Rudy Rucker on the early days of cyberpunk
Rudy Rucker's posted an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls, recounting the early days of the cyberpunk literary movement, in which drugged-out weirdos from around America discovered each other and were abused by science fiction fans:Early Days of CyberpunkI’d meet the other canonical cyberpunk, John Shirley, two years later, when we were both staying with Bruce and Nancy Sterling in Austin, Texas, in town for a science fiction convention that was featuring a panel on cyberpunk. John was a trip. When I woke up on Sterling’s couch in the morning, John was leaning over me, staring at my face.
“I’m trying to analyze the master’s vibes,” he told me.
The antic SF personage Charles Platt was there in spirit, he’d mailed Bruce a primitive Mandelbrot set program that he’d written in Basic. We’d set the program to running on Bruce’s primitive Amiga computer, and a couple of hours later we’d see a new zoom into the bug-shaped fractal–chunky pixels colored in blue, magenta and cyan.,
As we walked around Austin together talking, John had a habit of picking up some random large stone from a lawn, lugging it over to me, and putting it into my hands. Sometimes I’d be so into the conversation that I’d just carry the rock along for a few steps before noticing it.
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