The Ware Tetralogy

Afterword

I just finished rereading the four Ware novels for this omnibus edition. The books had been scanned from the old paperbacks, and I had to correct a number of typos that had crept in. Being a writer, I can’t reread something of mine without seeing things to fix, so I made a few small tweaks as well—making the novels consistent from one to the next, and smoothing the flow. But don’t worry, the old outrageous scenes are all here in their full rough vigor.

It took me about twenty years to write these novels, and it’s an odd experience to fast-forward through them in a few days. Naturally, I ask myself what the books were in fact about. I see three main threads: consciousness, drugs, and eyeball kicks.

The consciousness thread explores what it takes for something to support a mind. Software (1982) suggests that your mind as a software pattern that could run on a robot body. Wetware (1988) points out that DNA is a tweakable program, so you can in fact grow a new meat body for your software to live in. Freeware (1997) proposes that aliens could travel as radio signals coding up the software for both their minds and their bodies. And in Realware (2000), the characters obtain a device which can create living beings from their descriptions.

The drug thread asks how the humans and other beings of the future will get high. What kinds of visions will they have, and what kinds of problems? As the inevitable consequence of getting older, my attitude towards drugs shifted a little over the course of writing the four Ware books. In the second two volumes, the characters are having more problems with their drug use and by the end—incredibly—Sta-Hi himself gets sober. Even so, right up to the end of Realware, I remain devoted to breaking free of consensus reality, and to the dadaist humor and skewed dialog that emerges from the stoner mind-set.

The eyeball kicks thread is about depicting the gnarly, trippy scenes that might occur in a future where we’re mashing together different notions of consciousness with a countercultural attitude. I put a lot of energy into certain set-piece scenes and iconic images—I think of the two moldies juggling each others’ bodies as sets of balls, the birth of Manchile after a nine-day pregnancy, Randy Karl Tucker tripping on camote with his moldie girlfriend wrapped around his head, and, of course, the Little Kidders preparing to eat Sta-Hi Mooney’s brain from his skull with cheap steel spoons.

How did I end up writing these strange novels?

At age sixty, in 1974, my father, Embry Cobb Rucker, had a heart attack. In order to replace his clogged coronary arteries, his surgeon turned to bypass surgery.

This operation was still quite new. They opened up Pop’s whole chest, leaving a vertical scar at least a foot long. The drugs and the trauma had a bad effect on him. He had tortuous, freaky dreams that set him to crying out in his sleep.

Pop’s brush with death seemed to change him. He grew a white beard. He’d show me the scar on his chest and run his finger along it like undoing a zipper. “This is where they opened me up,” he’d say in a tight voice.

His sense that he was living on borrowed time made him unhappy with his lot, and less patient with my mother. He fell into an affair with another woman. My parents divorced in 1979—and they never spoke to each other again. Mom even had her wedding melted into a puddle of gold that she occasionally wore as a pendant. It was awful.

My wife and I were in Heidelberg on an academic grant at this time— among other things, I’d write an academic paper called, “Towards Robot Consciousness.” Pop and his new woman friend came to visit us in the fall of 1979. It was a mournful, uncomfortable encounter. Pop was a mess—he was consumed with guilt about leaving Mom, and he was drinking more heavily than ever before. His girlfriend was stiff and brittle with us. She disapproved of me, as if I were unworthy of being Pop’s son.

After a few long days, I put them on a train for Paris. They were planning to stay in a good hotel and live it up. Poor Pop. He’d done his duty all his life. Now Death was stalking him and he was trying to have fun. Seeing his train pull away, I felt as if my heart would break.

What to do? I started work on my third science fiction novel. I figured I’d write a transreal novel inspired by actual people I knew—but without overtly using myself as a character, as I’d done in my previous two novels Spacetime Donuts and White Light. I sensed that this move would open up the vibe.

One character, called Cobb Anderson, would be an old man modeled on my father in his current state. To some extent I could project myself into this character too. For all our disagreements over the years, Pop and I never were all that different. Another factor in my writing about Pop was that I was in some sense trying to inoculate myself against ending up like him—besotted, afraid of death, and on the run from my family.

