Transreal Cyberpunk (2 page)

Even readers familiar with Rucker and Sterling writing on their own will be amazed by what their combined impudence and erudition yields. Despite all the zany invention, there are recurring themes and locales, of course. Apocalypse scenarios run rampant, from the historical (the Tunguska explosion) to the highly unlikely (twelfth-dimensional cosmic collapse). In one of his story notes, Sterling even refers to their compositional methods as “a ridiculous catastrophe.” And the sites the authors are drawn to are spaces where innovation in all its forms can range free: scientific outposts, high-tech labs, digital media workshops, blogger confabs.

Most of the stories are set in some real or imaginary version of California, with its ethos of libertarian license and subcultural self-fashioning. It’s a world Rucker knows quite well—indeed, it’s his home base: he’s one of the finest chroniclers of West Coast outlawry since the early Steinbeck (who gets a shout-out in one of the stories). In this laidback technotopia, Sterling is like a visitor from another planet, skeptical where Rucker is accepting, dubious where Rucker is sanguine, a hipster rather than a hippie. Sterling’s instinct is always to hide behind the pose of a no-nonsense, dispassionate, if not slightly blasé raconteur, while Rucker’s main urge is towards the heartfelt, the confessional, the whimsically revelatory. Yet both are audacious, captivating storytellers, and their contrasting styles bring out the best in one another: Sterling lets his hair down, gets a little funky, while Rucker takes on a harder, more cynical edge. The result is nothing less than astonishing.

For those unfamiliar with the concept, “transrealism” is a term of Rucker’s coinage designed to refer to a combination of science-fictional inspiration and quotidian, if not memoiristic authenticity—or, as Sterling puts it at one point, a “mix of the visionary and the mundane.” Influences range from Burroughs to Hunter S. Thompson to Philip K. Dick, the effect being of an everyday world shot through with veins of hallucinatory wonder, fissured with portals into strange dimensions. Rucker’s early novels,
Software
and
Spacetime Donuts
, are classics of the form, and it was a newspaper review of those works by Sterling that first drew the two authors together. They met in 1983, and by 1985 had become, if not kindred spirits, then partners in crime, authoring a hilariously surreal take on the origins of the space age, “Storming the Cosmos,” for
Asimov’s Science Fiction
. As their story notes here make plain, they met infrequently over the years, but when they did, the sparks of inspiration flew, giving birth to some of the oddest works of contemporary SF I know of.

The transrealism of these stories lies in the fact that each contains a mismatched pair of friends, refractions of Sterling and Rucker, with the authors sometimes speaking for themselves, sometimes ventriloquizing one another. The history of SF is full of “buddy story” cycles, from Asimov’s
I, Robot
to Lem’s
Cyberiad
, but
Transreal Cyberpunk
differs from these precursors since the identities of the protagonists don’t stay fixed. In one story, we’re given a pair of Russian cosmo-nuts who discover an alien stardrive while zonked on psychedelic mushrooms, in another a pair of digital tinkerers dealing with an extra-dimensional ant invasion. The genders and sexualities of the duo morph from story to story—at one point forming a romantic couple facing down the end of the universe together. The pairs fight, they flirt, they fend off mutant “petware.” What stays consistent is a bantering tone drawn from classic screwball comedy, as the brainiac buddies debate Big Ideas while dashing from one mad escapade to another.

While this might sound somewhat formulaic, that is not the effect at all. Indeed, these aren’t just SF buddy stories, they’re metafictional reflections on buddy stories—and, more than that, potent fictive meditations on the virtues and vicissitudes of friendship itself. They don’t just reflect, they
embody
collaboration, dialogue, disputation. The stories are organized chronologically, and the characters seem to grow older together, the tones darkening, the humor taking on a sharper edge. The final story, written expressly for the volume, features a serene sage who faces down an ecological catastrophe with stoic bemusement. But he has not lost his youthful exuberance: after all, he has a kraken for a sidekick!

