Mad Professor (36 page)

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Bouncy Linda Loca created a metanovel entitled
George Washington,
depicting the world as seen from the point of view of a dollar bill. What lent her work its piquancy was how literally she'd managed to execute the plan: while perusing
George Washington
you felt flat and crinkly; you spent most of your time in a wallet or folded in a pocket; and when you came out into the air
the main thing you saw was countertops and people's hands. The beezies had helped by providing Linda with the life histories of real, orphid-meshed bills. The user could of course scroll past the dull parts, but the presence of the realistic data gave the work heft and seriousness.

When, once in a great while, Linda's George Washington dollar changed hands, the bill moved the story along by buying drinks, influence, or sex, and thereby sketching the rise and fall of a young cop whom Linda had named George Washington as well. Young officer Washington became corrupted due to his sexual attraction for a promiscuous older woman named Donna, who talked him into executing a hit on her landlord, who turned out to be George's biological father, this fact being unknown to George until too late.

For a time, Linda had blowback issues with her George Washington character because, to round him out, she'd made him an aspiring writer. Problem was, George began pestering Linda with messages about her metanovel—dumb suggestions, by and large, for the character was, after all, only a beezie simulation of a human, and not a true artist. He failed to grasp, for instance, the dark, erotic beauty of a four-hour scene consisting of the slow shifting of the dollar within a felt-appliqué wallet in Donna's tight jeans while Donna trolled Mission Street for men. By the same token, George was unable to understand that the precise convex pressure of his own virtual buttock upon the eponymous dollar as he sat writing at his virtual desk might be more interesting to his creator Linda Loca than what he wrote.

Weary of arguing with her character, Linda edited out virtual George's love of writing, and made his hobby bowling instead.
As it happened, Thuy's old boyfriend Jayjay ended up with Linda Loca. And then, while trying to prevent an outbreak of nants, Jayjay died. In the instant of extreme grief and despair when she learned of Jayjay's death, Thuy finally finished
Wheenk.

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The pieces of the metanovel came together like a time-reversed nuclear explosion. Her adventures in the kiqqie underworld of San Francisco, her lost love for Jayjay, her worries about the threat of the nants, a particular cone shell she had on her dresser, her mother's face the day Thuy had graduated from college, her father's bare feet when he tended his tomato plants, the dance Thuy had done down the rainy street one night while exulting over her metanovel—everything fitting, everything in place,
Wheenk
as heavy and whole as a sphere of plutonium.

Her Great Work finally done, Thuy pulsed the
Wheenk
database to the global orphidnet. Her pain had produced artistic transcendence.

Written May 1, 2006, with Terry Bisson.

Appeared in
Interzone,
Summer 2006.

Terry and I are both from Kentucky—he from Owensboro, I from Louisville. Terry's novel
Pirates of the Universe
(Tor Books, 1996) has some especially famous evocations of growing up in Kentucky.

Terry lived in New York City for many years, and he was active in organizing a famous monthly reading series at the KGB bar in the East Village. Recently he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and has turned his organizational skills to starting up a monthly series of readings at the New College in the Mission District in San Francisco: “SF in SF.” It's great to have Terry out here.

Terry is a master of the short story form; he's won the Hugo and the Nebula, and he even sells to
Playboy.
Last year he published his mind-boggling collection
Greetings
(Tachyon, 2005), as well as a book of linked mathematical
tales,
Numbers Don't Lie
(Tachyon, 2005), which includes some creditable mad mathematician equations that Terry made up. For much more Terry, see his Web site
www.terrybisson.com
.

This year Terry has been writing a series of deceptively simple fables, cast as children's stories about a boy named Billy. After hearing him perform “Billy and the Unicorn” at a hipster dive called The Make-Out Room, I was so impressed by the Zenlike purity of his phrasing that I began insisting he write a story with me.

