last byte

From the intersection of computational science and technological speculation, with boundaries limited only by our ability to imagine what could be.

DOI: 10.1145/2398356.2398382
Rudy Rucker
future tense
share My
enlightenment
I self-publish, and you get to sail my aether wave for free.

i’Ve ALWAYs thouGht of my novels as “beatnik science fiction,” not that anyone else uses those words. “Beatnik” is just something I like. I’m more what you’d call a kiqqie or a qrude. I live in a hole in the ground. I eat dirt. These are modern times.

At 36 I published my first novel, Bad Brain, about a brain in a jar that grows tentacles, rides a bicycle to the studio of a talk-radio station, and hollows out the head of an anti-beatnik broadcaster. Having preserved the original gray matter in its own jar, the bad brain takes up residence within the vacated skull and entertains the radio audience in offbeat but positive ways, tutoring the broadcaster’s brain all the while. At book’s end, the now-peace-loving broadcaster’s brain is restored to its place, and the bad brain rides his bicycle into the sunset in search of further ways to improve the world. Bad Brain appeared in paperback and as an aether wave. It was met with indifference, mutating to derision and scorn.

No matter. I developed a following. I won an award.

At night, alone in my burrow, I’d rub my feelers over the emerging good reviews. My quill would stiffen. My ink-sac would fill. I wrote more beatnik SF novels.

As I stand before you today, I’m 66, with a stack of beatnik SF novels to my credit. Meanwhile, my sales have turned anemic, with ever-smaller print-runs. The cretinous, slavering fans have become oblivious to my work. The reviewers jeer, and exhort me to stop.

As a comeback stratagem, I pub-

lished my autobiography, Beatnik SF Writer. My long-term publisher and I thought it might serve as a late-life mainstream break-out title. It bombed, and my long-term publisher dropped me.

at this point
my plan was
to distribute
my novel
as malware.

What next? I wrote another beatnik SF novel, On The Nod, about a Kentucky boy on a galactic roadtrip with a drug-addled alien cuttlefish searching for its soul, with the soul found in the gut of a microscopic cockroach in a you-tweak-it gene bar in Oakland, CA.

I found a small publisher for On The Nod. For reasons that were, I maintain, solely logistical, it bombed, too. The small publisher dropped me.

I began writing another beatnik SF novel. What else could I do? I should mention, by the way, that at all times I have had at least a few loyal followers, my cognoscenti. I dedicated my new novel to them. This one I called Zip Zap, about an allegedly insane man who befriends a possibly imaginary sea slug from the 10th [ContinueD on P. 135]

aMusInGly sInIstER t WEaKEd sElF-PORtRaIt by Rudy RuCKER