Surfing the Gnarl (11 page)

I'd like to revisit the world of
Frek
and write a sequel. I liked those characters, especially the flying cuttlefish called Professor Bumby. I had him as a professor in my abstract algebra course in grad school.

Your webzine
Flurb
reads like a who's who of outside-the-box SF writers. Who would you most like to get an unsolicited manuscript from, living or dead?

I've had a lot of fun editing
Flurb,
and as a personal matter, it's convenient to have a magazine which will always publish my stories. I sleep with the editor's wife, as I like to say.

I started with asking my old cyberpunk friends to contribute, but over time I'm getting more over-the-tran-som material from younger writers. Regarding your question, I'd be happy to get manuscripts from Robert Sheckley, Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, or Jack Kerouac. It's not so well known that the Beats were very interested in writing SF, and they talked about it a lot. They viewed SF as an indigenous American art form, along the lines of rock ‘n' roll or jazz.

If you look at it in a certain way, William Burroughs's novel
Naked Lunch
is an SF novel. But there's a certain goody-goody nerd element among SF people that tends not to want to acknowledge that.

What is Time? Seriously.

Kurt Godel, the smartest man I ever met, claimed that the passage of time is an illusion, a kind of grain built into the fabric of our reality. To the extent that we can sense Eternity, it's present in the immediate Now moment. Another point to make is that, insofar as time is real, it's like a fluid we swim around in. As John Updike puts it, “Time is our element, not a mistaken invader.”

Okay, I'm regurgitating quotes there. A simpler answer: time is breath. Does that answer your question?

No. You seem to have a knack for running into famous characters: Anselm Hollo, Martin Gardner, Godel, Wolfram? If you were forming a band, which would play lead guitar? Would Turing be in the band?

I'd probably like to be lead singer, like I was in my short-lived punk band, the Dead Pigs, in 1982. In this case I'd choose Johnny Ramone as lead guitarist. If I had a better voice, I'd want to work with Frank Zappa, but in reality I don't think Frank would let me sing. Maybe I could play kazoo. And of course I'd be happy singing with Keith Richards or Muddy Waters.

Being in a band was one of the more enjoyable things I've done. Much of my career has consisted of mathematics, computer hacking, and writing. These are solitary activities, so it was fun for me to be in a band and do something in group. Come to think of it, that's another reason I like editing my webzine
Flurb.

I don't think Alan Turing was all that interested in music, but I'd enjoy having him as a friend. He was
interested in writing science fiction, as a matter of fact, and he also had an interest in heavy philosophical trips. I'm currently writing a novel with the working title
The Turing Chronicles,
which centers on a love affair between Turing and William Burroughs.

I feel like I'm getting to know Turing and Burroughs via the process of writing about them and maintaining internal emulations of them. I've often done this in the past—I call it “twinking” someone. I twinked the mathematician Georg Cantor in my novel
White Light,
Edgar Allen Poe in
The Hollow Earth,
and the painter Peter Bruegel in my historical novel about his life,
As Above, So Below.
Bruegel was the best. He's a wonderful man.

Do you ever write longhand? Do you own a pencil?

In my back pocket I almost always carry a blank sheet of printing paper folded in four. I write ideas down on the paper, and when I get home, I type the notes into my computer; generally I've got a notes document going for whatever book I'm working on. I do write longhand on my pocket notes paper. Sometimes I can't read the writing later on. I used to take copy-books on trips with me and write longer passages in them, but now I almost always travel with a laptop.

Does anyone ever “own” a pencil? They're just things you rummage for, briefly use, and immediately lose. But now and then, if I have a pencil, I might use it to draw something on my pocket square of paper. More commonly I use a Pilot P-700 pen, preferably Extra Fine. I've been using these for going on fifteen years now, and I worry
about them going out of production. Every now and then I buy a big stash of them, like fifty or a hundred.

