybe the fact that I am so intimately familiar with computers makes me less paranoid. I'm less anxious about doing these kinds of things. Some writers might worry that posted pieces might get this taint on them, and their work will be just totally stolen. But really you’re safe if you post a copyright notice. I published a free zine online for a few years. Flurb. And lots of  writers were okay with that. But I don’t think they’d produce a zine of it themselves. And on the dark side, as you mentioned, you you can get any book you want in pirated form. But, getting back to my point, I like it if the bots can find all my books and learn how to write like me.

Gill: And that’s what you did. So, how did it go when Chat GPT looked at all your work and tried to write a chapter like you?

Rucker: Well, it wrote a damn good chapter.  It…it surprised me. I mean I was really surprised. 

Gill: John Henry surprised?

Rucker: It wasn’t just my style. They even put in couple of new characters. And a new twist, and a new device.  They —brought in some aliens. They did these nature descriptions that were exactly like I might write, but they weren’t my words.  None of it was cut and paste.

People say that the AI chatbots are doing cut and paste, but that's not how it works. They are not literally stealing our writing. They're learning from us. Like I’ve been saying, they have this immense network of linked neurons. Like a spring-mattress the size of the New York City. And we didn’t program it. The giant bot programmed itself. Like the way a child might learn to imitate adults. The bot is doing just like students do. Reading books and learning to imitate them. It’s not a crime. Some people can’t understand that. They don’t understand the power of an ultra-massive neural net that’s undone a phase transition.

Gill: When you say "some people" what do you mean?

Rucker: Let’s just say that I have some writer friends who are very paranoid about AIs. If you have your own style and plenty of ideas, you're safe, at least for now. But if you’re writing low-brow, highly predictable, most-obvious-response, low-heat stuff, then your days are numbered.

And, sad to say, it could be that eventually the reaper will come for you and me, David. They’ll have high-quality “life box” emulations of us, and they’ll be able to generate Rudy and David witticisms and jokes.

Upside, there will be, as I mentioned before, tons and tons of scintillating Rudy Rucker and David Gill  novels in the year 3K. All of them available as movies as well.

Gill: Yeah, baby.

Rucker: And like I keep telling people, they will not be collaging our work to make the imitation books.That’s not how it works. You sort of have to be a computer scientist to understand the process. It’s sort of complicated.

The big lawsuit against Anthropic is not because they're cut-and-pasting our work. It's about something low, and stupid, and trivial. Instead of buying copies of our books for study, they used pirated book copies. They shoplifted our books. But they are not plagiarizing them. They’re emulating them. And that remains completely legal.

Gill: Oh, that's the important key. That was what I was going to ask you next. Okay. Did you use the half-chapter they wrote?

Rucker: Well, it was good, but it wasn’t good enough. I'm still the king. They may get there, but they're not there yet.

I mean, to really make up new Rudy ideas, it takes more than emulating me. It's about getting something extra coming in. Something else.

Gill: Like what?

Rucker: Two things. One is simply the facts and experiences of my entire life. Of course a lot of that can be packed into what I call my life box.  And the writer bot could be tweaked to drop significant references and like that.

The second edge I have is that I’m alive in a physical body with a human personality. I pay attention to the real world around me and I have emotional experiences.

So I call my style transrealism.

Gill: Yeah, that's on my list of things to ask you about. Fantastic.

Rucker: A good topic to discuss, you being the consummate Phildickian. I was encouraged to write transrealism by Phil Dick and and by his novel A Scanner Darkly.

I think Norman Spinrad wrote a a blurb for the British edition of Scanner that says it’s a “transcendental autobiography.” And latched onto trans. And realism means it's about the artist and their life. Like a beatnik novel. Transrealism means you’re jacking it up with some kind of sci-fi twist.

And it’s hard to do all that. I don’t think today’s bot can readily do that. It's a lot to ask.

I'd like to think that my, you know, my finely-tuned skill from studying literature for my whole life and thinking about it day and night— is still a step above today’s bots. If my fiction is embedded in my full transreal life, the it’s richer than what a bot will write. More side references, more emotions, more dreams, more jokes.

Gill: I I've been really inspired by your transrealism. I mean, I got it from the idea of writing about yourself and making the literal figurative through science fiction tropes. And to hear your description of transrealism really drove the idea home for me and I'm wondering if you could speak about why it seems to make sense to look at our lives through science fiction tropes.

Rucker: Well, the endlessly quotable William Gibson said something interesting. He said science fiction enables us to get a little bit of distance on the world. You can see more clearly if you can back off.

