At the end of 1985, I’d just finished writing Mind Tools, a popular non-fiction book about math, and I was stoked to write science fiction again. I always start missing SF before too long—the funky old-school grooves, the wild thought experiments, the idiosyncratic characters with their warped argot, the eternal pursuit of transcendent truth.
Ace had let Software go out of print, so now Susan Protter got me a deal with John Douglas at Avon Books to reissue Software along with a projected sequel to be called Wetware. Both would appear as mass-market paperbacks.
Odd as it now seems, it was only with Wetware—my thirteenth book— that I started writing on a computer. The previous dozen manuscripts were all typed, with much physical cutting and pasting. Sometimes, if I couldn’t face typing up a fair copy of the marked-up and glued-together final draft, I’d hire a typist.
But with Wetware I was ready to change. I was still a freelance writer in Lynchburg, Virginia. Sylvia, the kids and I drove up to Charlottesville in November, 1985, and visited the only computer store in central Virginia. I ended up with what was known as a CP/M machine, made by Epson, with Peachtext word-processing software, and a daisy wheel printer. The system came with a Pac-Man-like computer game called Mouse Trap that the kids loved to play.
While I was gearing up for Wetware, I’d started what I thought was going to be a short story called “People That Melt,” and I sent the story fragment to my cyberpunk friend William Gibson, hoping that he’d help me finish it and, not so incidentally, lend the growing luster of his name.
He said he was too busy to complete such a project, but he did write a couple of pages for me, and said I was free to fold them into my mix in any fashion I pleased. As I continued work on my “People That Melt” story, it got good to me, and it ended up as the first chapter of Wetware. As a tip of the hat, I put in a character named Max Yukawa who resembled my notion of Bill Gibson—a reclusive mastermind with a thin, strangely flexible head.
Once I got rolling, I wrote Wetware at white heat. I think I finished the first draft during a six-week period from February to March of 1986. I made a special effort to give the boppers’ speech the bizarre Beat rhythms of Kerouac’s writing—indeed, I’d sometimes look into Jack’s great Visions of Cody for inspiration. Wetware was a gift from the muse—insane, mind-boggling, and, in my opinion, a cyberpunk masterpiece.
A couple of years later, in 1989, Wetware would win me a second Philip K. Dick award.
This award ceremony was at a smallish regional SF con in Tacoma, Washington. It wasn’t like the artists’ loft in New York at all. It was in a windowless hotel ballroom with a dinner of rubber ham and mashed potatoes.
I still wasn’t making much money from my writing, and I’d started working two day jobs, teaching computer science and programming in Silicon Valley. I didn’t have time to write as much as before, which was putting me into a depressed state of mind. Winning the award, I felt like some ruined Fitzgerald character lolling on a luxury liner in the rain—his inheritance has finally come through, but it’s too late. He’s a broken man.
In my acceptance speech, I talked about why I’d dedicated Wetware to Phil Dick, and why, in particular, I’d added a quote from Albert Camus about Sisyphus.
“I see Sisyphus as the god of writers or, for that matter, artists in general. You labor for months and years, rolling your thoughts and emotions into a great ball, inching it up to the mountain top. You let it go and—wheee! It’s gone. Nobody notices. And then Sisyphus walks down the mountain to start again. Here’s how Camus puts it in his essay, The Myth of Sisyphus: ‘Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that as to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’”
As so often happens to me, nobody knew what the fuck I was talking about. One of the fans invited me to come to his room and shoot up with ketamine, an offer which I declined. Outside the weather was pearly gray, with uniformed high-school marching bands practicing for something in the empty streets.
In 1995, I’d been laid off from my programming job, but I was still a computer science professor at San Jose State University, south of San Francisco. A year had gone by with no novel even started, and now it was time to get back on the One True Path. I decided to return to the world of Software and Wetware, and I began work on Freeware, which would eventually appear in 1997.
I sometimes write well when I don’t feel particularly creative. On a given day, it can be good if I’m just doggedly trying to finish the next scene of another goddamn novel. If I feel like I’m crafting a masterwork, the language is more likely to get away from me. When nothing is at stake, I’m free to go wild with the effects and have my characters say brutally honest things—without losing control. I develop a deadpan, surreal tone that I think of as writing degree zero.
The meaning of “freeware” in my novel is that, throughout the universe, alien minds are traveling from world to world in the form of compressed information files—akin to the files you might download from the web. When these rays strike a sufficiently rich computational object, the object may wake up—and begin emulating the alien mind.
In Freeware there are indeed a lot of computationally dense objects on Earth—these are descendants of the Software boppers, whose minds now inhabit soft bodies made of gnarly, mold-infested piezoplastic. I really liked the idea of having flexible, slug-like robots that stink—as different as possible from the standard images of machine-men. The form of the moldies had a lot to do with the computer science research I’d been doing on chaos and on cellular automata.
My old character Sta-Hi is an ex-senator in Freeware—by now he calls himself Stahn. Due to various mishaps, Stahn’s wife Wendy has her personality living in a piezoplastic ruff that she wears on her neck. And Stahn’s drug and alcohol problems are seriously messing him up.
While I was writing Freeware in 1995, I was seeing a lot of my artist and cartoonist friend Paul Mavrides. Mavrides had created a number of images for a parodistic cult called the Church of the SubGenius, which has a not-quite-divinity called “Bob,” always spelled with the quotes. The Church, which manages to get people to mail in donations, is a complex, interactive bit of dada art—or rather “bulldada,” as they would have it.
More recently, Mavrides had taken to painting on black velvet. But he wasn’t painting Elvis, the Virgin of Guadalupe, or dogs playing cards. He was painting the Kennedy assassination, the bodies at Jonestown, the Challenger explosion, the AIDS virus, and cockroaches.
Mavrides was a saturnine, puckish character, a little younger than me, and in some ways an inspiration for my character Corey Rhizome— although I hasten to add that Paul doesn’t share most of Corey’s bad traits. I thought of Paul as an old-school beatnik, with his finely honed sense of the absurd and his espresso-dark cynicism. I liked taking a day off and driving up to San Francisco to hang in his studio, often smoking pot, later going out with him for coffee or tapas on nearby Valencia Street. During those peaceful afternoons, if we were in the mood, I’d read Paul the latest chapter of my novel-in-progress while he painted. A writer reading new work to his artist pal—that felt like the way life should be.
In January, 1997, I decided to write another Ware book, this one to be called Realware, with part of it set in the South Pacific island kingdom of Tonga, which my wife and I had recently visited. Realware continues along the thread I followed throughout the Ware series, that is, the process of expanding the range of things that we might regard as being conscious patterns of information. Ten years later, I’d push my expanding-consciousness thread yet another notch further in my pair of novels Postsingular and Hylozoic, in which ordinary, unprogrammed matter comes to life.