The other character in my novel was a young guy called Sta-Hi Mooney, based on my wild and wacky friend Dennis Poague—a guy who used to turn up in Geneseo, New York, to visit his big brother Lee who was teaching there with me in the early 1970s. What I liked about Dennis was that he seemed to have no internal censor. He always said exactly what he was thinking. He was relatively uneducated, but he had a fanciful mind, and a hipster, motor-mouth style of speech. And, as with Cobb, there’s something of me in Sta-Hi, too.

In the opening scene, Cobb is sitting on a beach in Florida drinking sherry, and he’s approached by his double. At first I thought I was writing a time-travel novel, but then I hit upon the notion of treating the human mind as software. Cobb’s double is a robot copy of his physical form, some other robots will extract Cobb’s personality from his brain, and they’ll run the extracted human software on the robot who looks like Cobb.

“Software.” In 1979, this was a technical and little-known word—I’d picked it up from an article in the Scientific American. I decided to use it for the title of my book. I finished Software near the end of our stay in Heidelberg, in the summer of 1980, and I had no trouble selling it to Ace Books, who’d already published White Light.

My idea of copying a person onto a robot was a fresh concept in those days, and my book also drew some intensity from its father/son theme and from the colorful anarchism of my robot characters—the boppers.

I should mention that, although I knew all about the theory of computation from my studies of mathematical logic, I didn’t know jack about real-world computers—we SF writers very often don’t know the technical details of what we’re talking about. In 1979, the only way to access a computer was to use a text terminal with its nasty, inscrutable protocols—or to feed a deck of punched programming cards to a giant machine in a basement.

An oddly anachronistic thing about Software is that, in those years, I couldn’t imagine there being a really small computing device with the power of a human brain. So, instead of giving my Cobb-emulating robot a supercomputer that could fit inside this bopper’s skull, I had the Cobb­ robot’s brain be a big supercooled clunker that follows the robot around in the back of a refrigerated van that’s disguised as a Mr. Frostee truck. But that’s okay. It makes the novel more fun. And, at a deeper level, the brain in the truck is nice concrete symbol for an organization which maintains complete control over its agents.

Philip K. Dick died of a stroke in the spring of 1982. By then he’d become one of my favorite authors, and I’d began thinking about him a lot. At this point, I was living as a freelance writer in, ironically enough, the conservative town of Lynchburg, Virginia.

Some writers and editors were organizing an annual literary award honoring the memory of Philip K. Dick—and in the fall of 1982, my Ace Book editor, Susan Allison, told me that my novel Software had been nominated. I felt like I had a good shot at the award, given that my SF has that something of the same off-kilter, subversive quality as Phil’s. I began dreaming that my writing income might rise to a sustainable level.

And in March of 1983, I got the Philip K. Dick award for Software. My wife Sylvia and I flew up to New York City for the awards ceremony. Earlier that evening we had dinner with Susan Allison, the editor David Hartwell, a writer friend of Phil’s called Ray Faraday Nelson, and the well-known author Tom Disch—who was the one who’d initially proposed starting the award. Disch was a good guy, immensely hip and cultured.

Our whole party walked over to Times Square, where we saw Bladerunner, the brand-new movie based on Phil’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. On the way over, I talked to Ray Nelson.

I liked the Bladerunner movie a lot, particularly the first part, with the blimps bearing electronic billboards, the cop smoking pot while he interviewed the android, and the dark futuristic city with the neon lights glinting off pavements slick with rain. The last part of the movie seemed too violent, and inappropriately so, given that Phil’s Androids novel had largely been about empathy and peace. But that’s Hollywood.

“Phil would have loved it,” Ray Nelson reassured me. Actually, I’d been wondering if Phil’s worrying about the movie in progress was what drove him to his fatal stroke.

The award ceremony was in an artist’s loft, with the hallways covered in reflective silver paint. One of the first people I ran into was my artist friend Barry Feldman from college. Incredibly, he was wearing a suit, and he looked like Chico Marx at the opera. He seemed just a bit envious of me getting an award—although Barry was a great painter, working all day long in his studio, he wasn’t breaking into the gallery scene. On a sudden whim, I told Barry he could pose as me and enjoy the fame.

As I was such an outsider to the SF scene, nobody knew what I looked like, and the substitution worked for about half an hour. Barry stood by the door shaking hands and signing books, twinkling with delight. I stood across the room, drinking and hanging out with Sylvia, my friend Eddie Marritz, his wife Hanna, and the editor Gerard Vanderleun, who’d handled my non-fiction book The Fourth Dimension for Houghton-Mifflin. In the end the identities got sorted out, and I met the people I needed to meet—among them was Susan Protter, who’d end up being my literary agent for the years to come.