You sometimes collaborate on short stories, with Paul DiFilippo, Marc Laidlaw, John Shirley, Bruce Sterling, Eileen Gunn, even myself. Is this laziness or ambition?

As I already mentioned, writing is a somewhat lonely activity, so I enjoy collaborating on stories. There's no reason not to. The thing about short stories is that they're really hard to sell, at least for me. There's only a very small number of story markets, and often I end up having to publish a story in
Flurb.
And even if I do sell a story, it pays very little, and it can take several years before the story appears. It's not a satisfying market at all. So I might as well have some fun in the writing process by collaborating.

When you write together, it's something like a musical collaboration, a spontaneous give and take. I find that, in order to blend the prose, I tend to imitate the other author's style. Like the way that actors in Woody Allen movies usually seem to talk like Woody.

If you could spend twenty-four hours in any city on the planet, with money in your pocket, which would it be?

First of all, I'm not going for just twenty-four hours. Why travel so far and turn right around? That's idiocy. I'm staying for at least four days and maybe a week.

As for destinations—I'm a huge fan of New York City. I love the noise—you hear it as soon as you get out of the airport, a filigree of sirens overlaid onto a mighty roar. The museums are great, and I know a fair number
of cozy, inexpensive restaurants filled with hipsters and city slickers. I'd catch some ballet, and maybe a rock band. Just walking the streets in NYC is a great entertainment as well. And as long as you're paying, Terry, maybe I'll stay at the refurbished Gramercy Park Hotel.

I'd love to spend a week in Koror, a funky town in the archipelago of Palau. I'd go diving, riding a Sam's Tours boat out to the Blue Corner, which is perhaps the greatest dive spot in the world. I'd probably stay at the Palau Royal Resort, and I'd snorkel at the hotel beach, admiring the richly patterned mantles of the giant clams.

A lot of scenes in my SF novels are drawn from my dive experiences. SCUBA is really the closest thing we have to floating in outer space and to visiting alien worlds. Well, NYC is fairly alien as well. Life in the hive.

Your film career was cut short after
The Manual of Evasion.
What went wrong?

Well, you're talking about the acting part of my film career.
The Manual of Evasion
movie was also called
LX94,
as it was made in Lisbon in 1994. Terence McKenna and Robert Anton Wilson starred with me, and some excerpts are online, although the complete movie is hard to find. The director of that movie, Edgar Pera, is a really good guy. I went to visit him in Lisbon again in the summer of 2011.

In terms of movies, what I'd really like is for one of my novels to be made into a film. We came close with
Software.
It was under option to Phoenix Pictures for a decade and they paid for about ten screenplays, none by me.
Master of Space and Time
was another near-miss. Michel Gondry wanted to direct, Jim Carrey and Jack
Black were going to star, and Daniel Clowes wrote a script. A dream team.

But the producers didn't want to lay out the money. It still seems like the big-money people find my work a little too gnarly. Maybe I'm ahead of my time. That could change at some point. But it's not a prospect I obsess on. I joke that they can't make any of my novels into movies until they've made ever single one of Phillip K. Dick's novels and short stories into a film. And that's going to take awhile.

You are (in my mind, at least) a “hard SF” writer in that the machinery of your work is always math and physics. What do you have against wizards?

I don't like it in a fantastic story when there are a large number of unexplained loose ends. In the context of TV series, I think of
The X-Files
or
Lost,
where the scriptwriters are continually piling on new complications, and none of the earlier mysteries are being solved, and the narrator just gives you these big-eyed woo-woo significant looks.

It isn't really that hard to devote a little effort and figure out a logical framework for the story you want to tell. For a professional SF writer, it might take a day. But for some reason, TV and movie people are literally unable to do this—and they're unwilling to hire an SF writer as a consultant. They'll spend a hundred million on the effects, but they won't give some poor SF vet a hundred K so the story makes sense. I don't understand it.

