Rudy Rucker: I don’t like wringing my hands about how crappy the world is getting. Like, “Aint’ it awful?” Yes, horrible things are happening, and always were, and always will be. But why not laugh?

It’s not always easy. My wife Sylvia was dying of cancer when I wrote “Tooniverse Telemarketer.” A foreign telemarketer had gotten hold of our number, and he knew that Sylvia had cancer. This started a few days after we ourselves got the news. The telemarketer wanted to sell us drugs, or life insurance, or advice­—it was unclear—and he wasn’t content with talking to me, he wanted to talk to poor, suffering Sylvia herself, not that I let him. He was phoning three or four times a day, and in the night, spoofing his number as being from my legit contacts so I couldn’t block his calls.

I became obsessed with the notion of finding this telemarketer, wherever he was. I had a hunch that he lived in Mumbai. I’d fly there, somehow bringing a .45 automatic, and I’d wait outside the guy’s call center, and when he came out I’d shoot him in the head.

In reality I abandoned our phone number, got a new, secret number, and…wrote this science fiction story, flipping the sexes as I sometimes do. Instead of writing about a man losing his wife, I wrote about a woman losing her husband.

Cheerful? Well, it is kind of cheerful, at least the cartoon ending. In general, that’s how I write, no matter what. When I’m writing a story, I’m happy, and even laughing at the weird trips. Writing a story is a way of living in a better world. I love to write. It’s a skill. I’ve been practicing for a long time.

Sylvia died a year after the “Telemarketer” story. A second story emerged from our last couple of months together. A very short story: “Who Do You Love?”. This one is happy/sad. Nostalgic. A sweet farewell. I broke down in tears when I read the story to the SF in SF group (the name stands for “Science Fiction in San Francisco”).

Oddly enough, the story appeared in the online version of Nature magazine a week after Sylvia’s funeral. Nature happened to need a story right away. This was one of those times when my writing has a synchronic connection with the real world. Like the Muse wanted to see a Sylvia story right away.

You can read these two stories for free online. I recently updated my Complete Stories site, and you’ll find the “Telemarketer” and the “Who Do You Love?” tales at the end.

RR: Transrealism! I coined this word in 1983.

The ur-source was a remark by my college pal Gregory Gibson, who, like me, loved the Beats and science fiction, especially William Burroughs and Robert Sheckley. As Greg succinctly put it back in the early 70s, when we were trying to write a novel together: “Why not write your life as science fiction?”

I admired the way that Jack Kerouac turned his life story into fiction. And William Burroughs went a step further; he pushed his life story into surreal fantasias. And, although I didn’t initially realize it, Phil Dick was doing this too. Yes. Write your life as science fiction.

And life of course is science fiction. An inchoate mélange of your perceptions and emotions and thoughts is flowing across the matrix of the physical world, which happens to be, according to informed sources, a wave function of complex quantities glowing and flowing in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space!

My very favorite and most concise expression of our world’s essentially surreal nature is the following story title: “The Ifth of Oofth,” by Walter Tevis, 1957.

What more do you need, man? Today is the Ifth of Oofth.

Getting back to R.U.’s remark about Sylvia, she used to be annoyed when she’d meet a science fiction reader, and they’d say, “Oh, I know all about you from Rudy’s novels.” Annoyed at that reader, and annoyed at me. “Can’t you just leave me out for a change?” she’d say to me. But I usually wasn’t able to. I needed characters for my books, and Sylvia was the most vivid person in my life.

This said, over time I got better at creating unreal transreal characters via Frankenstein’s monster routines. That is to say, I might take an eye from here, a hand from there, and a liver from someone else.

I guess that, besides the many fictional Sylvias, my favorite transreal character was from my Wares series. Sta-Hi, or, later on, Stanley Hillary Mooney. Based on wildman diamond-in-the-rough Dennis Pogue, younger brother of Lee Poague, who was a fellow professor at my first job—as a math prof at Geneseo State in upstate New York. Lee himself appears in my novel White Light. You might say that Dennis was my Neal Cassady: Jack Kerouac’s pal.

And  I  stay up to date. My  latest novel, Sqinks, has a "Carol Cee" character who is based on my new woman friend Barb Ash. The book is even dedicated to Barb. Meeting her was the nudge that got me to writing again  last year. Like I couldn't write Sqinks until I found the co-star for my Rudy-character. Another gift from the Muse

It’s dangerous to hang around with me. I’m always paying attention. Even though it looks like I’m not. The camera’s always running.

