Complete Stories

Complete Stories
by Rudy Rucker
Transreal Books
Los Gatos, California
http://www.rudyrucker.com/transreal/

Complete Stories
is Copyright © 2012 Rudy Rucker as a volume, and the stories are copyrighted to their authors. First edition, 2012, Transreal Books, LosGatos, California.

This edition includes Rucker’s short stories written from 1974-2011. The “Introduction” and the “Notes on the Stories” describe the previous publications of the stories. Later editions of
Complete Stories
may expand to include later stories.

Cover painting is “My Life In A Nutshell,” by Rudy Rucker.

These stories are works of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

ISBN-10: 0984758518. ISBN-13: 9780984758517

Table of Contents
Introduction
Jumpin’ Jack Flash
Enlightenment Rabies
Schrödinger’s Cat
Sufferin’ Succotash
A New Golden Age
Faraway Eyes
The 57th Franz Kafka
The Indian Rope Trick Explained
A New Experiment With Time
The Man Who Ate Himself
Tales of Houdini
The Facts of Life
Buzz
The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge
Pac-Man
Pi in the Sky
Wishloop
Inertia
Bringing in the Sheaves
The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics
Message Found in a Copy of Flatland
Plastic Letters
Monument to the Third International
Rapture in Space
Storming the Cosmos (Written with Bruce Sterling)
In Frozen Time
Soft Death
Inside Out
Instability (Written with Paul Di Filippo)
The Man Who Was a Cosmic String
Probability Pipeline (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
As Above, So Below
Chaos Surfari (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
Big Jelly (Written with Bruce Sterling)
Easy As Pie
The Andy Warhol Sandcandle (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
Cobb Wakes Up
The Square Root of Pythagoras (Written with Pal Di Filippo)
Pockets (Written with John Shirley)
Junk DNA (Written with Bruce Sterling)
The Use of the Ellipse the Catalog the Meter & the Vibrating Plane
Jenna and Me (Written with Rudy Rucker Jr.)
Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation
MS Found in a Minidrive
Guadalupe and Hieronymus Bosch
The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club
Panpsychism Proved
Elves of the Subdimensions (Written with Paul Di Filippo)
2+2=5 (Written with Terry Bisson)
Visions of the Metanovel
The Third Bomb
The Imitation Game
Hormiga Canyon (Written with Bruce Sterling)
The Perfect Wave (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
Tangier Routines
Message Found In A Gravity Wave
Qlone
Colliding Branes (Written with Bruce Sterling)
Jack and the Aktuals or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory
All Hangy (Written with John Shirley)
To See Infinity Bare (Written with Paul Di Filippo)
Bad Ideas
Good Night, Moon (Written with Bruce Sterling)
Fjaerland (Written with Paul DiFilippo)
The Fnoor Hen
Hive Mind Man (Written with Eileen Gunn)
My Office Mate

I’ve arranged my stories in the order in which they were composed. On the whole, the later stories are better than the earlier ones, so you might do well to start reading somewhere towards the middle of this collection. Like many professions, writing is something one learns on the job.

Over the years I’ve published four print anthologies of my stories:

The 57th Franz Kafka
(Ace Books, 1983)

Transreal!
(WCS Books, 1991)

Gnarl!
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 2000)

Mad Professor
(Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007).

The final fifteen stories appearing in this, my new anthology, haven’t appeared in any of those four print anthologies.

At this point in my career, I thought it would be futuristic to abandon print and to have my story anthology take on the form of an ebook, published by my own Transreal Press. The big win is that, given that I’m working with an ebook, I can make make my new anthology comprehensive. Thus:
Complete Stories
.

Probably I’ll go on to write a few more stories in the coming years. So, as time runs on, I’ll simply make new editions of my
Complete Stories
ebook now and then. Walt Whitman spent his whole life revising and expanding one single book of poetry:
Leaves of Grass
.
Complete Stories
is in some sense my final anthology.

Flipping through these tales, I feel a mixture of nostalgia, pride, and embarrassment. I used to write as if women were wonderful, fascinating aliens—over the years I’ve gotten better at depicting them as people. Intoxication has remained a years-long literary obsession. My politics remain those of the hippies, punks, and grungers. But always the stories have their own wild humor and logic.

I can characterize my fiction with in terms of six concepts: (1) Thought experiments, (2) Power-chords, (3) Gnarliness, (4) Wit, (5) Transrealism, and (6) Collaboration.

(1) The notion of fictional
thought experiments
was made popular by Albert Einstein, who fueled his science speculations with so-called
Gedankenexperimenten
. Thought experiments are a very powerful technique of philosophical investigation. In practice, it’s intractably difficult to visualize the side effects of new technological developments. In order to tease out the subtler consequences of current trends, a complex fictional simulation is necessary; inspired narration is a more powerful tool than logical analysis. If I want to imagine, for instance, what our world would be like if ordinary objects were conscious, then the best way to make progress is to fictionally simulate a person discovering this. The kinds of thought experiments I enjoy are different in intent and in execution from merely futurological investigations. My primary goal is not to make useful predictions that businessmen can use. I’m more interested in exploring the human condition, with literary power chord standing in for archetypal psychic forces.

