Collected Essays (73 page)

The California housing costs were insanely higher than we’d imagined. But culturally we felt like we’d come home. As my new department combined two disciplines, I was offered the choice of teaching either mathematics or computer science. I decided to go for computers, even though I knew next to nothing about them. For her part, Sylvia retooled and got a Master’s degree in teaching English as a second language (ESL). We had to scramble pretty hard for a couple of years, but soon she’d found a good job teaching French and ESL at Evergreen Community College, and I was teaching all kinds of computer science courses at SJSU.

I very much enjoyed working at San Jose State—both the Math and the CS departments (now no longer combined into one) have a very pleasant atmosphere, and the students are lively and interestingly diverse. It’s one of life’s ironies that, after my strenuous efforts to avoid being sent to fight in Viet Nam, a large number of my SJSU students were in fact Vietnamese. I wouldn’t go to Viet Nam, but Viet Nam came to me.

New opportunities kept cropping up. I was like some Darwin’s finch with a beak evolved for cracking open a special kind of seed. While there’d been no seeds of the proper type in Lynchburg, they were all over the place in the Bay Area.

Some Berkeley freaks named Queen Mu and R. U. Sirius were editing a radical magazine called
Mondo 2000
—they hailed me as a representative of the new style of SF. I wrote some reviews and short articles for
Mondo
, and eventually I helped them put together an anthology called
The Mondo 2000 User’s Guide to the New Edge
—which was featured in a
Time
magazine cover story on cyberpunk.

I found many writer friends in California: Pat Murphy, Michael Blumlein, fellow cyberpunk John Shirley, Richard Kadrey, and the antic Marc Laidlaw. Marc and I wrote a few science fiction surfing stories together and referred to our shared technique as Freestyle SF.

By dint of teaching computer science courses of every level, I acquired some expertise. Programming was close enough to mathematics to be congenial for me. And I relished the interactive and experimental nature of computer work. I took to lugging my heavy IBM AT computer to parties to show fractals and cellular automata to my friends. All sorts of computer types came out of the woodwork; many of them fans of my work and eager to meet me. One of them, John Walker, happened to be the founder of a booming Sausalito corporation called Autodesk, and before I knew it, he’d hired me on.

So now I had three jobs: writing, teaching, and programming for Autodesk. Inevitably, my rate of literary production slowed down.

I’d started research for my next novel,
The Hollow Earth
, while still in Lynchburg. I’d participated in a so-called bateau race, during which several teams traveled down the James River in hand-made flat boats. In the nineteenth century, these bateaus were used to transport tobacco to Richmond, and as it happened, one of the first builders of a bateau was an ancestor of mine named Ambrose Rucker, who lived north of Lynchburg near, yes, Ruckersville, Virginia. I composed a tale of a country boy who leaves his farm, travels down the James in a bateau, meets Edgar Allan Poe in Richmond, and travels with him to Antarctica and the Hollow Earth.

While doing the research, I read pretty much everything by Poe, drawing particular inspiration from his novel,
The Journey of Arthur Gordon Pym
, which describes a sea voyage to the walls of ice around the Southern pole, with the implication that there is a huge hole to be found there, revealing Earth’s interior to be a hollow as that of a tennis ball. I came to identify with Eddie Poe—he once wrote of being possessed by an “imp of the perverse” that impelled him to do deliberately alienating and antisocial things. I’ve always had a streak of that myself. To round out my book, I used the hoaxing Poe-like expedient of pretending that
The Hollow Earth
was a manuscript that I found in the library of the University of Virginia.

In the years 1989 to 1992, I took half-time and then full-time leave from teaching so as to do more work at Autodesk. I helped design three software packages, doing a lot of the coding, and writing the manuals. These packages were meant to be like books, but interactive, and were based on programs illustrating new aspects of science. One was on cellular automata, one on chaos, and one on artificial life. The sales were reasonably good, but the profits from these relatively low-priced packages were negligible compared to Autodesk’s income from their flagship product, the drafting program AutoCAD. When the company’s stock price dropped, I was out of that job and back to teaching full-time at San Jose State. Fortunately they’d saved my position for me.

The Autodesk experience was fodder for a new transreal novel,
The Hacker and the Ants
. Here a hapless programmer becomes embroiled in a plot cooked up by his evil boss—a character loosely inspired by my ex-employer John Walker. Fortunately Walker has a good sense of humor, and he was quite fond of my book; although he did post on his website a phantom extra chapter for my book that wraps things up in a way more flattering to “his” character. He’s one of the brighter people I’ve met, and to this day I let him vet each of my new manuscripts for scientific errors. Many of my programmer friends feel
Hacker
is the best existing fictional depiction of the Silicon Valley life.

I returned to the
Ware
world in my phantasmagoric novel
Freeware
, one of my funniest, most outrageous books.

Around the end of this project I turned fifty. I realized that I was tired of drinking and getting high. What had once seemed to be a path to bohemian adventure had become a ball and chain. So I got some help, and I’ve been clean and sober ever since. The best thing about being sober is that I feel more comfortable in my own skin. And it makes for better relationships with the most important people in my life: Sylvia and children.