I got the idea for this story just as the narrator describes it in the opening paragraphs, that is, from an overheard conversation between two barristas—although in Los Gatos, California, not in Harrods Creek, Kentucky. Harrods Creek is actually the name of the small town near Louisville where my parents initially lived.

While I was planning the story, I was walking around the Mission district in San Francisco, and I actually saw “2+2=5” stenciled on the sidewalk. This tale is thought experiment exploring how to actually get to a point where this phrase is literally true.

Written March 25, 2006, with Paul Di Filippo.

Appeared in
Flurb
webzine, August, 2006

I collaborated with Paul on a story, “Instability,” before I ever actually met him. I think we first met face to face in 1999 when I took a bus through the snow to his house in Providence, Rhode Island, while on a journey to the East. He showed me H. P. Lovecraft's grave, we went ice skating together, and we wrote a second story, “The Square Root of Pythagoras.”

Paul is one of the most prolific short story writers at work these days, with a new anthology of his tales appearing nearly every year. The latest one is
Shuteye for the Timebroker
(Thunder's Mouth Press, 2006), and you can learn more at his Web site
www.pauldifilippo.com
.

Perhaps my all-time favorite of Paul's stories is “Stink Lines,” about the Disney Comics character Gyro Gearloose as drawn by the great Carl Barks, the tale set in a world where nanomachines actually generate dialogue balloons and, yes, graphical stink lines. This tale is in his collection
Neutrino Drag
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004).

As occasionally happens, my inspiration for “Elves of the Subdimensions” was the title itself, which has haunted me for years with no story attached. To me the title seems a perfect coupling of Golden Age power chords, worthy of
Thrilling Wonder Tales.

In order to set the story in motion, I suggested a transreal element: How does a mad professor survive retirement?

When I myself retired from teaching two years ago, I did find it a bit of a jolt. Retirement is hard, as a part of one's sense of self consists of the social roles that one plays. To abandon a role is to feel diminished. You're losing part of your identity. If you're fortunate, you find new roles, or expand some of your alternate roles, so as to make up for the lost role–so as once again feel yourself to be the right size.

In my case, I've been writing more since I retired. And I've been putting a lot of time into my Web site
www.rudyrucker.com
and its associated blog, not to mention my webzine
Flurb
at
www.flurb.net
.

Written December 6, 2005.

Appeared in
Mature
#439, January 26, 2006.

In recent years, the serious science magazine
Nature
has been leavening their pages with a short-short story in each issue. Having secured an invitation to submit a tale, I turned to a pet idea of mine, panpsychism (meaning “every object has a mind”). I was inspired by a very interesting book on the topic: David Skrbina,
Panpsychism in the West
(MIT Press, 2005).

My idea was to produce a thought experiment showing how panpsychism
might be verified. As my setting, I used the cafeteria at Apple, where I had recently visited my former student Leo Lee, who was working on a secret Apple project.

It was a real kick to see the title “Panpsychism Proved” right there in the august pages of
Nature.
That's a mad professor's idea of success!

Written June 13, 2004.

Appeared in
Poe's Lighthouse,
Chris Cordon, ed. (Cemetery Dance, 2006).

Since this story already has a hoax introduction, it's perhaps overkill to write another layer of annotation. But, hey, Edgar Allan Poe would.

In the summer of 2004, I went to Boulder, Colorado, to teach a one-week “Transreal Writing” course at the Naropa Institute. “Transrealism” is my term for the practice of basing fantastic tales on your real life—something I often do. I have more discussions of transrealism in my essay collection,
Seek!
(Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999) and on my writing page
www.mdymcker.com/writing
.

I'd last been at Naropa in 1982, when I got to meet Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs (but, no, I didn't spend the night with Burroughs). By way of illustrating my transreal writing technique to my students in 2004, I wrote “MS Found in a Minidrive” during the week I was teaching them. And, as so often seems to happen, my main character is a mad professor.

