Surfing the Gnarl (12 page)

Postsingular
and its sequel
Hylozoic
are based on the idea that gnarly, naturally occurring processes can serve as programmable computations. So you might be gaining information from an air current, or a candle flame, or the rocking branch of a tree, or an eddy in a stream. You might in fact program one of these processes to be an emulation of yourself.

As I was eager to get the ideas of
Postsingular
into circulation, I followed Cory Doctorow's example and released an edition of my book for free online under a Creative Commons license. The release didn't seem to hurt the hardback and paperback sales. But now that e-book sales are finally ramping up, I don't think I'll do CC releases anymore.

For a dude from Kentucky (I'm another), you exhibit a shocking lack of provincialism in your life and work. How come? Has this been a hindrance?

It's a bit of an American tradition to have a rube from the sticks become a cultured cosmopolitan. Harold Ross, the founder of the
New Yorker,
was from Colorado. William Gibson grew up in Wytheville, Virginia.

One reason I learned about more than Louisville was that my mother was from Berlin, and I have a lot of relatives in Germany. We went there several times when I was a boy, and I spent most of the eighth grade in a Black Forest boarding school.

Certainly I was still somewhat provincial when I arrived at Swarthmore College in 1963. But after college I
married Sylvia, a Hungarian woman whose family lived in Switzerland, and we ended up visiting them in Europe nearly every year thereafter. And in the U.S., we were of course attending graduate school, working at universities, and culture-vulturing any and all available events.

Speaking of Kentucky, Terry, I always enjoy seeing you at SF events, as you have the feel of a distant cousin from down home. A fellow Kentucky ham, both of us well cured.

I don't get your transrealism thing. Hasn't the novel always been made out of the stuff of the author's life? Is there any other way? Or do you think SF is different?

It's not really the case that every novel is made of the author's life. People very often settle for writing about stock situations, or about scenarios they've encountered in other books or in movies, or about arbitrary things they've completely made up. What impressed me about the Beats when I started reading them in high school was that they were writing about their actual lives—and in a confessional, self-revelatory kind of way.

My notion of transrealism is that, if you're writing SF, and also writing about your life, you can enhance or mutate your experiences in interesting ways. I see the familiar power chords of SF—time travel, antigravity, alternate worlds, telepathy, etc.—as standing for certain kinds of archetypal emotions or experiences. Time travel is memory, flight is enlightenment, alternate worlds symbolize the great variety of individual world-views, and telepathy stands for the ability to communicate fully. If you're using the power chords, but also writing about your life,
you end up with something richer than realism and more engaging than sheer fabulation.

Genre fiction like SF is even more at risk of having flat, two-dimensional characters than is normal literary fiction. Perhaps some SF authors imagine that their ideas and situations are so fascinating that they don't need realistic characters. Sticking to a transreal approach is a fairly easy way to ensure that your novel will be lively.

What's the difference between the infinite and the absolute? Do they coexist?

In the branch of mathematics called set theory, infinity is a fairly garden-variety kind of number, and there are lots of different infinities. One is known as alef-null, the size of the set of all natural numbers. Another is called the continuum, and it's the size of the set of all points on a line. My early novel
White Light
is about a young mathematician interested in figuring out the exact relationship between alef-null and the continuum.

The absolute, on the other hand, is more of a philosophical notion. It's the ultimate, inconceivable, largest possible infinity. God, for instance, would be an absolute, and not a mere infinity.

In mathematics, the class of all possible sets is an absolute. There's a semitheological axiom of set theory known as the Reflection Principle. It says that whenever we think we've conceived of the class of all sets, we're thinking of some smaller set. That is, any property enjoyed by the absolute is reflected in the properties of some lower-level infinite set. And any notion you have of God also applies to something smaller. Does that answer your question?

No. What's on your iPhone? What's not on your iPhone?