And that's part of the motive for SF transrealism. Another part is that if you only look at cruddy entertainment that could have been written by a low-heat  chat GPT—if you do that, you’re missing out on the strangeness of the actual real world around you.

I mean, the people that you know, they're all strange. I mean, go and ask anybody, "What's your family like?" And they'll always say, “They're not normal.” 

Gill: Right? Like Tolstoy's line. Every happy family is the same? Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

Rucker:  The concept of “normal” is a scam. A whip our would-be masters use to swat us down. 

Getting to know the real world is what matters. Something I like about the world is its richness. This connects to my interest in computation and chaos. It’s not not widely realized that the view you see out your window is probably not exactly duplicated anywhere else in the entire history of the universe.

Suppose you have a tree with a hundred leaves, and each leaf can be in ten positions. The number of possible arrangements is ten times ten times ten …  a hundred times. Ten to the hundredth power.  Sometimes known as a “google.”  A very large range of options from just a few leaves.  

Matter of fact, a mere ten to the eightieth may, according to some cosmologists, is the total number of particles in the universe. All that choice from one scrawny tree. And add in the full motions of the bushes. And the thoughts of the people around you. And the shapes of the clouds. 

Your daily world is unique. Reality is chaotic  and rich. So why do we keep talking abort these stupid-ass life box robots? 

Just to home in on what this has to do  with “normality,” my point is that reality is not a cheap-ass collage of, like, a thousand, stock characters, situations, tag-lines. It’s not a beige mall. It’s not an RGB bitmap. The smallest pieces are variable in ten to the thousandth ways, okay?

Make it new, tell it like it is, let your freak flag fly, and make your robots funky.

Gill: Funky. What's that mean to you? Funky.

Rucker:  What's a funky robot?  Oh, it curses. It stinks. It takes drugs in the form of crooked electrical waveforms. It laughs at things, but the laughter is backwards. It changes the subject six times in one sentence. It's questions your reality. It hates the Pigs.

Gill: What do you think about Isaac Asmov's robots?

Rucker: Well, they were a start. Of course my bopper robots would utter a hearty FU to any “three laws.” But the laws were a good gimmick for setting up stories. I met Isaac once. He was a good guy. Jovial. A genius.

Gill: Yeah. Did he snap your bra?

Rucker: From what I saw, he could be quite charming. Very into himself. Maybe a little like a stand-up comic on break.

At one point Isaac was angry at me because Charles Platt did an interview with me and I mocked Asimov a little bit. I said, "Well, you know, I like to write about people that talk the way my actual friends do. And if I'm explaining something to them, it's not like an Asimov book where they say, ‘Please tell me more, professor.’ They say, ‘Screw that. Let's do something else.’"

Gill: Like, you're boring me.

Rucker: Yeah. And somehow Isaac latched onto this and and he wrote a column railing against "this Rucker person, whoever he is."

Gill: Really? Would you be able to find that column anywhere? Do you think you have a copy of it somewhere?

Rucker: I don't know.

Gill: Point me to it. I would love to read that. That sounds amazing.

Rucker: Well, he to he used to write columns in … Asimov's magazine probably.

Gill: Yeah. I'm gonna put my researchers on that task.

Rucker: But then I wrote him a letter apologizing and he wrote back a very nice note. So it was all okay. I mean, I did greatly admire a lot of things about his work. Even if he was a little uncool.

Gill: I also liked his books a lot when I was growing up. That brings me to another question. What got you into science fiction as a kid?

Rucker: Well, I liked Heinlein a lot better than Asimov. He was funkier, you know. And noir.  Though sexually so strange—this jumped out  when I reread The Door Into Summer, which I’ve always admired for its superb treatment of time travel. But with a Lolita number at the end.

Heinlein’s treatment of curved space and hyperspace travel in Starman Jones was a huge influence on me, as was Tunnel in the Sky. And my novel Master of Space and Time is greatly influenced by Heinlein’s The Puppet Master.

Going from Asimov to Heinlein involved a shift from SF written for 12 year olds to SF written for 20 year olds. Even Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels feel grown-up. He had a really great narrative voice. Kind of worldly wise, jaded, open to new kicks, and sardonic.

For reasons unknown, I once was assigned to write a double-header book-review for the LA Times: Edward Sanders, The Family (the Manson family)  and a re-issue of Heinlein’s Stranger in  a Strange Land, said to be one of Charlie’s fave reads.

I don’t really remember my review, probably I was joking about the whole thing. But I do remember an angry letter to the editor, protesting that a punk like Rucker shouldn’t be allowed to write about the Master. “It’s like letting a member of (the band) Quiet Riot review Beethoven’s Ninth,”  Oooh-kay.