The theme of the story had already been defined by Chris Conlon, who was editing an anthology
Poe's Lighthouse
(Cemetery Dance, 2006) of stories all taking off on the same unfinished story fragment by Master Poe. You can find the complete text of the original “Lighthouse” fragment in Poe's Online Collected Works at
http://www.eapoe.org/works/tales/lightha.htm
. I might mention, by the way, that my friend John Shirley has a really terrific story, “Blind Eye,” in that same
Poe's Lighthouse
anthology. John sticks to the straight Poe style and delivers a tale that's eerily like one of the master's.

The high point of my week at Naropa was a large group reading they had. I was on a bill with my favorite poet and dear friend Anselm Hollo, reading to
a crowd of three hundred people. As my story was tailor-made for the Naropa audience, it fully blew their minds and they loved it. I was thrilled to be performing at this level in the home of the Beats; it was truly “a gala night within the lonesome latter years,” as Poe touchingly puts it in his poem “The Conqueror Worm.”

Written May 6, 2004.

Appeared in
Infinite Matrix
webzine, December 2005.

For the years 1980–1986, I lived with my wife and kids in Lynchburg, Virginia, the home of televangelist Jerry Falwell and headquarters of his right-wing “Moral Majority” political action group. I ended up writing a number of stories about Lynchburg, transreally dubbing it Killeville.

During our final years in Lynchburg, I was proud to be a member of the Oakwood Country Club—it was a pleasant place and the dues were modest enough that even an unemployed cyberpunk writer could afford them. I was always intrigued by a group of men who sat drinking bourbon and playing cards in a small windowless room off the men's locker room—isolated from the civilizing force of the fair sex. Somehow I formulated the idea that at night the men were rolled up like apricot leather and stored in glass carboys of whiskey that sat within their “golf bags.” I was thinking of a power-chord story somewhat analogous to Phil Dick's “The Father Thing.” The power chord here is “alien-controlled pod people.” Another archetype I wanted to touch upon is the Pig Chef, an icon that's always disturbed me. I wanted to push this concept to its logical conclusion, so that everyone would finally understand the Pig Chefs truly evil nature!

I think the story is funny and logical, but it's also so mad and strange (ah, Killeville!) that I had trouble getting anyone to publish it. Fortunately, the writer and editor Eileen Gunn gets my sense of humor. Like my earlier story
“Jenna and Me,” this weird tale found a home in Eileen's webzine
Infinite Matrix
at
www.infinitematrix.net
, which was, as long as it lasted, something like a clear channel border radio station.

Written April 9, 2004.

Appeared in
Interzone,
October 2005.

I've always been fascinated by artistic representations of the Virgin of Guadalupe—she's usually drawn in the middle of a spiky oval halo. To me, that halo looks like an image you might find by zooming into the computer graphics fractal known as the Mandelbrot Set. Not that this image has much to do with the story.

The story was inspired, rather, by buying myself a good-quality microscope. On searching the web to find books about microscopy, I came across a delightful flying-saucer tract that I ordered: Trevor James Constable,
The Cosmic Pulse of Life: The Revolutionary Biological Power Behind UFOs
(Borderland Sciences, Garberville, CA, 1990). Constable jovially argues that our atmosphere is filled with all-but-invisible giant “aeroforms,” akin to jellyfish or protozoa. And, writes Constable, these home-grown “aliens” are what we're seeing when we see when we see UFOs.

I came up with the hard science idea for the story's conclusion while giving a lecture to my Advanced Computer Graphics class at San Jose State University. We were studying the mathematical projective transformation that is used to convert three-dimensional coordinates into locations upon a painter's canvas or, for that matter, upon a computer-game's view screen. It turns out that you can imagine forming the inverse of the projective transformation, and that if you were to let this inverse transformation act upon your body, then you could indeed find yourself striding across houses and mountains, with the fabled Point At Infinity only a few more steps away. I explained all this to my students at the time—they enjoyed the rap, although of course they thought I was a mad professor.