One might expect the author of a book that opens with an ax-wielding, corpse-smoking necrophiliac to be out back in the woods, gnawing on animal bones after a self-mutilation and methamphetamine binge. Instead, we’re greeted by a grandfatherly, mild-mannered retired professor in tortoise-shell glasses and sandals who comes off much younger than his 65 years. “Compared to what I write, my life has been surprisingly conventional,” Rudy Rucker confesses.
“I’ve never really gone off the deep end,” he says, even though he writes about drug-addled characters such as Skeeves, who sleeps with sarcophagi in a van on the cliffs between Santa Cruz and Davenport. It doesn’t bother him that he hasn’t lived that life. “If I lived in a van, it would be hard to have an office where I can write.”
Rucker ushers us through a living room of oak floors and oriental rugs, past a neatly arranged shelving unit of LP records and CDs (Zappa, Big Star, the Pretenders and the Pixies appear to have been played recently) and an equally organized floor-to-ceiling bookshelf with an entire row of Beat and Beat-influenced literature—Kerouac, Ginsberg, Carver, Burroughs, Bukowski—at eye level. Higher brow stuff —Nabokov, Kafka, Pynchon—are on the top shelves, and the large format art books—heavily weighted towards Picasso, Dali, Hockney, Van Gogh and the Flemish renaissance painter Pieter Bruegel—are stacked horizontally at the bottom.
The penchant for organization and categorization contrasts with Rucker’s obvious bias towards artists, writers and musicians who fled strictures and conventions. His sense of making order of the world, though, seems at harmony with a man whose Ph.D. specialty was mathematical logic and who spent two decades teaching computer science to engineering students at San Jose State University.
Another paradox: the digital era icon, a pioneer of cyberpunk alongside William Gibson, John Shirley and Lewis Shiner, lives a largely analog existence. An old thermostat hangs from the wall. He wears a sweep hand watch and plays vinyl on a turntable, which he runs through a preamp and his computer’s sound card using a free software program to load old songs onto his iPod. “I got through 30 albums before I lost my momentum,” he says of the retirement project.
“The scratches are sort of good,” he says of the digitized vinyl recordings. “They give it an impasto quality,” Rucker muses, using the Italian term for the painting technique to build up layers of paint, a process that he has experimented with in the past few years. He motions towards one of the colorful, cartoony paintings that fill the walls of his writing room, pointing to one done several years ago that was flat on the canvas. Newer ones have relief ridges and texture from the layered paint.
Sitting in an Aeron chair, a 5×7 photograph of him with two granddaughters in a bathtub next to his portrait-oriented computer monitor, Rucker explains that he likes to paint the worlds he writes about.
“I often paint before I write to get some images,” he says. “After I write I don’t get as motivated. I’ve seen it. I’ve lived it. I’ve been there.”
Rucker’s 32nd novel, Jim and the Flims (Night Shade Books, 2011), is a departure from its hardcore science fiction predecessors. “I wanted to try something a little different,” he says.
He’d been writing about a “post-singular” world after the advent of “singularity,” at which point machines became smarter than humans. There were dragonfly cameras that observed everything. He threw in teleporting as well. “It was like three hours of nonstop speedmetal,” Rucker says.
“I wanted to back off and do something that’s more like fantasy. You know, like Harry Potter. Fantasy is doing really well,” he points out, though he thinks the Potter series could use a few sci-fi touches, like nanobots.
In Jim and the Flims, his protagonist, Jim, punctures the membrane separating earthly existence from the afterworld. “He wants to find his wife’s soul and bring her back to Earth,” Rucker says.
Jim winds up in the afterworld, which doesn’t much resemble those of classic literature, mythology or religious lore. In this alternate world are no winged angels or hell fires. Instead there are mythical creatures (“flims”) like yuels and jivas, rolling green hills and plowed plots with humanoid heads growing like cabbage. Evil flying beets traverse the horizon, and inhabitants live in a large purple, snail-like pod. With eye stalks.
