Collected Essays (4 page)

Keep in mind that I’m not saying any particular row of the table is absolutely better than the others. My purpose here is taxonomic rather than prescriptive. Rather than using the words “predictable” and “random” to refer to the lowest and highest levels of complexity, one might use the less judgmental words “classic” and “surreal.”

Just so you have a general idea of what I’ll be talking about, here’s how I see some of my favorite authors as located on the complexity spectrum:

Let me stress again that I like the work of all the authors in this table very much. Otherwise I wouldn't mention them at all. The point here is to discuss various modes and approaches. Note that some authors may write novels in various modes—Terry Bisson’s
Pirates of the Universe
for instance, is high gnarl and transreal, while his
The Pickup Artist
is a surreal shaggy-dog story. Also note that any given novel may have different complexity levels relative to the four columns.

In any case, if you disagree with my classifications, so much the better—my main goal is to offer a tool for thought.

Subject Matter and Transrealism

Regarding the kinds of characters and situations that one can write about, my sense is that we have a four-fold spectrum of possible modes: simple genre writing with stock characters, mimetic realism, the heightened kind of realism that I call transrealism, and full-on fabulation. Both realism and transrealism lie in the gnarly zone. Speaking specifically in terms of subject matter, I’d be inclined to say that transrealism is gnarlier, as it allows for more possibilities.

What do I mean by transrealism? Early in my writing career, my friend Gregory Gibson advised, “It would be great to write science fiction and have it be about your everyday life.” I took that to heart. The science fiction novels of Philip K. Dick were an inspiration on this front as well.

In 1983, having read a remark where the writer Norman Spinrad referred to Dick’s novel
A Scanner Darkly
as “transcendental autobiography, ” I came up with the term
transrealism
, to represent a synthesis between fantastic fabulation (trans) and closely observed character-driven fiction (realism), and I began advocating a transrealist method of writing.

Trans
. Use the SF and fantasy tropes to express deep psychic archetypes. Put in science-fictional events or technologies which reflect deeper aspects of people and society. Manipulate subtext.

Realism
. Possibly include a main character similar to yourself and, in any case, base your characters on real people you know, or on combinations of them.

Twenty novels later, I no longer feel I have to go whole hog with transrealism and cast my friends and family into my books. I think they got a little tired of it. For awhile there, I was like Ingmar Bergman, continually making movies with the same little troupe of actors/family/friends. These days I’m more likely to collage together a variety of observed traits to make my characters, like a magpie gathering up bright scraps for a nest.

I’ve come to think that you can in fact write transreally without overtly using your own life or specific people that you know. Even without having any characters who are particularly like myself, I can write closely observed works about my own life experiences. And if I’m transmuting these experiences with the alchemy of science fiction, the result is transreal. So I might restate the principles of transrealism like this.

Trans
. The author raises the action to a higher level by infusing magic or weird science, choosing tropes so as to intensify and augment some artistically chosen aspects of reality. Trans might variously stand for transfigurative, transformative, transcendental, transgressive, or transsexual.

Realism
. The author uses real-world ideas, emotions, perceptions that he or she has personally experienced or witnessed.

Looking back, here’s a list of my most fully transreal works, which are those featuring a character modeled in some way on me. On each line I list a book title, my character’s name in the book, and the character’s approximate age in the course of the book.

The Secret of Life
, “Conrad Bunger”, 16-21.

Spacetime Donuts
, “Vernor Maxwell”, 21-26.

White Light
, “Felix Rayman”, 26-32.

The Sex Sphere
, “Alwin Bitter”, 32-34.

Complete Stories
(the “Killeville” short stories in particular). Various names. 34-40.

The Hacker and the Ants
, “Jerzy Rugby”, 40-46.

Saucer Wisdom
, “Rudy Rucker”, 46-51.

By the way, in hopes of selling to a larger market, and with my blessing, Tor Books marketed
Saucer Wisdom
as a non-fiction book of futurology. But I think it’s more accurate to call this book a novel too—in somewhat the same sense that Vladimir Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
is a novel rather than a long poem with annotations.

 Over the years, I’ve gained enough writerly craft to start using characters who are assembled from bits and pieces of the real world—without being a particularly close match for any one person. These days I’m more likely to collage together a variety of observed traits to make my characters. Like a magpie gathering up bright scraps for a nest. One way to gather scraps for characters is to jot down gestures and remarks that you see or hear on the street. This is the method that Jack Kerouac called “sketching”. And sometimes I even let myself make things up out of whole cloth.