I’d had a slight worry that sobriety might impair my courage to write or lessen my flow of inspiration, but far from it. Indeed, the pace of my writing production has picked up. I have more time available for productive activity, and I’m better able to plan and control my projects. I feel my work is stronger than before.

Despite all this, the first book I wrote after my recovery was, perhaps thanks to my imp of the perverse, one of my oddest books of all:
Saucer Wisdom
. The book evolved in a strange way.
Wired
magazine wanted to start a line of books, and they were interested in having me write a work of speculative futurology. I sent them some ideas that they liked, but then the editors wondered if I could find a thread to tie my disparate predictions together. I suggested that I frame the book as if I’d learned my facts about the future from a man who’d actually been there. My time-traveler was to be Frank Shook, a crackpot UFO abductee who’s been given a tour of the next three thousand years by his alien captors.

My old friend Gregory Gibson was visiting me at the time, and I took him along to the pitch meeting with the
Wired
editors. On the drive from San Jose to San Francisco, Greg and I cooked up the scheme that he would present himself as actually being Frank Shook the saucer nut. Greg has a full beard, wears his hair very long, and has a piercing glare. At the pitch meeting, with four editors present, Greg made a few tense, distracted remarks, and then stalked out, muttering that it was too painful to be talking about his experiences to so many of us at once.

There was a stunned silence. I had the deal. After a bit, I let on that Greg really had been hoaxing them, but the editors didn’t quite want to let go of the illusion. It was decided they’d present the book as a factual
Communion
-style true-life adventure starring the characters Rudy Rucker and Frank Shook. I was a little worried about what this might do to whatever credibility my name has, but I was willing to grit my teeth and go through with it—not only in hopes of sales, but also as a way of thumbing my nose at conventional notions of respectability. Eddie Poe would have done no less.

I had a bit of trouble writing the book, I even got a little paranoid that the aliens—if they existed—might show up to harass me. To further roil my psyche, Greg was leaving voice-mail messages for me in the persona of Frank Shook. Finally I got control of the book by turning it into a particularly close-to-the-bone transreal novel—as well as being a work of futurology.

Unfortunately, the week I sent the final manuscript to
Wired
, they canceled their whole line of books. Susan Protter got them to let us keep most of the substantial advance, and I sold the book again to Tor Books. My Tor editor David Hartwell didn’t have the stomach for mounting a “
Saucer Wisdom
is really true” hoax—and I was relieved. Tor instead marketed the book as a nonfiction science book about the future. It may be that it would have done better if it had been presented as a novel. In any case, it bombed, and my advances went down for the next several books.

On another front, the independent publisher and editor John Oakes put out essay and story anthologies by me entitled, respectively
Seek!
and
Gnarl!
I based the pair of titles on a personal motto I’d devised during my years of programming in Silicon Valley: “Seek the Gnarl.” The books work together as a demonstration of my theory and my practice:
Seek!
describes my notions about how to find interesting things to write, and
Gnarl!
displays the results. Some of this work also appeared in my earlier collection
Transreal!

With Sylvia in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, 2008.

I wrapped up my
Ware
series with a fourth novel,
Realware
. I cast the book as a sweet love story, and included a scene with a character hugging his estranged father and seeing him off to something like Heaven. I felt as if I were finally laying to rest the specter of my last painful conversation with Pop. One of the virtues of writing is that you get the chance to revise your past.

All this time I was teaching CS courses at San Jose State, primarily graphics, object oriented design and software engineering. Over ten years, I developed an intricate framework of C++ code that my students could use to create three-dimensional computer games of their own with a minimum of effort. I called my code the Pop framework. The Pop framework and my lecture notes led to a textbook:
Software Engineering and Computer Games
. To my mind, games are currently the most interesting area in computer science, combining nearly every aspect of the field. But at this point they’re much too stiff and difficult a medium to permit free artistic self-expression.

My very last class meeting at San Jose State, a graduate course called Software Project. 2004. Photo by Alvin Cho.

Although it was rewarding to see my students making games, the code maintenance and overall computer drudgery was starting to get to me. As a reaction, I turned to the sixteenth century and wrote a historical novel about my favorite painter: Peter Bruegel the Elder. This involved trips to Antwerp and Brussels and to Vienna, where most of Bruegel’s paintings can be found in one amazing room of the Kunsthistorisches Museum. In addition, I took an oil-painting class with Sylvia, so that I’d have a better feel for the craft I was describing. Even after the book was done, I continued painting a bit. I enjoy the process; it’s refreshingly different from writing and programming.

To me, each Bruegel picture is like a novel, rich with characters and emotions, with artifacts and events, all set against wonderfully realistic natural landscapes. I identify very deeply with the man. He loved both the fantastic and the specific; he depicted otherworldly drolleries and everyday life. His work was often viewed as vulgar or obscure, and he had only a modest success in his lifetime.

I put everything I had into
As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel
, and I hoped it would have a wide mainstream success. But despite excellent reviews in the trades, my book was ignored by the newspapers and magazines, and sales were indifferent. I found this extremely disappointing.