Transreal Cyberpunk by Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling

to visit me in Lynchburg, Virginia, where I was living as an unemployed writer, hoping to support my wife and three children. I came home from my rundown office in shades and a Hawaiian shirt, driving our 1956 Buick, and there they were. I was thrilled that they’d visited me.
    Around that time, Bruce started publishing a single-sheet newsletter called Cheap Truth , which railed at the plastic artificiality of much SF. This zine—and Gibson’s huge commercial success—soon established cyberpunk as a legitimate form of writing. I was grateful to be included.
    “Storming the Cosmos” takes off on Bruce’s deep interest in all things Soviet. He brought in a huge mass of facts for our story, which was wonderful. And he did more of the work on this one than me.
    One way to organize a story collaboration is a transreal approach in which each author owns or in some sense is one of the characters. Ultimately Bruce and I organized every single one the Transreal Cyberpunk stories in that way. In “Storming the Cosmos,” Bruce is Nikita and I’m Vlad.
    I was really thrilled that we worked in Laika, the very first space dog. And I still laugh whenever I recall the bit where Nikita is saying, “I did it for Science.”
    This story got a cover on Asimov’s Science Fiction .
    Bruce on “Storming the Cosmos”
    To collaborate with another writer one needs an agenda, because collaboration’s not “half the work,” it’s twice the work, at the least. My agenda in “Storming the Cosmos” was the large problem I had as a Texan science fiction writer coming to terms with “fantastyka,” with Soviet science fiction writing.
    My interest there was, and is, genuine, but I was rather over-burdened with my autodidactic Soviet erudition. Also, there’s something untoward and even tasteless about a Texan fantasist who rashly meddles with Soviet themes, especially when he lacks a humane sympathy for Russians or Marxists, and stares at the vast Soviet historical catastrophe as if it were some lunar ant-pile. As a story, “Storming the Cosmos” is a catalog of Russian catastrophes.
    So the work needed a lighter touch, and Rudy supplied that: Russian beatniks.
    No state-approved Soviet science fiction writer would ever valorize Russia’s bohemian scumbags, erratic dropouts, and wacky refuseniks. But of course Russia did have many genuine counterculture people during the Soviet Space Age: smugglers, stilyagi, jazz listeners, hooligans, parasites, the pampered children of the Red elite. These erratic people would become our Soviet science-fiction heroes.
    It’s their Kerouackian lightness of heart that gets one through this picaresque tale that is, by any objective measure, terrifying. “Storming the Cosmos” is a perky road-tale, a Hope and Crosby Siberian buddy-movie where either or both of the dual leads can be denounced, arrested, jailed, liquidated, or even annihilated by unspeakable cosmic forces. “Storming the Cosmos” is dreadfully funny. Writing the story with Rudy allowed me to expand that blackly comic sensibility; it came pretty easily to him, but I learned it through imitation, and that was quite a useful, long-lasting lesson for me.
    If you have to commit a breach of literary taste, there’s no use being coy and camp about that; you’ve got to be Rabelaisian, Burroughsian, open and big-hearted, it needs to yawp right from the rooftops.
    We quickly decided on dual protagonists—that was a whim, but a whim of iron that has persisted through all our joint works. “My” character, Globov the story’s narrator, is less interesting than Zipkin, the Rucker character. Globov’s best moments, which center on blubbering Slavic self-pity, were written by Rudy. I preferred writing Zipkin, especially those various scenes where Zipkin, a starry-eyed incompetent, tries to harangue and boss his way out of a jam.
    We proved something to one another by writing this story together, as we didn’t collaborate again for nine