Free Collected Essays by Rudy Rucker

tripod legs.
“Her hold bears a rich cargo of moldie-flesh,” came Ulam’s calm, eldritch voice in Willy’s head. “Ten metric tons of chipmold-infected imipolex, surely to be worth a king’s ransom once this substance’s virtues become known. This cargo is why Fern flew the Selena here for ISDN. I tell you, the flesher rabble attacks the Selena at their own peril. Although the imipolex is highly flammable, it has a low-grade default intelligence and will not hesitate to punish those who would harm it.”
When the first people tried to climb aboard the Selena , the ship unexpectedly rose up on her telescoping tripod legs and lumbered away. As the ship slowly lurched along, great gouts of imipolex streamed out of hatches in her bottom. The Selena looked like a defecating animal, like a threatened ungainly beast voiding its bowels in flight—like a frightened penguin leaving a splatter trail of krilly shit. Except that the Selena’s shit was dividing itself up into big slugs that were crawling away towards the mangroves and ditches as fast as they could hump, which was plenty fast.
Of course someone in the mob quickly figured out that the you could burn the imipolex shit slugs, and a lot of the slugs started going up in crazy flames and oily, unbelievably foul-smelling smoke. The smoke had a strange, disorienting effect; as soon as Willy caught a whiff of it, his ears started buzzing and the objects around him took on a jellied, peyote solidity.
Now the burning slugs turned on their tormentors, engulfing them like psychedelic kamikaze napalm. There was great screaming from the victims, screams that were weirdly, hideously ecstatic. And then the mob’s few survivors had fled, and the rest of the slugs had wormed off into the flickering night. Willy and Ulam split the scene as well.
    Cyberpunk lives!
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    Note on “Cyberpunk Lives”
    Written 1998.
    Appeared as “Letters From Home” in The New York Review of Science Fiction , #113, January 1998.
    Although it’s framed as a review of three books, the essay also has some of my thoughts on the similarities between the cyberpunks and the Beats. I particularly like the idea that I get to be Burroughs. And I mention the meeting with Ginsberg that I describe in my “William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg” essay—one of the high points of my life.

The Freestyle Antifesto (Written with Marc Laidlaw)
    Write like yourself. Exaggerate it. Write more like yourself. You are correct. Write more. Only you have the secret. Tell every detail in the readiest tongue. Write like yourself except more so. Everyone but you is crazy. Write high, write drunk, write depressed, write in ecstasy, always tell the truth and always lie. Manipulate subtext; transreally seize each character and attitude from that day’s mental magpie-gleanings. Your streetscene events are, ideally, to be elicited by you in the manner of a ranter who leaves no soul unturned—and no idler in your room’s corner is left unharrassed or unloved or untreated to a freestyle soul-winning session.
    I view Marc Laidlaw as the head freestylist, the behind-it-all zealot surfpunk dictator of freestyle. Marc is the author of that most immaculate novel, Dad’s Nuke , where timebake flurries snatch your ass from the diaper into the deathbed. On deck: Marc’s Tibetan Buddhist SF novel, The Neon Lotus , with the future fantasia Kalifornia still to come.
    Marc and I picked up on the word freestyle while working on our surfing SF story, “Probability Pipeline.” To me, surfing has always been a central life image, as in the phrase, “wave with it.” Now that I’m in California, I got a wetsuit and used board from local shop. By way of further research, I went out to try surfing at Three Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz on New Year’s Day, 1987, with my wife Sylvia, Marc, his wife Geraldine, and our three kids. Memorable.
    By way of introducing Marc’s quintessential summation of freestyle writing, he sent me an ad torn