Transreal Cyberpunk (43 page)
Read Transreal Cyberpunk Online
Authors: Rudy Rucker,Bruce Sterling
Tags: #Science Fiction, #punk, #cyberpunk, #silicon valley, #transreal
And there you have it.
Transreal Cyberpunk
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What’s the overarching subject of our nine tales? Well, as I keep repeating, the stories are transreal. They’re about Bruce and me, about our friendship, and about what it was like to be working as SF writers over the last thirty years.
It’s been an awesome run.
Bruce on “Kraken and Sage”
Most Rucker-Sterling stories are about ridiculous catastrophes. That’s because, transreally, our composition process is itself a ridiculous catastrophe. However, we’d never written a story where the catastrophe is finished, complete, over and done with: end of the book, turn the page, finally close the covers.
Once upon a time, it was a big gaudy deal, but now it’s in the past. The weird and dire events have been subsumed, become one with the passing parade of life. Because the participants are elderly people, or better yet, they’re dead. They properly belong to the ages, like William Burroughs or J. G. Ballard, two idols of our cyberpunk youth.
“Kraken and Sage” is about a guy who has survived ridiculous catastrophe and reached a state of mature serenity. Or, at least, it would be about that grand theme, if Rudy or I possessed any maturity or serenity. However, we just don’t. Maybe some day. There’s hope for us, I think.
We created a pretty good framework plot for this tale: our hero is this Californian sage who has retreated from the unseemly hurly-burly of wealth and power, and become a kind of Taoist. Then his own creations rise from their slumbers in some new catastrophe—(let’s say a disaster in China, why not, they’ve got plenty)—and he arrives on-scene to restore the world’s calm. He’s not an agent of freak-out, an aid and abettor to the sci-fi krakens who harshly disrupt our reality. On the contrary: the wise sage is a classic, conservative figure.
What an exciting departure from our norm, because no Rucker-Sterling protagonist is ever on the side of order, ethical responsibility, legality and proper social roles. People like that do exist—(fewer of them all the time, but some do)—yet they always had a marked absence from the extensive Rucker-Sterling oeuvre.
Could we even imagine such a person? A placid sage who calms Krakens? Maybe the Kraken is his sidekick, an entity he can pat on the head!
Keen to tackle this creative challenge, I envisioned a protagonist rather like the late-in-life Vaclav Havel. Not the dramatic, street-rally, revolutionary hippie Vaclav Havel of 1989, but the wise but waning, been-there-done-that narrator of the little-known Havel book “To the Castle and Back.” This is certainly the best memoir ever written by a guy who was once a nation’s President. There’s no politicized frenzy, special-pleading or moral chest-beating in Havel’s final book. It’s all about furniture, state dinners, press coverage, how to dress, scheduling problems, over-booking the state helicopter, the stuff of lived presidential experience. It’s a severely unromantic and super-convincing text. I was pretty sure I could steal a lot of it and no one would know.
So we created a draft that was basically about a guy like the elderly Havel—he’s very hip, but he can no longer be much bothered, he just sees right through the technicolor sci-fi bluster. Giant jellyfish, huge ants, Soviet UFOs, he knows these wacky advents just come and go in the long run. However, well, that story was boring. Rudy couldn’t put up with it, the narrative was too dull. And he was right, because it was passionless, very gray ink-wash. It read like a respectful obituary.
Something had to be done to get this monochrome text off its sickbed, so we hauled in the defibrillators and the electroshock cables. First Rudy vividly tore it up with some Burroughs cut-and-paste sampling. Then I cut all the fat and gristle out of it and violently squeezed it into a Ballard condensed novel.
The story survived these devastating attacks, but it became mighty hectic and bedraggled. Oddly, this made the story feel very 2015 AD: it became an authentically contemporary work. “Kraken and Sage” features grinding low-level aerial warfare. Industrial and ecological catastrophes. Obvious charlatans with all the wealth and power. Scientists as a victim class. And some mud monsters, because, well, mud monsters.
“When you cut up the present, the future leaks out.” “Earth is the only truly alien planet.” When you’re a science fiction writer, you need to pretty well throw the bread way out on the water. Once the seas rise, you never know what oozy relic will be left to a wondering mankind: floating on the slow blue waves out there, or half-buried in the dark and muddy shore.
Table of Contents
Notes on “Storming the Cosmos”
Notes on “Big Jelly”
Notes on “Junk DNA”
Notes on “Hormiga Canyon”
Notes on “Colliding Branes”
Notes on “Good Night, Moon”
Notes on “Loco”
Notes on “Totem Poles”
Notes on “Kraken and Sage”