I’m happy to see that transreal has become an accepted literary term. You can even look it up on Wikipedia!

And even if my genre isn’t often mentioned, I’d say that very many modern novels do have a transreal quality. That is to say, today’s realistic novels often have a fantastical or speculative element. Not that any enterprising young novelist wants their novel to be tarred with the down-market, subliterate brush of SF!

RR: I’m happy you’d make that comparison, R.U. I always loved and admired the Russian-tinged British gutter slang of Clockwork Orange. What Burgess in fact did was to take Russian words and replace the syllables by short English words. Lonely became oddy knocky, very evocative. A punch or a blow was a tolchock. Word was slovo.

It’s also worth mentioning that Burgess was a scholar of James Joyce’s work, wherein the words prance and caper like trained goats.

The neologisms and names that I use in my stories and novels are important to me. Sometimes the right word will pop into my head. Other times it might take fifteen minutes or even a day to find the right one. I feel it’s important that my fake words should be short, punchy, non-pompous, and easy to say.

When searching for a mot juste, I might quickly type a list of candidates, right off the top of my head, hoping for the right one to hit my eye. It’s not a logical process at all. It’s like drawing a shape with a single quick line. Or feeling around in a pile of garbage with your eyes closed.

For me to wave means to go with, and wavy is good. Teep is telepathy. Yump is a valuable substance. Unny is creepy. Stuzzy is way cool. And I use the word uvvy to stand for a biotech sea slug that you set onto the nape of your neck in order to have teep.

I take into account the cognates of my invented words, that is to say, I think about the words that my new words sound like (partial homonyms), and about what they remind me of: the hinted-at ghost-synonyms.

Rather than Russian, I’ve always been fascinated by Beat, doper, punk, and hipster slang, not to mention 30’s and 40’s gangland cant. I’m always begging my children or grandchildren for news from the street.

My favorite new expletive of the last few years is “Ew.” I use that one every chance I get.

RR: True telepathy, yes. I wrote about it in Postsingular, in Juicy Ghosts, and in my very latest novel, Sqinks.

Full telepathy would mean experiencing another person’s sensations, thoughts, and emotions as directly as they experience them. As if you were inside their mind and body. You show this in a movie simply by switching to the other person’s point of view.

We have various ways of knowing what’s in someone’s head. Physical touch. Pheromones. Facial expressions. Body language. Speech. Reading and writing. Artwork. Telephone. Video.

The idea of being on a hilltop and showing what you’re seeing to a friend at home, and discussing it—why, a hundred years ago we might already have called that telepathy!

But we’d like telepathy to transmit more than what you see and hear. I mentioned pheromones, or scents, as a special way of transmitting inner feelings, Efforts in this direction have so far been crude. But note that music and images can go some way towards transmitting some of the biochemical qualities associated with your mental state. Tension, elation, anxiety, fear, and so on. This is what movie sound tracks are all about.

And it goes almost without saying that pornography very strongly transmits these non-verbal states. It’s often said that pornography always leads the way in applications of new media techniques. People really want to get inside those scenes.

Going into pure SF bullshit mode, in my novel Juicy Ghosts I propose that there might be a way to directly transmit biochemical molecules by having them be analyzed and encoded within the sender’s body, with the code being sent and then assembled into the same molecules within the receiver’s body. I gave these coding and decoding agents the name “gossip molecules.”

For the teep in Postsingular, I used the hallowed shuck-and-jive technique of invoking quantum entanglement. And I did something similar in Sqinks, were I used a made-up word twirlware for my teep transmission channel.

It felt good to come up with “twirlware,” after writing the series of novels Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware!

RR: Certainly I smoked pot with you a few times, R.U. And the most extreme and terrifying psychedelic experience of my life took place at the Mondo house, where that zine was published. I unwisely smoked two successive doses of something like toad venom, and had a conversation with a mocking Mandelbrot-set alien named Beetlejuice Monkey—who counted up to a billion—counting by ones, you understand, and with me counting along. That kind of thing bothers you a lot, if you're a mathematician. You can look up the details in my journals, Nested Scrolls, which can be read for free online.

I haven’t had a great many psychedelic experiences over the years. The only one that really and truly stands out was when I talked to God, a.k.a. the White Light, on Memorial Day, 1970, in the apartment I shared with Syliva and our nine-month-old Georgia in Highland Park, New Jersey, near our grad school, Rutgers.