Later that evening I stood on the bar at one end of the silvery room and delivered a short speech that I’d composed on the plane up from Lynchburg.

“If I say that Phil Dick is not really dead, then this is what I mean: He was such a powerful writer that his works exercise a sort of hypnotic force. Many of us have been Phil Dick for brief flashes, and these flashes will continue as long as there are readers. ... I’d like to think that, on some level, Phil and I are just different instances of the same Platonic form—call it the gonzo-­philosopher-SF-writer form, if you like. . . . If it is at all possible for a spirit to return from the dead, I would imagine that Phil would be the one to do it. Let’s keep our eyes open tonight, he may show up.”

At the end of 1985, I’d just finished writing Mind Tools, a popular non-fiction book about math, and I was stoked to write science fiction again. I always start missing SF before too long—the funky old-school grooves, the wild thought experiments, the idiosyncratic characters with their warped argot, the eternal pursuit of transcendent truth.

Ace had let Software go out of print, so now Susan Protter got me a deal with John Douglas at Avon Books to reissue Software along with a projected sequel to be called Wetware. Both would appear as mass-market paperbacks.

Odd as it now seems, it was only with Wetware—my thirteenth book— that I started writing on a computer. The previous dozen manuscripts were all typed, with much physical cutting and pasting. Sometimes, if I couldn’t face typing up a fair copy of the marked-up and glued-together final draft, I’d hire a typist.

But with Wetware I was ready to change. I was still a freelance writer in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sylvia, the kids and I drove up to Charlottesville in November, 1985, and visited the only computer store in central Virginia. I ended up with what was known as a CP/M machine, made by Epson, with Peachtext word-processing software, and a daisy wheel printer. The system came with a Pac-Man-like computer game called Mouse Trap that the kids loved to play.

While I was gearing up for Wetware, I’d started what I thought was going to be a short story called “People That Melt,” and I sent the story fragment to my cyberpunk friend William Gibson, hoping that he’d help me finish it and, not so incidentally, lend the growing luster of his name.

He said he was too busy to complete such a project, but he did write a couple of pages for me, and said I was free to fold them into my mix in any fashion I pleased. As I continued work on my “People That Melt” story, it got good to me, and it ended up as the first chapter of Wetware. As a tip of the hat, I put in a character named Max Yukawa who resembled my notion of Bill Gibson—a reclusive mastermind with a thin, strangely flexible head.

Once I got rolling, I wrote Wetware at white heat. I think I finished the first draft during a six-week period from February to March of 1986. I made a special effort to give the boppers’ speech the bizarre Beat rhythms of Kerouac’s writing—indeed, I’d sometimes look into Jack’s great Visions of Cody for inspiration. Wetware was a gift from the muse—insane, mind-boggling, and, in my opinion, a cyberpunk masterpiece.

A couple of years later, in 1989, Wetware would win me a second Philip K. Dick award.

This award ceremony was at a smallish regional SF con in Tacoma, Washington. It wasn’t like the artists’ loft in New York at all. It was in a windowless hotel ballroom with a dinner of rubber ham and mashed potatoes.

I still wasn’t making much money from my writing, and I’d started working two day jobs, teaching computer science and programming in Silicon Valley. I didn’t have time to write as much as before, which was putting me into a depressed state of mind. Winning the award, I felt like some ruined Fitzgerald character lolling on a luxury liner in the rain—his inheritance has finally come through, but it’s too late. He’s a broken man.

In my acceptance speech, I talked about why I’d dedicated Wetware to Phil Dick, and why, in particular, I’d added a quote from Albert Camus about Sisyphus.

“I see Sisyphus as the god of writers or, for that matter, artists in general. You labor for months and years, rolling your thoughts and emotions into a great ball, inching it up to the mountain top. You let it go and—wheee! It’s gone. Nobody notices. And then Sisyphus walks down the mountain to start again. Here’s how Camus puts it in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that as to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’”

As so often happens to me, nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. One of the fans invited me to come to his room and shoot up with ketamine, an offer which I declined. Outside the weather was pearly gray, with uniformed high-school marching bands practicing for something in the empty streets.