I have about thirteen gigabytes of music. First I ripped my CDs, then a bunch of CDs from the library, and then I started ripping my old vinyl records, which is an interesting but time-consuming process. You get, I like to think, a richer sound when you digitize the vinyl originals. What kinds of music? Punk rock, Frank Zappa, blues, reggae.

What's not on my iPhone? No books as yet—I'm still holding back from reading digital editions, although just in the last year I've finally started seeing some actual e-book sales on my royalty statements.

Bruce Sterling got me to attend an Augmented Reality (AR) conference in San Jose last year. An example of AR is when you hold up your iPhone and see the world with things overlaid onto it. I got this cool
AR Invaders
app, in which I see UFOs flying around my living room or in the sky over my deck, and I can shoot them. A perfect tool for any SF writer.

Do you think math models the universe? Or the human brain?

Math is the abstract science of form, and seems to be ideally suited for modeling anything at all. It's a universal construction kit. This said, I sometimes feel like the whole idea of science, logic, and math is a little off-the-beam for modeling the universe and the brain. From the inside, life feels like emotion, sounds, colors, and memories, arranged in a mushy and not-particularly-mathematical way.

Our professional organization, SFWA, is currently lobbying Congress to repeal the Scaling Law. Good idea or not?

Terry, you're a card, and sometimes I'm not sure what you're talking about, or if you know either. I'll assume that with the “Scaling Law” you're referring to the empirical fact that society's rewards for creativity are distributed according to an inverse power law—in which an author's financial reward is inversely proportional to his or her popularity.

Rather than lying along a smoothly sloping line, a Scaling Law payment schedule has the form of a violently down-swooping curve, akin to the graph of 1/x. It's as if society wants to encourage very many books that are precisely of the kind that it likes the most, and to discourage those works that vary in the slightest from the current ideal. The swooping, hyperbolic Scaling Law curve loads money on the best-selling authors, while portioning out much smaller amounts to the scribes out on the long tail.

Disgruntled writers sometimes fantasize about a utopian marketplace in which the Scaling Law distribution would be forcibly replaced by a linear distribution. But this wouldn't work, as I discuss in my nonfiction book
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.
Scaling laws are a much a part of nature as are gravitational laws, or the laws of probability. Coming to understand this has greatly helped my serenity—seriously. Sometime math can actually make you happier.

One lesson I can draw from the Scaling Law is that it's okay if my best efforts fail to knock the ball out of the park. There's simply no predicting what's going to catch on, or how big it's going to be. Trying harder isn't going
to change anything. Relax, do my work, and don't expect too much. Almost nobody wins, and the winners are effectively chosen at random. Along these lines, the science-fiction writer Marc Laidlaw and I once dreamed of starting a literary movement to be called Freestyle. Our proposed motto:
Write like yourself, only more so.

A flipside of the Scaling Law is that maintaining even a modest level of success is hard. The gnarly computations of society keep things boiling at every level. As a corollary, note that there's no chance of making things easier for yourself by sending your outputs to lower-paying magazines. They're still likely to reject you, but they'll be ruder and more incompetent about it. Ah me, the writer's life.

You and author Michael Dorris were teenage pals. Did you share any interest in literature, or was it all girls and cars?

I seem to remember that Dorris and I were preoccupied with finding erotic fiction to read, combing the louche bookshops of downtown Louisville. Otherwise our tastes weren't very similar. I recall that he liked James Michener's
Hawaii
and I liked Jean Paul Sartre's
Nausea.
And in the backs of our minds, both of us dreamed of somehow becoming writers. But we didn't talk about it much. I wish very much that he were still alive. Even though he's dead, he's still my friend.

Your novels (and stories, like the ones in this volume) are known for their irreverent and wildly humorous social satire. Why do you hate America?

In the fourth grade I was remanded to a private boys school where I felt bullied and picked upon. And after my college years I had to deal with a government that wanted to draft me and send me to die in a pointless war in Viet Nam. I never fit in well. As I described in my novel
The Secret of Life,
I've always felt like a visiting alien.

