Collected Essays by Rudy Rucker Read Free Book Online Page B

the specific quirks of our society at a given time. It’s also the case that SF shows us how our world could change to radically different set of strange attractors. One wonders, for instance, if the world wide web would have arisen in its present form if it hadn’t been for the popularity of Tolkein and of cyberpunk science fiction. Very many of the programmers were reading both of these sets of novels.
    It seems reasonable to suppose that Tolkein helped steer programmers towards the Web’s odd, niche-rich, fantasy-land architecture. And surely the cyberpunk novels instilled the idea of having an anarchistic Web with essentially no centralized controllers at all. The fact that that the Web turned out to be so free and ubiquitous seems almost too good to be true. I speculate that it’s thanks to Tolkein and to cyberpunk that our culture made its way to the new strange attractor where we presently reside.
    In short, SF and fantasy are more than forms of entertainment. They’re tools for changing the world.
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    “Note on Gnarly SF”
    This version written 2012.
    Earlier versions appeared in various forms.
     
    This essay is a mash-up of five different versions of the material. The first was a talk, “Power Chords, Thought Experiments, Transrealism and Monomyths, ” which I gave at Readercon in July, 2003, where I was the guest of honor. The second version was “Seeking the Gnarl,” my address to the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts in March, 2005, where I was again the guest of honor.
    Before the ICFA talk in Florida, I found a twisted branch on a nearby beach, and I brought it to my talk to display as an example of gnarl. Later some members of the audience took possession of the gnarl-branch as a kind of trophy. The ICFA version of the essay appeared in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts , Spring, 2005.
    I worked some of this material into my nonfiction book, The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul in 2005. A different thread with some new material appeared as my introduction to my story collection, Mad Professor of 2007. And a merged essay fairly close to the present one appeared as “Surfing the Gnarl,” in my small collection Surfing the Gnarl , 2012, brought out by the estimable PM Press of Oakland, Califorina.
    Writing essays like this is a useful activity for a writer—it allows you to organize and clarify your methods of composition, methods that you otherwise might not be consciously aware of.

Cyberpunk Lives!
    William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley and I grew up under the spell of beatnik literature. And somehow we got the opportunity to start our very own cultural and artistic movement: cyberpunk.
    I remember meeting Allen Ginsberg at a friend’s house in Boulder, Colorado, 1982. “Allen,” I gushed, “I always wanted to be like one of the beats. What was the secret? How did you guys get so much ink?” “Fine writing,” said Allen. I pressed further: “Will you give me your blessing?” “Bless you,” he said and slapped his cupped hand down on my scalp, sending a sheet of energy cascading down my shoulders to trickle into my chakras.
    The canonical Beat writers are four in number: Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. Taken as I am with the concept of a Beat/cyberpunk correlation, I occasionally muse over who matches whom.
    Kerouac is the most wonderful writer among the beats, and surely the one who sold the most books. Gibson is a natural fit for this role. He writes like an angel, and everyone knows his name. Without Kerouac there would have been no Beat movement, without Gibson there would be no cyberpunk.
    Ginsberg is the most political and most engaged—here I think of Sterling. At the beginning of cyberpunk, it was Bruce who was the indefatigable pamphleteer and consciousness-raiser with his Cheap Truth zine. His Mirrorshades anthology defined cyberpunk in many minds. Like Ginsberg, Sterling continues to roam the planet,