The Interviews, April 14, 2021
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Rudy Rucker, All the Interviews, April 14, 2021 All the Interviews by Rudy Rucker Last updated: April 14, 2021 Word count: 128,554. Questions: 1 through 445 All the Interviews is my compilation in chronological order of all of the interview questions I’ve answered by email (with the occasional transcription of a spoken-word interview thrown in as well). The questions (and matching answers) are numbered consecutively. Generally I’ve recorded the dates of the interviews, also the names, towns, and venues of my interviewers. I don’t know why there’s a seven year gap at the start. The first thirty-seven Q&A pairs were reprinted in my non-fiction anthology Seek! (1999). Tokyo, 1990 ................................................................................ 2 Athens, 1997 ............................................................................. 11 Tokyo, 1997 .............................................................................. 13 San Francisco, 1997 .................................................................. 16 St. Paul, Minnesota, 1999 ......................................................... 17 London, 1999 ............................................................................ 18 Erasmus, Belgium, 1999 ........................................................... 20 Novara, Italy, March, 17, 1999 ................................................. 21 New York, July 5, 1999 ............................................................ 23 Austin, Texas, July 20, 1999 ..................................................... 27 New York, May 22, 2001 ......................................................... 30 Paris, June 16, 2001 .................................................................. 31 Rome, January 25, 2002 ............................................................ 33 Mayville, North Dakota, April 5, 2002 ..................................... 37 Austin, Texas, June 20, 2002 .................................................... 40 Madrid, August 27, 2002 .......................................................... 45 Pinole, California March 3, 2003 .............................................. 51 Paris, March 6, 2003 ................................................................. 52 Rome, April 9, 2003.................................................................. 53 Warsaw, May 23, 2003 ............................................................. 57 San Jose, July 20, 2003 ............................................................. 63 San Jose, October 31, 2003 ....................................................... 68 San Francisco, March 17, 2004................................................. 74 Genoa, November 1, 2004 ........................................................ 82 Milano, November 8, 2004 ....................................................... 86 Oakland, September 19, 2005 ................................................... 88 San Francisco, November 9, 2005 ............................................ 92 Rome, November 21, 2005 ....................................................... 95 Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, January 28, 2005 ..... 98 Brighton, United Kingdom, May 29, 2006 ............................. 102 p. 1 Rudy Rucker, All the Interviews, April 14, 2021 Brandywine, Maryland, October 10, 2006.............................. 109 Capetown, South Africa, November 1, 2006 .......................... 115 San Francisco, March 1, 2007................................................. 123 San Francisco, July 18, 2007 .................................................. 131 San Francisco, January 22, 2008............................................. 132 Statesboro, GA, and Mobile, AL, January 29, 2008 ............... 137 Milano, Italy, April 16, 2008 .................................................. 144 Seattle, Washington September 15, 2008 ............................... 147 Los Angeles, California, February 17, 2009 ........................... 153 San Francisco, California, April 20, 2009 .............................. 159 Berkeley, California, May 24, 2009 ........................................ 161 Edmonton, Canada, July 4, 2009 ............................................ 162 Perth Amboy, New Jersey, July 5, 2009 ................................. 168 New York, July 20, 2009 ........................................................ 171 Los Angeles, November 2, 2010 ............................................. 176 Paris, July 27, 2011 ................................................................. 181 Barcelona, September 27, 2011 .............................................. 184 Valencia, October 25, 2011 .................................................... 185 London, November 3, 2011 .................................................... 188 New York, January 3, 2012 .................................................... 191 San Francisco, February 8, 2012............................................. 196 Brazil, September 15, 2012 ..................................................... 201 Lakeland, Florida, October 27, 2012 ...................................... 206 Berkeley, California, December 12, 2012 .............................. 210 Oakland, California, May 2, 2013 .......................................... 214 Portland, Oregon, August 4, 2013 .......................................... 226 Durham, North Carolina, December 16, 2014 ........................ 228 Los Angeles, May 12, 2015 .................................................... 233 San Francisco, June 12, 2015 .................................................. 239 Seattle, February 29, 2016 ...................................................... 242 Hoboken, April 29, 2019 ........................................................ 246 North Sandwich, New Hampshire, May 7, 2019 .................... 250 Washington DC, June 15, 2019 .............................................. 254 Indiana, Pennsylvania, July 1, 2019........................................ 254 Portland, Oregon, November 25, 2020 ................................... 259 Liverpool, England, March 10, 2021 ...................................... 265 Tokyo, 1990 Interviewer: Nozomi Ohmori For: Hayakawa SF Magazine Q1. First of all, I’d like you to tell us something about how you group your novels. In a letter, you categorize The Hacker and the Ants as “transreal autobiography.” So, I also want to know whether it makes an p. 2 Rudy Rucker, All the Interviews, April 14, 2021 interconnected series along with former three novels (The Secret of Life, White Light and The Sex Sphere). A1. My eleven or twelve novels thus far break into three groups: the Ware tetralogy, the Transreal series, and the Others. As you mention, The Hacker and the Ants is part of the Transreal series which includes The Secret of Life, Spacetime Donuts, and White Light. The Secret of Life is about me in high school and college. I was a young beatnik freak punk and the objective correlative for this in the book is that I discover that I am in fact from a flying saucer. Spacetime Donuts, the first SF book I wrote, is about my days as a graduate student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. Note that the hero, Vernor Maxwell, spends a lot of time in libraries! White Light is about when I was a math prof at SUCAS Geneseo in Geneseo, NY. I’ll put a little table for you here. I should mention that I didn’t write the Transreal books in quite the same temporal order as the periods they describe. Transreal Series “My” name Period of my life. The Secret of Life “Conrad Bunger” 63 - 67 Spacetime Donuts “Vernor Maxwell” 67 - 72 White Light “Felix Rayman” 72 - 78 The Sex Sphere “Alwin Bitter” 78 - 80 The Hacker and the Ants “Jerzy Rugby” 86 - 92 Saucer Wisdom “Rudy Rucker” 92 - 97 And then there’s my other six novels. Ware Tetralogy. Software, Wetware, Freeware, Realware. Other Novels. Master of Space and Time, The Hollow Earth. It’s hard to use the same period of your life twice; a writer’s memories are a precious resource that get used up over the course of his or her career. The transreal novel gap from 1980 - 1986 corresponds to my years in Lynchburg, Virginia. I did set a number of transreal short stories in Lynchburg — I usually called it “Killeville.” And The Hollow Earth includes some scenes of Lynchburg as well. Speaking of Lynchburg, one Lynchburg story I never got around to writing would be called “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club,” and it would be about some men who drink and play cards all day every day in the country club locker room, and each evening the black man who takes care of the locker-room puts the men in the steam bath, and all the juice runs out of their bodies, and they’re just leathery skins, and he rolls each skin up and places it overnight to pickle in glass-lined golf club bags filled with whisky that’s inside of that man’s locker. And p. 3 Rudy Rucker, All the Interviews, April 14, 2021 then in the morning the skins go back into the steam bath and swell up, and there’s the platypus honking of the men’s hale morning voices. The men aren’t supposed to be me, mind you, they’re just a Lynchburg image that I never used. If I wrote it, I’d probably tell it from the point of view of a teenage caddy. It could perhaps be a little like Phil Dick’s wonderful story, “The Father Thing.” At the start of this answer, I said I’d written “eleven or twelve novels” because one might either classify Saucer Wisdom as a novel or as some new genre such as “fiction nonfiction.” I would be most inclined to say Saucer Wisdom really is a transreal