Collected Essays (72 page)

White Light
was my first book written fully in what I came to call my transreal style. That is, the novel described, more or less accurately, my life as an indifferently successful academic at a small college in upstate New York. That was the “real” part. The “trans” part was that my character, Felix Rayman, leaves his body and journeys to a land where Cantor’s infinities are as common as rocks and plants. I fused Beat autobiography, science-fictional adventuring, and science-popularizing mathematical rigor. The book’s title was, of course drawn from my memorable acid trip. Other influences were the
Donald Duck
and
Zap
comics that I loved so well—
White Light
has both a chapter featuring Donald and his nephews, and a chapter where objects start talking, as they sometimes do in R. Crumb strips.

I finished the manuscript for
White Light
late in 1979, and after a few false starts, I managed to place it with Ace Books in the US, and Virgin Books in England. I made the Virgin connection by attending my first science-fiction convention, Seacon in Brighton—recall that I was living in Heidelberg at the time. The atmosphere at mathematics conferences had always been rather frosty. There weren’t enough jobs to go around, and newcomers weren’t particularly welcome. But the science-fiction folks were, like, “the more the merrier.” It was great. Some guys from London got me high on hashish, I met a man who was editing a new line of books for the Virgin record company, and I got my hands on a copy of Philip K. Dick’s
A Scanner Darkly
—a hilarious, sorrowful transreal masterpiece.

In 1983, I’d describe my ideas about this new way to write science fiction in an essay, “A Transrealist Manifesto,” which appeared in the
Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America
. The word “transreal” was in fact inspired by a blurb on the back of my Seacon copy of
A Scanner Darkly
to the effect that Phil Dick had written “a transcendental autobiography.”

Over the years, I’d write several transreal books rather directly based on my life, and even the more freely-invented books would often use characters and scenes inspired by the people I knew and the things I saw. Case in point: Dennis Poague, the younger brother of my friend Lee Poague, a fellow untenured professor at Geneseo. Dennis was a wildman, a free spirit who always said exactly what he was thinking. He was relatively uneducated, but he had a brilliant, undisciplined mind. In some ways he was my Neal Cassady, serving as inspiration for the character Sta-Hi Mooney who appeared in my next novel,
Software
. The theme behind
Software
was that one might be able to extract a person’s personality from their brain, and it might then be possible to run the extracted human software on some fresh hardware, for instance on a robot resembling the person’s former body.

I finished
Software
during the second year of my grant at Heidelberg, and had no trouble selling this to Ace Books as well. The world software was new in the early 1980s, and my idea of copying a person onto a robot was fresh as well. The book gained power from the intensity of its father/son themes and from the colorful anarchism of my robot characters, whom I called “boppers,” and endowed with bizarre Beat rhythms of speech. The book has an unforgettable cyberpunk scene where some sleazy biker types are about to cut off the top of a guy’s skull and eat his brain while he’s still alive. In 1982,
Software
was honored with the first Philip K. Dick prize for the best paperback novel of the year. To this day, people tell me that I’m Phil’s legitimate heir, and that my SF has that same off-kilter, subversive quality that Phil’s did.

Given how many Dick-based movies there are, it’s seems possible that one of my books might eventually be filmed. Indeed, in the Nineties,
Software
was under option to Phoenix Pictures for ten years, and went through ten scripts. But the film was never made. Some other books of mine are also under option, but I try not to put much emotional energy into speculating about what Hollywood might or might not do with my work. If a film is ever made, great, but there’s no point letting a long-shot dream dominate my life.

While in Heidelberg I also started a non-fiction book entitled
Infinity and the Mind
, dealing with some of the same issues as two Heidelberg SF novels. I’ve often worked by alternating between writing science fiction and writing popular science. Since I tend to invent new things in my popular science rather than simply repeating what’s well-known, there’s a nice interplay with the thought-experiments of my science fiction.

With my grant expiring, it was time to find another job in the U. S. Once again, I received but one job offer, this time from Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sylvia, the kids and I were happy to be back in the States, but the Lynchburg of 1980 took some readjustment. For one thing, it was the home town of the then-famous TV evangelist Jerry Falwell. Far from being populated by beatniks, hippies and university types, Lynchburg seemed filled with rednecks and preppies. There were but three people in the Mathematics Department, and the chairman and I never saw eye to eye. He disliked that I didn’t collect and grade homework on a daily basis, and after two years, I was out of that job as well.

What with getting fired from two jobs in a row, I had a lot of punk sentiment; indeed, for a very brief time, some other terminated faculty and I formed a punk rock band called The Dead Pigs. I was the singer, even though I can’t really sing—but I can’t play any instruments either. It was exciting, and fun to be doing something non-intellectual for a change. But, as per usual with punk bands, we self-destructed fairly fast. I was unhappy and Sylvia was unhappy too. It was a tough time, an emotional low point.

Age 36, enjoying a rare bit of snow in Lynchburg, Virginia, with Georgia, Rudy, and Isabel.

Even so, life in Lynchburg had its positive aspects. We’d bought a nice big house, the kids were settled in their schools, and we had a lively social life. Sylvia had found her way back into the workforce, first as a sign-painter and then as a teacher. Pulling up stakes for yet another doomed low-status academic job seemed futile. We decided to tough it out and stay in Lynchburg a bit longer. Sylvia was teaching French and Latin, and I was going to try and make it as a freelance writer.