In 1995, I’d been laid off from my programming job, but I was still a computer science professor at San Jose State University, south of San Francisco. A year had gone by with no novel even started, and now it was time to get back on the One True Path. I decided to return to the world of Software and Wetware, and I began work on Freeware, which would eventually appear in 1997.

I sometimes write well when I don’t feel particularly creative. On a given day, it can be good if I’m just doggedly trying to finish the next scene of another goddamn novel. If I feel like I’m crafting a masterwork, the language is more likely to get away from me. When nothing is at stake, I’m free to go wild with the effects and have my characters say brutally honest things—without losing control. I develop a deadpan, surreal tone that I think of as writing degree zero.

The meaning of “freeware” in my novel is that, throughout the universe, alien minds are traveling from world to world in the form of compressed information files—akin to the files you might download from the web. When these rays strike a sufficiently rich computational object, the object may wake up—and begin emulating the alien mind.

In Freeware there are indeed a lot of computationally dense objects on Earth—these are descendants of the Software boppers, whose minds now inhabit soft bodies made of gnarly, mold-infested piezoplastic. I really liked the idea of having flexible, slug-like robots that stink—as different as possible from the standard images of machine-men. The form of the moldies had a lot to do with the computer science research I’d been doing on chaos and on cellular automata.

My old character Sta-Hi is an ex-senator in Freeware—by now he calls himself Stahn. Due to various mishaps, Stahn’s wife Wendy has her personality living in a piezoplastic ruff that she wears on her neck. And Stahn’s drug and alcohol problems are seriously messing him up.

While I was writing Freeware in 1995, I was seeing a lot of my artist and cartoonist friend Paul Mavrides. Mavrides had created a number of images for a parodistic cult called the Church of the SubGenius, which has a not-quite-divinity called “Bob,” always spelled with the quotes. The Church, which manages to get people to mail in donations, is a complex, interactive bit of dada art—or rather “bulldada,” as they would have it.

More recently, Mavrides had taken to painting on black velvet. But he wasn’t painting Elvis, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or dogs playing cards. He was painting the Kennedy assassination, the bodies at Jonestown, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS virus, and cockroaches.

Mavrides was a saturnine, puckish character, a little younger than me, and in some ways an inspiration for my character Corey Rhizome— although I hasten to add that Paul doesn’t share most of Corey’s bad traits. I thought of Paul as an old-school beatnik, with his finely honed sense of the absurd and his espresso-dark cynicism. I liked taking a day off and driving up to San Francisco to hang in his studio, often smoking pot, later going out with him for coffee or tapas on nearby Valencia Street. During those peaceful afternoons, if we were in the mood, I’d read Paul the latest chapter of my novel-in-progress while he painted. A writer reading new work to his artist pal—that felt like the way life should be.

In January, 1997, I decided to write another Ware book, this one to be called Realware, with part of it set in the South Pacific island kingdom of Tonga, which my wife and I had recently visited. Realware continues along the thread I followed throughout the Ware series, that is, the process of expanding the range of things that we might regard as being conscious patterns of information. Ten years later, I’d push my expanding-consciousness thread yet another notch further in my pair of novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, in which ordinary, unprogrammed matter comes to life.

I structured Realware as a pair of love stories—I’d come to feel that it’s a good idea to have romance at the heart of a novel. I also included a scene with my main character hugging his estranged father and seeing him off to something like Heaven. And old Cobb himself achieves an apotheosis as well. In writing these scenes, I felt as if I were partially laying to rest the specter of a painful argument I’d had with my father the last time I’d seen him, shortly before his death in 1994. One of the virtues of writing is that you get to revise your past.

I was happy with how Realware came out, I felt it had good tightness and focus. But by now I felt like I’d pushed the series as far as I could— although I do sometimes wonder what kinds of adventures Cobb had with the Metamartians in their flying saucer. I got the idea for the very last line of the Ware tetralogy from Sylvia: “The newlyweds’ eyes were soft, their kisses wet, their hearts free, the big world real.”

One of my other recent writing projects has been an autobiography, with the working title Nested Scrolls, slated to appear from PS Publishing and from Forge Books in 2011. Much of the material in this afterword is in fact drawn from my memoir. So seek out Nested Scrolls if you want to know what else I’ve been doing for all these years. And for ongoing information, you can always check my blog, http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog.

I’m very happy to see my Ware novels one volume like this, and to reach a new generation of readers.

Enjoy the adventures—and seek the gnarl!