Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolph Von Bitter Rucker - Hardcover

Rucker, Rudy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 076532752X ISBN 13: 9780765327529

Verlag: Tor Books, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

Nested Scrolls reveals the true life adventures of Rudolf von Bitter “Rudy” Rucker—mathematician, transrealist author, punk rocker, and computer hacker. It begins with a young boy growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a businessman father who becomes a clergyman, and a mother descended from the philosopher Hegel. His career goals? To explore infinity, popularize the fourth dimension, seek the gnarl, become a beatnik writer, and father a family.

All the while Rudy is reading science fiction and beat poetry, and beginning to write some pretty strange fiction of his own—a blend of Philip K. Dick and hard SF that qualifies him as part of the original circle of writers in the early 1980s that includes Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, John Shirley, and Lewis Shiner, who were the founders of cyberpunk.

At one level, Rucker’s genial and unfettered memoir brings us a first-hand account of how he and his contemporaries ushered in our postmodern world. At another, this is the wry and moving tale of a man making his way from one turbulent century to the next.

Nested Scrolls is like its author: sweet, gentle, honest, and intellectually fierce.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RUDY RUCKER lives in Los Gatos, California. He has twice won the Philip K. Dick Award.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Death’s Door
 
 
In the summer of 2008 a vein burst in my brain. A cerebral hemorrhage. I spent a week at death’s door, and then I got better. In normal times I don’t think directly about death—it’s like trying to stare at the sun. But that summer I did think about it.
It would have been easy to die. Conditioned by a zillion novels and movies, you tend to think of death as a big drama—with a caped Grim Reaper kicking in your midnight door. But death may be as ordinary as an autumn leaf dropping from a tree. No spiral tunnel, no white light, no welcome from the departed ones. Maybe it’s just that everything goes black.
In those first mornings at the hospital, I’d sit on their patio with an intravenous drip on a little rolling stand, and I’d look at the clouds in the sky. They drifted along, changing shapes, with the golden sunlight on them. The leaves of a potted palm tree rocked chaotically in the gentle airs, the fronds clearly outlined against the marbled blue and white heavens. Somehow I was surprised that the world was still doing gnarly stuff without any active input from me.
I think this was when I finally came to accept that the world would indeed continue after I die. Self-centered as I am, this simple fact had always struck me as paradoxical. But now I understood it, right down in my deepest core. The secrets of the life and death are commonplace, yet only rarely can we hear them.
Sitting on that patio—and even more so when I came home—I came to understand another natural fact as well. The richest and most interesting parts of my life are the sensations that come in from the outside. As long as I’d been in my hospital bed, the world was dull and gray. I’d been cut off from external input, halfway down the ramp into the underworld. When I made it back to the trees, people, clouds, and water, I was filled with joy at being alive. It was like being born.
*   *   *
I had a similar rebirth experience right before my fourteenth birthday in 1960. My big brother Embry and I were in the back yard playing with our rusty old kiddie swing set—seeing who could jump the furthest. The chain of the swing broke. I flew through the air and landed badly, rupturing my spleen—as I immediately told my father. I might have died of internal bleeding in less than an hour if he hadn’t rushed me to the hospital to have the crushed spleen removed.
What made me think it was my spleen? I’d been studying a paperback book about karate in the hope of making myself less vulnerable to the hoodlum bullies I feared, also I’d been (fruitlessly) trying to build up karate-calluses on my hands by pounding them into a coffee-can of uncooked rice. My karate book had a chart of attack points on the body, and there was one in the belly area marked “spleen”—so I happened to make the right guess. Our doctor talked about this for years.
After the operation, I woke in the night from dreams of struggle to see an attractive private nurse leaning over me. I realized with embarrassment that this pleasant woman, one of my father’s parishioners, was the unseen force whom I’d been fighting and soddenly cursing while trying to pull a painfully thick tube from my nose.
When I came home from the gray and white hospital room, it was springtime, and our back yard was sunny and green. The shiny magnolia tree was blooming, the birds were fluttering and chirping, the blue sky shone above our familiar house. I was flooded with sweetness, dizzy with joy, trembling and on the verge of tears. I’d never realized how wonderful my life was.
In the coming weeks and months, I’d occasionally brood over that blank interval when I was under the anesthetic. I drew the conclusion that someday I’d go unconscious for good, like, bam and then—nothing. This was my introduction to life’s fundamental puzzler koan: Here you are, and life is great, but someday you’ll be dead. What can you do about it?
*   *   *
I used to imagine that I’d live to be eighty-four, but after my brain hemorrhage on July 1, 2008, I started thinking I might not last so long. Suppose that I only had time to write one more book. What should I write? This book. My autobiography. Nested Scrolls.
Actually, I’d already started thinking about writing a final memoir back in 2003. I’d been out backpacking on my own, and I was on a rocky beach in Big Sur, with the sun going down. I was thinking about my recently deceased friend Terence McKenna—with whom I’d once led an utterly bogus but enjoyable seminar at the new age Esalen hot springs resort nearby, a three-day class called, I think, “Stoneware and Wetware.”
A seagull looked at me. His eyes disappeared when seen directly head-on. Using my ever-present roller-ball pen and pocket-scrap of paper, I drew him in four or five positions. He was staring out to sea, cawing, looking at me, glancing at the shore, looking down at his feet. I don’t draw especially well, but sometimes I do it as a way of focusing my perceptions, or as a way to grab a kind of souvenir. Like a snapshot.
Sulfur smell wafted from a stream raging into the restless sea. I felt lucky to be on this wild shore.
“I love you,” I said to the seagull. He bowed. We repeated this exchange. Maybe the seagull was Terence.
I’d set out on my backpacking trip with a hope of deciding what to write next. And, looking at the seagull, the notion of an autobiography popped into my head. I was seeing it in terms of settling scores and taking credit. And I liked that I wouldn’t have to learn anything new to write it.
But I wasn’t ready. First I wanted to analyze the deeper meaning of computers, by writing a hefty volume with a long title: The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How To Be Happy. This non-fiction tome appeared in 2005, and then I got into dramatizing its new ideas in the context of three science fiction novels: Mathematicians in Love, Postsingular and Hylozoic. And then, unexpectedly, in 2008 I had to swing by death’s door.
I’m no longer very interested in the self-promotional aspects of an autobiographical memoir. As dusk falls, however rapidly or slowly, what I’m looking for is understanding and—time travel. A path into my past.
The thing I like about a novel is that it’s not a list of dates and events. Not like an encyclopedia entry. It’s all about characterization and description and conversation. Action and vignettes. I’d like to write a memoir like that.
Most lives don’t have a plot that’s as clear as a novel’s. But maybe I can discover, or invent, a story arc for my life. I’d like to know what it was all about.
*   *   *
Four years before starting this memoir—that is, back in 2004—I retired from my job as a professor of computer science at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley. I taught for thirty-seven years, sometimes taking a semester or two off. Although I always felt good about the social usefulness of teaching, I also regarded it as a day-job, with my writing being my real job. Once I was old enough to get a pension, I was happy to step away from teaching and to put my full energy into writing.
Being retired felt weird at first. When you quit a job, you’re losing part of your identity.
During my second winter off, in 2005, I spent a few days organizing my papers in the basement. I had a lot of stuff—reaching all the way back to a carton of papers my mother...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 076532752X
• ISBN 13: 9780765327529
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 327
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: RUE DE SEVRES; https://www.hachette.fr/; ; 1 AVENUE GUTENBERG; MAUREPAS CEDEX; 78319; Frankreich