Gill: When did Phil Dick enter the picture?

Rucker: The King. I’ll get to him in a minute. But first I want to talk about Robert Sheckley. He was my shining light. My true mentor. I was a maybe a junior in high school when I got hold of his first anthology of stories. Untouched by Human Hands. Later I got to know him in person because he was working as fiction editor at OMNI magazine, and he wanted to buy a story from me, but then the top editor Ben Bova wouldn’t let him buy it. Anyway, I got to socialize with him a little, and he loved my work. He was a very hip guy. Like a beatnik. Apartment in Manhattan. He smoked pot with me, and he had lots of women friends and he was a wildman in his own way. 

At one point he came and stayed at our house in Lynchburg, Virginia. He had a camper van and was with his then-wife Jay Rothbell. He plugged his van’s wire into my house and connected his water hose to my faucet. It made me so happy. A dream come true. The Sheck-man, hero of my youth.

Not to go too far onto tangents, at one point Timothy Leary, of all people, wanted Robert and me to write the scripts for a TV show he wanted to host. Like, science for freaks. Robert and I went over to Tim’s house in Hollywood and talked, and he thought we’d be prefect, “These are the guys.” I took Tim’s PC computer apart and installed a CAM 6 cellular automata board so he could see the pretty patterns. Goot times.

Gill: What's the connection for you between science fiction and math? You were getting into that a little bit when you mentioned chaos theory and computation.

Rucker: Mathematics is what I majored in at college. My father told me, "Don't major in literature. You can read books. Major in something hard. Be a Renaissance man."

Gill: Good advice, right?

Rucker: It was. And good to study mathematics. I was a terrible student in college. I was drinking as much as I could, and smoking pot, and really doing very little studying. Subjects like History, Economics, and Political Science, were out of the question.

Gill: Living the dream, man.

Rucker: Yeah. In the mid ‘60s, And I did like math, even though I missed a lot of classes. Math comes easy to me. I like that way of looking at the world. It's a built-in twist of my mind. I like to see underlying principles about how the universe works. And math is a treasure trove for science fiction. The fourth dimension! As soon as I heard of that, I wanted to to know more. Eventually, I published three non-fiction books about the fourth dimension. And I have a novel called Spaceland that's about a guy going into the fourth dimension.

Gill: Is that a rip off of the book Flatland?

Rucker: Well, I wouldn't call it a ripoff. It's, you know, a riff. Not a rip. And the main character is a middle manager in Silicon Valley. You might say he stands for A Square from Flatland.

Gill: Yeah. Is that another thing that you get that from Phil Dick? The interest in a main character who’s a schlub, an everyman.

Rucker: Well, writing about them comes naturally to me, given that I have not been the most highly regarded person at any point in my life. At the beginning, I called myself Mister Nobody from Nowhere.

Gill: I think that worldview sets itself up for for a special kind of greatness, you know.

Rucker: I had a lot of trouble getting teaching jobs and often it was hard to get published. I really relate to Phil Dick. I like the everyman quality of his characters. Although his characters were, a lot of the time, they were depressed. And I did sort of get  tired of that. I wanted them to to have a little more fun.  In Scanner Darkly they were having fun, in a way, even though things are terrible.

One bit cracked me up. This blown-mind guy thinks aphids are infesting him, and he’ll look at you across the room, his eyes slitted, because he knows you’re an aphid-carrier person. Or when our hero Bob Arctor is freaking out, and his car engine is dead in the pull-over lane of a freeway, and the parts of the dashboard are calling out to him in “high horrible thin voices,” and his companion runs his finger over the engine block and holds he finger up to Arctor’s face and says, “Look, Bob, it’s dog shit. Your engine is coated with dog shit”  Or when Arctor’s friend Luckman is choking to death on a piece of food, and Arctor watches Luckman twisting on the floor, and then Luckman manages to cough out the food and, and he glares at Arctor and says, “Why didn’t you help me? What were you doing? Jacking off?” Full, rich humor.

Gill: I've had friends who, you know, after a certain number of Phil Dick books, they say, "I just don't want to read mean people sniping at each other anymore."

Rucker: Yeah, exactly. But he can be so funny. And, like I say, I worship A Scanner Darkly. I’ve read that so many times.  Not everyone understands that it’s funny. Maybe you have to be a stoner or a former stoner to get it. The stoner humor is so incredibly perfect. Like in Freak Brothers comix, and in William J. Craddock’s Be Not Content.  Phil is great at dialog. He captures this flat style of speech. Ironic, paranoid, despairing, and whatever. Very California.