Back to books, my feeling is that you can be just as logical in a fantasy story as in a science-fiction story. But there seems to be a convention in fantasy that you're not
expected to cash the checks that you write. You do any old thing, and then move on to something else and you never circle back. I guess I care more about logic than most people do. Must have something to do with the PhD in mathematics.

My most recent novel,
Jim and the Flims,
is to some extent a fantasy story—a large part of it is set in the after-world, and my characters are battling with otherworldly beings who are basically demons. But I found it natural to think of some pseudoscientific explanations for the goings-on, and working the logic into the story made me feel more comfortable.

What drew you into math, chaos or order? What drew you into literature?

From the start I liked math's tidiness and power— the numbers and the geometric diagrams. As for literature, I always loved reading and traveling to other worlds. I read science fiction as a boy, and Beat literature in high school. I came to appreciate the radical, countercultural aspects of literature as well.

I wanted to major in English in college, but my father nagged me that I should major in something hard that I couldn't learn on my own. He made the point that I could read novels without taking classes about them. So I decided to major in physics. But then I didn't take the right courses freshman year, and only the math option was open for me. I was okay with that because I found math easy. If you understand what's going on in math, you don't have to memorize very much. Most of what you need to know follows logically from a few basic principles. And
I like that math has a lot of gnarl—chaotic patterns that emerge from seeming order.

When I finished college in 1967, I had the option of going to fight in Viet Nam or going to grad school, and I picked grad school. I'd been a very poor student in college, and I only had a C average. So I had some trouble getting into a PhD program. As it happened, I married my wife Sylvia the week after graduation, and Rutgers University was eager to have her enter their graduate French program. The French chairman put in a word with the math chairman, and they let me in. I ended up getting my doctorate at Rutgers, a PhD in mathematical logic. And by the time I was done, my average was more like an A than a C. I'd finally found some course material that interested me.

I wrote my first novel,
Spacetime Donuts,
around 1976. I was amped up from having seen the Rolling Stones play live in Buffalo, New York. Ultimately, writing was to be my real career, and teaching my day job.

As it happened, I switched from teaching math to teaching computer science when my family and I moved to San Jose, California, in 1986. This was a good move for me. It meant I got to ride a twenty-year wave of computer science, from PCs up through the Web. I never took a single course in computer science, but eventually I taught most of them. I enjoyed the hands-on, experimental nature of the subject, and some of it permanently changed the way I think.

Are you prepared for the Singularity?

I have complicated thoughts about the so-called Singularity. First of all, I think it will be quite a long time,
maybe a hundred years, before we get close to humanlevel artificial intelligence. I have this opinion from having taught AI as part of my job at San Jose State. The AI field's existing techniques are a handful of cheap parlor tricks.

Second of all, I don't think we'll ever see standalone devices that are vastly more intelligent than people. What we'll see will be intelligence amplification (IA) tools, so that people can create at a higher level. But it'll still be the people doing the creating.

Third, I don't think we'll see injectable nanotech elixirs that can restore a person to a state of youth. I feel that a hysterical fear of death on the part of guys like Ray Kurzweil has clouded the discussions of the Singularity. I think it's lame and juvenile to worry so much about dying. Didn't Ray take his acid in the Sixties like he was supposed to?

Fourth, I think we'll soon be able to create interactive emulations of individual people that I call lifeboxes. The secret for lifeboxes is to use really large databases rather than extreme AI. If you're a writer and a blogger, you're well on the way to having created your lifebox. Singulatarians are, however, obsessed with a much stronger version of the lifebox, that is, with the notion of creating an artificially alive android-like replica of yourself and thereby achieving a kind of immortality. It's not all that well known that I was one of the very first people to present this “uploading” idea in a science fiction novel, that is, in
Software
in 1982.

I have a strong feeling that the conventional notions of a Singularity don't go nearly far enough. A couple of years ago, I got impatient with the prevalent style of hype about the Singularity and, wanting to move past it, I wrote a novel called
Postsingular.
Charles Stross's
Accelerando
helped me see how to write this book. You load on the miracles and keep a straight face.