This seemed feasible, as not only had
Infinity and the Mind
,
White Light
and
Software
been published, but Ace had also bought my earlier novel
Spacetime Donuts
, a story collection
The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka
, and a new novel
The Sex Sphere
, about nuclear terrorism and—well, a giant butt from the fourth dimension.

I rented an office for fifty dollars a month in an abandoned house at 1324 Church Street in downtown Lynchburg, right next to the offices of the building’s owners, some friends who ran a small graphics design company. I got a contract for a new nonfiction book for Houghton-Mifflin titled
The Fourth Dimension
; I had accumulated more ideas on this topic and was ready to treat it again. This book and
Infinity and the Mind
have been my most popular, and have been translated into a dozen or so languages.

I was selling some articles to a popular science magazine called
Science 83
(they changed the last digit of their name every year). For one article I got to interview the wonderful mathematics writer Martin Gardner, and he lent me a box of rare books on the fourth dimension. After the artist David Povilaitis illustrated one of my
Science 83
articles, I privately engaged him to illustrate
The Fourth Dimension
, which did much for the appeal of the book. I was in the writing business and I was proud of myself.

As if descending from Olympus, no less a figure than my boyhood hero Robert Sheckley appeared to bless my venture. He was touring the country in a camper van with his then-wife Jay Rothbel Sheckley. He knew where I lived because I’d recently sent a story to
Omni
, where he was for a time the fiction editor. (Although Sheckley bought my story, his higher-ups wouldn’t print it.) Sheckley parked his van in our driveway for several days, plugging into our electricity and water. My mother was visiting as well, and it was fun to see the two of them together, almost flirting with each other. Sheckley had read
White Light
, and said he liked it exceedingly.

I had another memorable visit in 1983, from Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, and Lew Shiner. They’d started a new movement in science fiction which would come be known as cyberpunk. They were a bit younger than me—I was thirty-seven by now. They’d read all my books and they looked up to me. I was thrilled to join forces with them, it felt like being an early Beat. I met the other canonical cyberpunk, John Shirley, that summer when we were both staying with Bruce and Nancy Sterling in Austin, Texas. I recall driving a rented car around town with John, with him riffing off my book
Software
, leaning out our car window to scream at other drivers, “Y’all ever ate any live brains?”

Although Ace was buying my books, they weren’t paying very much, and, as a freelancer, money was increasingly important to me. After getting the Philip K. Dick award for
Software
, I’d signed on with a literary agent, Susan Protter. She found me a good two-book deal with a new company called Bluejay Books. They published my transreal three-wishes novel
The Secret of Life
, and my jokey classic SF novel
Master of Space and Time
. And then they went bankrupt.

As
The Secret of Life
was such a personal book, it was very important to me. By way of preparing for it, I first wrote a ninety-foot scroll called
All the Visions
. I’d always savored the legend of Jack Kerouac writing
On the Road
on a roll of teletype paper. So as to emulate the master, I got a roll of copier paper, rigged up a holder for it, and pounded away for a couple of weeks. I was still using my red IBM Selectric. There was really no hope of selling
All the Visions
to a large publisher, but eventually a small press put it out as a back-to-back double volume bound with
Space Baltic
, a book of poems by Anselm Hollo.

One of fate’s kind gestures had brought my literary idol Anselm to the Lynchburg area as a poet-in-residence at Sweetbriar College, and we immediately recognized each other as kindred spirits. Meeting Anselm rekindled my interest in poetry, and I put together a Xeroxed chap-book of my poems called
Light Fuse and Get Away
, calling myself Carp Press after a line in Rene Daumal’s book,
A Night of Serious Drinking
: “I have forgotten to mention that the only word which can be said by carp is art.” I later reproduced these poems along with my stories and essays in a small press omnibus,
Transreal!

On the commercial front, I got a deal for another nonfiction book with Houghton-Mifflin; this was for
Mind Tools
, a survey of mathematics from the viewpoint that everything is information. My agent knew an editor at Avon Books, and she got them to reissue
Software
along with my newly-written sequel,
Wetware
, perhaps the most cyberpunk of my novels.
Wetware
was, I believe, the first of my books that I wrote using a word-processor; the previous dozen were all typed, with much physical cutting and pasting. I wrote
Wetware
at white heat, in about six weeks. The book has considerable snap and drive, and it earned me a second Philip K. Dick award.

The money wasn’t coming in fast enough. Although my books were selling and getting good reviews, none of them were big hits, and my advances weren’t great. The kids needed braces, and their college tuition fees loomed on the horizon. Professional writers have to spend all too much time worrying about how to sell their work. As I once heard someone say, “Amateurs talk about art, pros talk about money.” It gets old. After four years of freelancing, I was ready to look for another teaching job.

This time around, I got lucky. A mathematician friend of mine was working in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at San Jose State University (SJSU) south of San Francisco, California. I happened to be complaining on the phone to him about how broke I was, and he told me that they had an opening, and that several of the faculty admired my book
Infinity and the Mind
. I flew out for an interview, and gave a talk based on
Mind Tools
. Given that I’d been thinking about this material for a year, my talk was well-prepared; one of the faculty later told me it was the best interviewee talk they’d ever heard. I got the job offer on my fortieth birthday.

Sylvia was fed up with Lynchburg by now, and the kids, though somewhat anxious, were excited to be moving to California. We rented a big Ryder truck and headed across the country; Sylvia driving our station wagon with two of the kids, and one kid riding in the truck with me and our beloved collie-beagle dog Arf. I rotated to a different kid each day. It took about a week, a wonderful adventure. We felt like pioneers.