The Sunnyvale-bred central figure in Jim and the Flims is a recently graduated e. coli bioengineer who worked for a Santa Cruz firm trying to convert human waste into electricity, a job he lost when he served genetically modified eel at a company barbecue. His late parents had been “eaten by their jobs,” then financially wiped out in a low-grade investment scam.
Without elaborating on the parallels, Rucker suggests that there are some autobiographical qualities to Jim, who’s “drawn from my life experiences.” His characters are mash-ups of those around him. “I model most of my characters on someone I know — or fragments of people I know, and reassemble them.”
How does the sarcastically self-described “kindly old author” with white hair swept back on the sides and combed forward in front implant his persona into the paradigm-shifting, slang-tossing Santa Cruz surfer-stoner dude? “I’m not a 27-year-old surfer,” Rucker admits. He doesn’t even surf, though he tried to when he moved to California 25 years ago. He found it “harder than I thought it would be,” especially the part that involved paddling out to the waves. “You get out there, and you’re exhausted.”
Later, when he indulges our request to pose with the barely-used surfboard he bought when he moved to California 25 years ago, he says, “This is just totally bogus.” He laughs and continues the shoot like a good sport.
Having set his sights on writing “beatnik science fiction” when he moved to the Santa Clara Valley town where surrealists Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady cavorted in the 1950s and 1960s, Rucker seems concerned about being inauthentic as he makes shit up amidst his paintings of nudists with UFOs, flying vegetables and disembodied vaginas.
“Even though I’ve published 32 books, I get anxiety over whether I’ve just been faking all this time. I wonder if I’ll be able to do it,” Rucker muses. ”I’ve got all these rabbits running and all these plot threads. Am I going to be able to bring it all to a nice, grand, harmonious climax?
“You don’t know what it’s going to be until you get there. You have to trust the muse.”
The world outside his meticulously organized writing laboratory is much like the other side of the mortal membrane, where the flims live.
Beyond the railing of the quintessentially Californian wooden wraparound deck that has no doubt shifted with the Santa Cruz Mountains’ winter rains and seismic activity, a tangle of native and non-native trees—eucalyptus, pine, bamboo and California oak—rise over the winding mountain asphalt below. The road leads to Main Street, Los Gatos. Sounds from construction activity at his wealthy neighbors’ homes can be heard on this hot midsummer afternoon.
He calls Los Gatos “a very comfortable community,” even though it’s a bedroom town of “engineers and Realtors,” not bohemians and artists, as it once was. “There’s not a big subculture here,” he understates.
He appreciates the scruffiness of Santa Cruz’s downtown, though he also enjoys Los Gatos’ main drag, Santa Cruz Avenue, which he says has a similar feel “except that people aren’t shoving petitions in your face or asking for money.” He bemoans the Silicon Valley town’s devolution into a place that sells “stuff to put on your table, like candlesticks and napkins.
“There’s no bookstore anymore, which is pathetic.”
Nonetheless, “as a place to live, I like it.” And he especially likes the proximity to Santa Cruz, which is only 20 minutes away at the right time of day. Rucker eavesdropped on Santa Cruz surf culture, picking up the slang, during his frequent jaunts over the summit. “I like going to Santa Cruz two or three times a month. I enjoy Pacific Avenue, 14th Street Beach and Four Mile Beach,” he says.
North of Santa Cruz on Highway One are the cliffs that Rucker likes to paint in plein air landscapes, just across the Brussels sprout fields from the parked vans where his latest novel’s characters sleep. Sometimes a giant squid or UFO stalks the unclothed humans in his paintings. The parallel world kicks in around Santa Cruz’s northern city limits, the defining line of the duality, the boundary between order and chaos, truth and fiction, professorial normalcy and freaky chemical mentalbrain stuff, worldly secularity and Egyptian gods, Silicon Valley and the continent’s edge, life and afterlife. And when the line’s porous, the paradox, rather than crumbling, becomes even sharper.