Earlier in my career, it seemed important to put a character like me into my novels, and to depict the people around me. This is due in part to a young writer’s egotism—what could be more important than one’s own personal experience!

As my mentor Robert Sheckley remarked in his preface to my story collection
Transreal!
“A writer’s first problem is how to write. His second is how to write a story. His third is how to write about himself.”

I no longer feel as strong an urge to directly depict myself in my fiction. But even without a specifically Rudoid character, my books can be transreal. My Ware novels are full of refracted images of my life when I was writing them, as John Roche points out in “Beat Zen, Alien Zen: Varieties of Transreal Experience in Rudy Rucker’s Ware Novels.” Although there’s nothing of present-day California in As Above, So Below, my historical novel about Peter Bruegel, I came to identify so deeply with Bruegel that I put very much of myself into his character depiction. And the same thing happened when I represented Edgar Allan Poe in my alternate history
The Hollow Earth
.

Turning to some of my later novels, although
Spaceland
was transreally based on life in Silicon Valley, I went ahead and made the main character Joe Cube quite unlike me—I made him a not-too-bright middle-manager. Since the action of the book involves having Joe explore higher dimensions, I thought that the reader might find it more congenial to have Joe be non-mathematical, so as better to mirror the puzzlement that the reader might feel.

My epic quest novel
Frek and the Elixir
would seem to be a complete fabulation: it’s set in the year 3003 and involves travel to utterly alien worlds. But Frek’s hometown is transreally modeled on the town of Lynchburg, Virginia, where I raised my children, and Frek himself includes elements of my own childhood memories as well as images of my son. Frek’s personal difficulties with his father mirror both my own relations with my father and my son’s relations with me. And the political subtext of the book is a direct expression of my feelings about Y2K America.

My next novel
Mathematicians In Love
is set once again the contemporary Bay Area of California, and my main characters are young mathematicians incorporating many characteristics of people I’ve known. The main character shares much of my sensibility, but his life experiences are quite different from mine.

One practical reason for no longer putting my life into my books has to do with something John Updike talks about: a writer’s problem of bit-by-bit using up his or her past. And it may be that as I get older, the more recent parts of my life become less interesting to describe—or in any case less interesting to my youngish target audience.

In any case, the point is that you can write transreally without overtly using your own life or specific people that you know. Even without having any characters who are particularly like yourself, you can write closely observed works about your own life experiences. And if you’re transmuting these experiences with the alchemy of science fiction, the result is transreal.

To this point, in his afterword to his great transreal novel,
A Scanner Darkly
, Philip K. Dick writes, “I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel.”

Thinking of Philip K. Dick brings a caveat to mind. A transrealist author really does need to model most of his characters upon observations of people other than himself or herself. For in Philip K. Dick’s less successful novels, such as
A Crack In Space
, there is a tendency for quite a few of the male characters to be of a similar type: gloomy, self-doubting, and easily cowed by authorities or by powerful women. One supposes that these might all be images of Phil himself. A book with too many examples of the same kind of character feels airless.

Monomyth and Emerging Plots

In this section, I’ll discuss a four-fold range of plot structures.

At the low end of complexity, we have standardized plots, at the high end, we have no large-scale plot at all, and in between we have the gnarly somewhat unpredictable plots. These can be found in two kinds of ways, either by mimicking reality precisely, or by amplifying reality with incursions of psychically meaningful events.

It’s often said that there’s only a few basic story patterns. Suppose we use the nice word “monomyth” to stand for “story pattern”. (Strictly speaking, there should maybe be only one monomyth, but I think it’s clear enough what I mean by pluralizing the word.)

I taught software engineering courses to computer science students at San Jose State University for over twenty number of years, and there’s a relevant phenomenon I want to mention. In the 1990s, programmers began using “objects” in their programs, where objects are encapsulated high-level software constructs that are easier to use than the rats-nests of low-level code that they replace. In the 2000s there’s been a movement towards a still higher-level approach known as “software patterns.” The idea is that most programs can be viewed as plugging together certain standard kinds of objects into one of several standard arrangements. A pattern is the notion of hooking together some objects in a certain way.

In literature, the “objects” are the stock characters, the classic situations, the props and devices. And the standard ways of hooking them together are the story patterns or monomyths. Here are a few examples.

Three Wishes. I used this in Master of Space and Time. There were three wishes, and the pattern was comparable to the folktale “The Peasant and the Sausage.” The Secret of Life is also about a series of wishes, in this case there were five, and it’s modeled on the classic children’s book, The Five Chinese Brothers, written by Claire Huchet Bishop and illustrated by Kurt Wiese.