Transreal Cyberpunk
is a labor of love from two of the most protean SF authors of the past three decades. It is also a goofball chronicle of a unique and admirable friendship. As with most friendships, the book loses its temper at times, or makes a brazen fool of itself, but it also rises to rapturous heights of zonked-out fellow feeling you’re unlikely to find anywhere outside the pages of Kerouac or Rabelais. Science fiction is the richer for it.

Storming the Cosmos

I first met Vlad Zipkin at a Moscow beatnik party in the glorious winter of 1957. I went there as a KGB informer. Because of my report on that first meeting, poor Vlad had to spend six months in a mental hospital—not that he wasn’t crazy.

As a boy I often tattled on wrongdoers, but I certainly didn’t plan to grow up to be a professional informer. It just worked out that way. The turning point was in the spring of 1953, when I failed my completion exams at the All-Union Metallurgical Institute. I’d been working towards those exams for years; I wanted to help build the rockets that would launch us into the Infinite.

And then, suddenly, one day in April, it was all over. Our examination grades were posted, and I was one of the three in seventeen who’d failed. To take the exam again, I’d have to wait a whole year. First I was depressed, then angry. I knew for a fact that four of the students with good grades had cheated. I, who was honest, had failed; and they, who had cheated, had passed. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t communist—I went and told the head of the Institute.

The upshot was that I passed after all, and became an assistant metallurgical engineer at the Kaliningrad space center. But, in reality, my main duty was to make weekly reports to the KGB on what my coworkers thought and said and did. I was, frankly, grateful to have my KGB work to do, as most of the metallurgical work was a bit beyond me.

There is an ugly Russian word for informer:
stukach
, snitch. The criminals, the psychotics, the parasites, and the beatniks—to them I was a
stukach
. But without
stukachi
, our communist society would explode into anarchy or grind to a decadent halt. Vlad Zipkin might be a genius, and I might be a
stukach
—but society needed us both.

I first met Vlad at a party thrown by a girl called Lyuda. Lyuda had her own Moscow apartment; her father was a Red Army colonel-general in Kaliningrad. She was a nice, sexy girl who looked a little like Doris Day.

Lyuda and her friends were all beatniks. They drank a lot; they used English slang; they listened to jazz; and the men hung around with prostitutes. One of the guys got Lyuda pregnant and she went for an abortion. She had VD as well. We heard of this, of course. Word spreads about these matters. Someone in Higher Circles decided to eliminate the anti-social sex gangster responsible for this. It was my job to find out who he was.

It was a matter for space-center KGB because several rocket-scientists were known to be in Lyuda’s orbit. My approach was cagey. I made contact with a prostitute named Trina who hung around the Metropol, the Moskva, and other foreign hotels. Trina had chic Western clothes from her customers, and she was friends with many of the Moscow beatniks. I’m certainly not dashing enough to charm a girl like Trina—instead, I simply told her that I was KGB, and that if she didn’t get me into one of Lyuda’s bashes I’d have her arrested.

Lyuda’s pad was jammed when we got there. I was proud to show up with a cool chick like Trina on my arm. I looked very sharp too, with the leather jacket, and the black stove-pipe pants with no cuffs that all the beatniks were wearing that season. Trina stuck right with me—as we’d planned—and lots of men came up to talk to us. Trina would get them to talking dirty, and then I’d make some remark about Lyuda, ending with “but I guess she has a boyfriend?” The problem was that she had lots of them. I kept having to go into the bathroom to write down more names. Somehow I had to decide on one particular guy.

Time went on, and I got tenser. Cigarette smoke filled the room. The bathroom was jammed and I had to wait. When I came back I saw Trina with a hardcore beatnik named Starsky—he got her attention with some garbled Americanisms: “Hey baby, let’s jive down to Hollywood and drink cool Scotch. I love making it with gone broads like you and Lyuda.” He showed her a wad of hard currency—dollars he had illegally bought from tourists. I decided on the spot that Starsky was my man, and told Trina to leave with him and find out where he lived.