In a different vein, another Dick book that I love is Time out of Joint. I read that in college. I hadn’t known there could be science fiction like that. 

And I’ve gotta mention Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? So much heavier and profound than the Blade Runner movies.  Not that those movies aren’t great.

I want to mention a key birth-of-cyberpunk moment. I was in NYC to receive the very first Philip K. Dick award. For my paperback novel Software.  And right before the ceremony some of us went to see Blade Runner at a theater in Times Square. It had just opened that week. Bam.

Gill: I want to to tell us more about about sci-fi and and math. I don't want to waste this chance to hear about that.

Rucker: There's a specific aspect of math that inspires me. Logical consistency. I hold to that. One way you sometimes do math is to start with a theory, and see what comes out of it.  You get some basic rules, like Euclid's postulates, and you see what logically follows from these.

So when I'm writing a novel, I like to develop certain rules about the universe we’re in. But I adjust the rules as I go along. If something isn’t consistent as things stand, I’m going to need an additional rule. So then, fine, I tweak the rules, keep the system consistent. A certain amount of back and forth. Not that I do this lightly.

At the end, I want the whole thing to hold together and be completely logical. A fully integrated and seamless whole. Tightly reasoned.  Like a solid mathematical theory.

Another aspect of this is that when I think about the rules I've put into my universe, there will be consequences that were not obvious to me at the tart. And this part is fun. The consequences can set up the action for later chapters. It’s great to find cool consequences of something I already have. It’s wonderful when the logic leads me to new kicks. A rich pay-off.

It’s like I'm in doing a thought experiment and studying this world and looking at every angle of it, and kind of living in it. Like my novel’s world is a 3D model I can explore and find things. I’m getting extra material for free.

The best is when the new things are complete surprises to me. I want my novel to surprise me. If it doesn’t surprise the author, it’s not going to surprise the reader. You can’t come on all godlike and act like you know everything. A narrator like that is a boring windbag. A shithead.

I love big special effects, but it’s so much cooler when the new effects are implied by what was already there. Cool things that emerge spontaneously from what’s given. Like flowers growing from compost.

Gill: So science for you is an important part of science fiction? It's not just like a blank slate that you can play with those tropes willy-nilly. Not just pasting on dime-store stickers.

Rucker: That’s the way I roll.

Gill: I love it. All right. Last question. How do you define reality.

Rucker: Reality. It's rich. It's Hilbert space. There's one thing I learned recently that I should have known, but I didn’t. The stars are shining all day long. I mean, they're up there shining and you don't see them because the sky is bright from the sun.

Gill: Yeah.

Rucker: And I think your dreams are like the stars. You see your dreams at night because your daylight mind isn't in the way. But the dreams are playing in your head all day long. Always there. Deams are part of reality.

Take it a step higher. Your dreams and my dreams are shared a little bit. They're in this mental Hilbert space where there’s no barriers. Our dreams are bumping into each other. Entangled. I think reality is this huge shared thing. Sleeping and waking, all of us together. It’s great.  

And always there are connections and synchronicities. In my life, they seem to come in waves. More of them in certain times and situations…maybe when I’m paying more attention? At times of great emotional upheaval, like after death or a birth. Or during a passionate romance. Or when concentrating very hard on some intellectual task, like writing a book. Or finding your way around a new city.

Stuffy, dullard spoilsports say synchronicities are random, or that people imagine them. But they can feel very real, especially when you get runs of them. What if you think of our world as a supreme work of art? Compare it, say, to a novel. If you're going to write the biggest and best novel ever, you’d want to put in lots of cool connections. Not just the “vertical” links of cause-and-effect, but with “sideways” connections happening too. People hearing about each other,  people meeting, coincidences weaving it all together.

And I’m saying this stuff' is not random and accidental. It's part of this beautiful design that we live in. Connections not based on conventional cause and effect.  The phenomenon is subtle, but real. Why wouldn’t it be? Why would the world be chintzy?  As opposed to rich and multi-layered. 

I think reality is this incredibly rich and precious thing that we happen to be part of. And we’re never going to find out the answers. All you know is that you’re here now. In the middle of it.

Gill: As a mathematician, does that bother you that at the end of the day there's nothing on the other side of the equal sign?

Rucker: It doesn't. When I was younger, I imagined I would figure it out. And now I realize I'm not going to. I'm just enjoying being in it. It's a wonderful place to be.

Gill: Oh, what a fantastic place to end, Rudy. Honestly, I think that was an incredible interview. You are you are a fountain of great amazing insights and thought. I really enjoyed this.

Rucker: Well, thanks.