"Rucker is an artist well worth discovering, reading, and keeping up with... [His novels] sparkle with deadpan wit and a natural storyteller’s flair.”
--The Washington Post
"Science Fiction author-hero Rudy Rucker is an oddity and a treasure.... In these days of neat little marketing categories, few writers attempt to cover so much ground.”
--Wired
“Rudy Rucker is in possession of one of the world’s most powerful and interesting minds... And he’s holding it for ransom! Nested Scrolls is immensely entertaining, spirited and deep. This is Rudy Rucker at his thoughtful best.”
--Greg Bear, author of Eon
"Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today."
--Charles Stross, author of the Merchant Princes series
“Rucker's Nested Scrolls is a time machine set to move you from 1946 up to the present day Chaosium inside a capsule attached to Rudy’s eyes, which let you see from the infra-red up into the colors of the gamma region, especially when he gets glasses after the age of nine. Travel through a roller-coaster life from the viewpoint of an imaginative boy who grew up to be a mathematician and then moved on into the many dimensional world of a multi-universe traveling writer. Don't forget to hang onto the rails.”
--Donald Kingsbury, author of Courtship Rite
“Like all the best memoirists, Rudy Rucker allows us to glimpse through him the contours of our own lives, and to ponder, a little wistfully, why they couldn't have been more like his.” --Paul Park, author of A Princess of Roumania
“Nested Scrolls is a wild but good-hearted ride through the life of counter-culture mathematician and transrealist science fiction writer, Rudy Rucker. While his journeys toward becoming a writer, mathematician, and computer scientist are initially made easier by use of alcohol and recreational drug, eventually he has to choose to sober up or risk losing everything. It is a remarkable memoir.” --Kathryn Cramer, editor of The Architecture of Fear
“I welcome this important book. It's time the world knew the truth about Rudy Rucker. Now the healing can begin.” --Terry Bisson, author of "Bears Discover Fire"
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 had stored—I had drawings from kindergarten, letters to friends and family, love notes to my girlfriend (and eventual wife) Sylvia, early literary efforts, volume upon volume of journals, traces of my teaching and research, novel notes—and unclassifiable late-night scribbles from me, as dogfather, creeping up from the family den to howl at the moon.
I looked at everything and organized it into four plastic boxes with hanging file holders. I physically touched all of them, and for a little while I knew where they all were.
There’s something deeply melancholy about old papers. I’m kind of hoping I don’t have to root around in them again. I’d rather wing my autobiography, as if I were talking to you during a car-trip, letting the important stories bubble up.
The one basement paper that I’ll mention was a little journal that my mother’s mother kept when she was born. On the first page I saw my mother’s name and birth-year—Marianne von Bitter, 1916—and pressed into the journal were two of my dear mother’s curls. Blonder than I would have expected, and very fresh-looking, as if they’d been snipped the day before, rather than ninety years ago. I kissed them.
* * *
I was pretty bewildered, that first month after my cerebral hemorrhage. I felt like my mind was a giant warehouse where an earthquake had knocked everything off the racks—and I had to reshelve things one by one. I was, like, “Oh, yes, that’s a steam shovel, that’s a potty, that’s a quartz crystal, that’s my first day of nursery school.”
Repeatedly I remembered marrying Sylvia, and how cute she was in her white hat and veil. Somehow I was wonderstruck by the fact that humans come as males and females—and that I’d had the good fortune to marry a female. Sylvia got tired of hearing about my wonder.
“Why are you always so surprised about everything?” she said, and started imitating me. “I can’t believe I have children. I can’t believe I’m alive. I can’t believe the world exists.” Truth be ...