Now that I’d finished my investigation, I could relax and enjoy myself. I got a bottle of vodka and sat down by Lyuda’s Steinway piano. Some guy in sunglasses was playing a slow boogie-woogie. It was lovely, lovely enough to move me to tears—tears for Lyuda’s corrupted beauty, tears for my lost childhood, tears for my mother’s grave.

A sharp poke in the thigh interrupted my reverie.

“Quit bawling, fatso, this isn’t the Ukraine.”

The voice came from beneath the piano. Leaning down, I saw a man sitting cross-legged there, a thin, blond man with pale eyes. He smiled and showed his bad teeth. “Cheer up, pal, I mean it. And pass me that vodka bottle you’re sucking. My name’s Vlad Zipkin.”

I passed him my bottle. “I’m Nikita Iosifovich Globov.”

“Nice shoes,” Vlad said admiringly. “Cool jacket, too. You’re a snappy dresser, for a rocket-type.”

“What makes you think I’m from the space center?” I said.

Vlad lowered his voice. “The shoes. You got those from Nokidze the Kazakh, the black market guy. He’s been selling ‘em all over Kaliningrad.”

I climbed under the piano with Zipkin. The air was a little clearer there. “You’re one of us, Comrade Zipkin?”

“I do information theory,” Zipkin whispered, drunkenly touching one finger to his lips. “We’re designing error-proof codes for communicating with the ... you know.” He made a little orbiting movement with his forefinger and looked upward at the shiny dark bottom of the piano. The Sputnik had only been up since October. We space workers were still not used to talking about it in public.

“Come on, don’t be shy,” I said, smiling. “We can say ‘Sputnik,’ can’t we? Everyone in the world has talked of nothing else for months!”

It was easy to draw Vlad out. “My group’s hush-hush,” he bragged criminally. “The top brass think ‘information theory’ has to be classified and censored. But the theory’s not information itself, it’s an abstract meta-information ...” He burbled on a while in the weird jargon of his profession. I grew bored and opened a pack of Kent cigarettes.

Vlad bummed one instantly. He was impressed that I had American cigarettes. Only cool black-market operators had classy cigs like that. Vlad felt the need to impress me in return. “Khrushchev wants the next sputnik to broadcast propaganda,” he confided, blowing smoke. “The Internationale in outer space—what foolishness!” Vlad shook his head. “As if countries matter anymore outside our atmosphere. To any real Russian, it is already clear that we have surpassed the Americans. Why should we copy their fascist nationalism? We have soared into the void and left them in the dirt!” He grinned. “Damn, these are good smokes. Can you get me a connection?”

“What are you offering?” I said.

He nodded at Lyuda. “See our hostess? You see those earrings she has? They’re gold-plated transistors I stole from the Center! All property is theft, hey Nikita?”

I liked Vlad well enough, but I felt duty-bound to report his questionable attitudes along with my information about Starsky. Political deviance such as Vlad’s is a type of mental illness. I liked Vlad enough to truly want to see him get better.

Having made my report, I returned to Kaliningrad, and forgot about Vlad. I didn’t hear about him for a month.

Since the early ‘50s, Kaliningrad had been the home of the Soviet space effort. Kaliningrad was thirty kilometers north of Moscow and had once been a summer resort. There we worked heroically at rocket research and construction—though the actual launches took place at the famous Baikonur Cosmodrome, far to the south. I enjoyed life in Kaliningrad. The stores were crammed with Polish hams and fresh lamb chops, and the landscape of forests and lakes was romantic and pleasant. Security was excellent.

Outside the research complex and block apartments were
dachas
, resort homes for space scientists, engineers, and party officials, including our top boss, the Chief Designer himself. The entire compound was surrounded by a high wood-and-concrete fence manned around the clock by armed guards. It was very peaceful. The compound held almost fifty
dachas
. I owned a small one—a kitchen and two rooms—with large garden filled with fruit trees and berry bushes, now covered by winter snow.

A month after Lyuda’s party, I was enjoying myself in my
dacha
, quietly pressing a new suit I had bought from Nokidze the Kazakh, when I heard a black ZIL sedan splash up through the mud outside. I peeked through the curtains. A woman stamped up the path and knocked. I opened the door slightly.