Burritos demand to be eaten and, when characters need light, they
ask ceilings to glow in Rudy Rucker‘s new novel,
Hylozoic. This latest by the multi-award-winning
mathematician/computer scientist/cyberpunk pioneer — whose nearly
three dozen previous works include Realware, Spacetime
Donuts, and Postsingular — is set in a postgadget
futureworld where telepathy and telekinesis have replaced technology.
But it’s under threat from aliens, including some that take the form of
“nasty man-sized birds” and others that resemble giant flying
stingrays. Battling them are honeymooners Thuy Nguyen and Jorge
“Jayjay” Jimenez and a vast cast of characters that includes the
15th-century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch. Rocks and atoms
communicate. A pitchfork speaks with a hillbilly twang.
Rucker, who will be at Moe’s Books (2476 Telegraph
Ave., Berkeley) on Sunday, June 7, says his “ideas trickle in
unpredictably. Often I’ll push for an idea, focusing on a story
situation and trying to imagine what comes next. When I’m brainstorming
like this, it helps to be taking notes. … Making little drawings
helps, too.” As does traveling. To absorb local color for
Hylozoic, he visited Bosch’s hometown and spent a week living on
San Francisco’s Valencia Street: “I don’t always get the full insight
that I need while I’m pushing. The search seems to continue in my
subconscious, and maybe a few hours or even days later I’ll get an
‘aha’ moment about what I need to do.”
He has admired Bosch’s visionary, weird works “ever since high
school, when my big brother showed me a book of his paintings. Given my
bent towards science fiction, surrealism, and fantastical worlds, Bosch
is a natural for me. I’ve often wondered what kind of person Bosch was.
Some passages in his pictures seem rather cruel; in other spots you
pick up a feeling of ecstasy, and then again there’s often a feeling of
mockery and satire. I enjoyed trying to combine these hints into a
character in Hylozoic — where he comes across as a genius,
a devoted artist, somewhat sarcastic, a mystic, and something of a
prick.”
Rucker paints, too, creating sherbet-bright oils and acrylics such
as “Stun City,” “The Attack of the Mandelbrot Set,” “Arf and the
Saucer” (in which a dog barks at starfishlike creatures emerging from a
spacecraft and leaping into what looks like a hot tub), and “Welcome to
Mars.”
“It’s not pleasant or productive to sit at my computer trying to
write all day. If I do that, I start feeling sorry for myself, like a
shut-in. … Painting is totally unlike using a computer. I smear
things around, I drool over the pretty colors, and nothing is perfectly
neat. My level of manual control is low enough that I tend to surprise
myself with what I end up painting. Sometimes these surprises show me
things that are a good fit for my current novel or story — you
might say that I’m channeling information from another part of my
brain.” 7:30 p.m., free. MoesBooks.com