(2) When I speak of
power chords
in the context of fantastic literature, I’m talking about certain classic tropes that have the visceral punch of heavy musical riffs: blaster guns, spaceships, time machines, aliens, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, faster-than-light travel, immersive virtual reality, clones, robots, teleportation, alien-controlled pod people, endless shrinking, the shattering of planet Earth, intelligent goo, antigravity, starships, ecodisaster, pleasure-center zappers, alternate universes, nanomachines, mind viruses, higher dimensions, a cosmic computation that generates our reality, and, of course, the attack of the giant ants. When I use a power chord, I try to do something fresh with the trope, perhaps placing it into an unfamiliar context, perhaps describing it more intensely than usual, or perhaps using it for a novel thought experiment. I like it when my material takes on a life of its own. This leads to what I call the gnarly zone.

(3) In short, a gnarly process is complex and unpredictable without being random. If a story hews to some very familiar pattern, it feels stale. But if absolutely anything can happen, a story becomes as unengaging as someone else’s dream. The gnarly zone is lies at the interface between logic and fantasy. I see my tales as simulated worlds in which the characters and tropes and social situations bounce off each other like eddies in a turbulent wake, like gliders in a cellular automaton graphic, like vines twisting around each other in a jungle. When I write, I like to be surprised.

(4) My early mentor Robert Sheckley was a supremely witty writer. Over the years I got to spend a few golden hours in Sheckley’s presence. And I think it’s safe to say that wit, rather than mere humor, was his primary goal. Wit involves describing the world as it actually is. You experience a release of tension when you notice a glitch. Something was off-kilter, and now you see what it was. The elephant in the living room has been named. The evil spirit has been incanted. Perceiving an incongruity in our supposedly smooth-running society provokes a shock of recognition and a concomitant burst of laughter. Wit is a critical-satirical process that can be more serious than the “humorous” label suggests.

(5) “Transrealism” is a word that I made up. Early on, I found that using myself and my friends as characters in my science-fiction tales appeals to me very much. My actual life is the
real
part, and the
trans
part are the cool things that happen to the characters in my science-fiction stories. In other words, I found that I could use the special effects and power chords of SF as a way to thicken and intensify my material. The tools of science fiction can be a way to add a more artistic shape to the suppressed fears and desires that you inevitably incorporate into your fiction. To my way of thinking, transrealism is a way to describe not only immediate reality, but also the higher reality in which life is embedded.

(6) Regarding collaboration, note that nearly a third of the pieces in
Complete Stories
were written with other authors. As a practical matter, I get lonely being a writer on my own, and I welcome the chance to get into a collaborative exchange with another writer. One of the remarkable things about science-fiction writing is the level of literary collaboration that it supports. In this respect, we’re like scientists—and like musicians. Science fiction is a shared enterprise. And I’m grateful to be part of it.

—Rudy Rucker, Los Gatos, California, 2012

It was a hell of a lecture. “Out of Your Mindscape,” Jack had called it on the posters he’d put up all over town. The posters had a picture of a guy thinking a thought balloon of himself thinking a thought balloon of himself thinking etcetera and ad infinitum. Jack Flash was wild about infinite regresses that term.

I never could see the use of them myself. So my mind has an image of my mind which has an image of my mind and so on. So what. To me the fact that my mind is infinite is about as significant as the fact that human bodies have ten toes. Big Mind doesn’t have anything to do with the finite-infinite distinction. And in terms of my immediate life, what counts in the Pure Land is having two minds instead of one mind…and who cares if they’re infinite.

At the time I’m talking about, I was an English instructor at the same upstate New York college where Jack taught. People don’t take to me, and I always have trouble keeping jobs on Earth. They were going to terminate my contract even though I’d just had a paper on
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
accepted by the
Journal of Popular Culture
.

I had just gotten the bad news from my chairman at lunch time, and I’d spent the afternoon going through my second to last spore of geezel. That’s a pretty hefty dose for one sitting, so I was kind of lit when I walked into Jack’s lecture.

Jack had drawn a big crowd, but they were pretty stiff. I was feeling reckless, and decided to loosen things up by laughing and stamping my feet every time Jack said, “infinity.” Before long the place was rocking.

Jack likes to work a crowd; and once I’d gotten them started he kept bringing them higher…changing the subject, making slips of the tongue, and mixing in side-raps, one-liners, and level changes. It was a pleasure to watch him.

He was wearing light tan corduroys and a blue flannel Bean’s shirt. He never stopped moving except when he wanted to say something heavy. For that he would lean forward on the desk and manage to look every one of us in the eye. But mostly he’d be writing things on the board, wiping chalk dust off on his corduroys, pushing his long brown hair back from his forehead, or taking his ratty black sweater on and off.

I couldn’t really tell you what the talk was about. After all, I
was
pretty high, and I’ve never bothered to master a lot of the standard human concepts. Roughly speaking, it seemed like Jack thought he could prove that every possible universe exists. Considering my background, you’d think I’d be interested in what he might have to say on this topic…but you’d be wrong. I just wanted to lesnerize a couple of people and get the hell back to the Pure Land.

Without thinking about it too hard, I suspected that most of what Jack said was wrong anyway…but it was fun listening to him rave. Quite a few people came up to him afterwards, and I stuck around.

After a while it was down to just one chick talking to Jack. I walked up to join their conversation. “That was splendid, Jack,” I said.

“Thanks, Simon,” he answered. He turned to the girl, “What do you say the three of us go get a beer?” He had already put on his brown leather jacket.

“All right,” the girl said, and we started out. I’d never seen her before. She reminded me of a Mercedes-Benz…classic features, and a flawless exterior, gliding along on smoothly meshing joints.