Your German grandmother introduced you to the work of Peter Bruegel the Elder at an early age. You later wrote a serious (and wonderful) novel based on his life,
As Above, So Below.
Was writing historical fiction a stretch for you?

In some ways, writing historical fiction is akin to writing fantasy or SF. In each case, you're imagining a complete world that exists in parallel to the world we live in. I considered bringing SF elements into my Bruegel novel, but I decided I didn't want to drag the master into the gutter. His life and times were strange enough on their own.

Something I like about Bruegel's paintings is that sometimes they seem to illustrate a moral or a folk tale, but nobody's ever been able to figure out exactly what the tale is. The Flemish godfather makes you an offer you can't understand. And it's especially the things you can't understand that seem worth knowing.

I remember being very sad when I finished writing
As Above, So Below.
I felt I'd grown very close to Bruegel during my years of work on the book. He'd become like a close friend, or an alter-ego. When the book appeared I was actually living in Bruegel's hometown of Brussels on a grant. His house still stands, and I walked by it in the rain. I felt like Bruegel's ghost was right there with me. He liked my book.

Bruce Sterling once compared the cyberpunk movement (you, Gibson, Cadigan, Shirley, and of course Bruce) to the Beats. Was that accurate? Which were you? (And don't say Kerouac, he had no sense of humor.)

I was William Burroughs—the oldest of the group, rather professorial, and perhaps the gnarliest. In my
Seek!
collection, I have an essay, “Cyberpunk Lives!” that draws this comparison. One of the things I write about in that essay was the time in 1981 when I met Allen Ginsberg in Boulder, Colorado. I asked Allen for his blessing, and he slammed his hand down on the top of my head like the cap of an electric chair, crying out, “Bless you!” It was great. I met Burroughs then, too, but I didn't get very close to him. I managed to give him a copy of novel
White Light.
Bill said, “Far out.”

My
Jeopardy
topic: SF Today. The answer is, “Because girls just want to have fun. “ You provide the question.

Why is supernatural romance so popular?

Do you like guns?

Guns aren't for me. If I kept a gun in my house, I probably would have shot someone by now, possibly myself.

How did you learn to paint? Did it involve unlearning something as well?

In 1999, my wife and I took an oil-painting class in night school at the local museum. I took to it right away.

My level of manual control is low enough that I tend to surprise myself with what I end up painting. Sometimes these surprises show me things that are a good fit for the novel or story that I'm currently working on—you might say that I'm channeling information from another part of my brain. But it's fine if I don't use the images in my fiction. The main thing is that I'm feeding my soul and getting into the moment and, if I'm lucky, turning off my inner monologue. Given that painting doesn't involve words at all, it's even more meditative than writing. I love the luscious colors.

Painting has taught me a few practical things about writing. When I'm doing a painting, for instance, it's not unusual to completely paint over some screwed-up patch and do that part over. I think this has made me feel more relaxed about revising my fiction. And I've also noticed that the details that I haven't yet visualized are the ones that give me the most trouble. But the only way to proceed is to put it down wrong, and then keep changing it until it works.

If there's anything I needed to unlearn, it was the belief that I needed to paint human figures with complete accuracy. Approximations are fine, and I can brush away at a given figure until it looks reasonably okay. We have cameras for accuracy.

“Your soul isn't in fact immortal on its own, but is, rather, a pattern of information that God stores in His memory so that He can resurrect you.” Explain.

In the Passion scene in the Gospel according to Luke, the Good Thief says, “Lord, remember me when
you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus seems to agree with that, and says, “Verily I say unto you, today you will be with me in paradise.”

I once had an interesting discussion of this passage with my old science-writer mentor, Martin Gardner. Some religious sects have taken the exchange between Jesus and the Good Thief to mean that your soul isn't in fact immortal on its own, but is, rather, a pattern of information that God stores in memory so as to resurrect you. Sometimes the word “soul sleep” is associated with this notion.