That trip stayed with me for life. It permanently converted me to all-is-one mysticism. By then I was already predisposed to mysticism, but the acid trip closed the deal. The White Light said, “I love you, Rudy. I’m always here.” What more do you want?

RR: I’m for magical hi-tech, for sure. The other stuff? People worry too much. In public. It makes them feel important. We’ve only been doing modern science for one or two hundred years. Lots of goodies still to come. Ask the pro SF writers!

 I take this confrontational tone because I feel that if “they” can get me to worry about their perceived threats, then they own me mind. I’m not yourself. I’m on their bad trip. They’re jerking me around like a puppet.

With T back in power, I’ve pretty much stopped reading, or watching, or listening to the news.

Head in the sand? Where exactly is your head, man?

You might say I’d rather write the news than listen to what they say it is.

I’m almost eighty. I’m going to die before too long. I want to live the years that I have on my own terms. As for helping the country, yes, for sure, I’ll keep on writing the most anti-establishment and mind-opening stuff that I can.

My most recent story “Big Germs” is an SF fantasy about eliminating all guns forever! You can read it in my online Collected Stories.

And my novel Juicy Ghosts includes the violent take-down of an insane, evil president at his third inauguration. I wrote this in 2020, with T in his first term and hoping for his second.

Turns out I was seeing the future. Everything that I wrote is coming true. But nobody would publish Juicy Ghosts book when I wrote it. Even though it might be my best novel. But it was too heavy. The editors were scared. So I published it myself. Check it out. You can buy it, or read it free online. I’m eager to corrupt your mind.

RR: (a) A few years ago a blood vessel burst in my brain and I was in a coma for a few days. It was a shock to come back, and see the world still going on. Like a jump cut in a movie. Bam, cut to black. Bam, resume action.

The lesson I drew was that when I die it’ll be just like that—but without the “resume action,” just plain “cut to black.” Turn off my lights.

For years my native sense of self-importance made it hard to accept that. How could the world possibly continue without me somewhere in it, if only behind the scenes?

Well, duh, the world can continue fine. Think of all the flowers that die and shrivel every year. All the animals that have come and gone. All the generations passed away. Crumbled into dust. God doesn’t care. God’s not a hoarder.

Although, if it’s any solace to you, yes, the past is still there. Ever since Einstein we’ve known that the universe is a fused spacetime block universe. It’s not just a space screen movie that flickers tick-by-tick in time. The past is always present, if you can parse what it means. The eternal now. The passage of time is an illusion. But for most of this is cold comfort.

“I miss my wife.” “She’s not gone.” “So where is she?” “She’s in last year.”

(b) Although it’s not as well-known as I’d like it to be, I was the very first person to write a novel about a human mind being preserved as software in a robot. This would have been in Software of 1980. I have a long blog post about it.

Along the way, I coined the word “lifebox” to stand for a hardware/software object that might be viewed as storing your personality, preferably in an interactive form. This way, the kiddies can talk to gone grandpa.

I’ve used the lifebox in many of my books and novels. My Juicy Ghosts in particular has some good riffs about big companies storing people’s lifebox “souls” in cloud silos. The price of being stored is that your soul does gig work camera’s for the big companies.
It's debatable whether the lifebox tech is really there yet. It’s one of those moving-target things, like telepathy or AI. When do you really have it?

For much more, see my massive nonfiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. You can read it free online here.

(c) I’d far rather be in the real world, if only as a bot. Rather be there than being inside some lame-ass videogame. I think techies tend to underestimate the richness of the physical world. Or, more accurately, to use a word that the first President Bush coined, they “misunderestimate” it.

And, by the way, I wouldn’t actually want to have my lifebox being paired with a bot in the physical world. Not a bot in the sense of a machine. I’d want to have my lifebox's body be an animal, or a tank-grown clone. A juicy ghost, you understand.

The supremacy of the analog physical world is something that I discuss in my novel Juicy Ghosts. As I just said, that’s the meaning of the title. Even if you have a software lifebox in the cloud, you want to have a physical body made of meat.

(d) Regarding your last question, R.U., there’s no way, as I’ve been saying, that any “computer simulation” can hold a candle to the physical world. At least not in the current meaning of the word “computer,” which is some chips in a box. That’s no match for a trillion galaxies of physical matter! Why be stingy? The universe has a big budget!
It’s a rich world, and we’re lucky to live it in, even if it’s only for a little while. But we’ll always have last year.

Thanks for the good questions, R.U. It's always good to be back in touch with my old running buddy.