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one person. These days I’m more likely to collage together a variety of observed traits to make my characters. Like a magpie gathering up bright scraps for a nest. One way to gather scraps for characters is to jot down gestures and remarks that you see or hear on the street. This is the method that Jack Kerouac called “sketching”. And sometimes I even let myself make things up out of whole cloth.
    Earlier in my career, it seemed important to put a character like me into my novels, and to depict the people around me. This is due in part to a young writer’s egotism—what could be more important than one’s own personal experience!
    As my mentor Robert Sheckley remarked in his preface to my story collection Transreal! “A writer’s first problem is how to write. His second is how to write a story. His third is how to write about himself.”
    I no longer feel as strong an urge to directly depict myself in my fiction. But even without a specifically Rudoid character, my books can be transreal. My Ware novels are full of refracted images of my life when I was writing them, as John Roche points out in “Beat Zen, Alien Zen: Varieties of Transreal Experience in Rudy Rucker’s Ware Novels.” Although there’s nothing of present-day California in As Above, So Below, my historical novel about Peter Bruegel, I came to identify so deeply with Bruegel that I put very much of myself into his character depiction. And the same thing happened when I represented Edgar Allan Poe in my alternate history The Hollow Earth .
    Turning to some of my later novels, although Spaceland was transreally based on life in Silicon Valley, I went ahead and made the main character Joe Cube quite unlike me—I made him a not-too-bright middle-manager. Since the action of the book involves having Joe explore higher dimensions, I thought that the reader might find it more congenial to have Joe be non-mathematical, so as better to mirror the puzzlement that the reader might feel.
    My epic quest novel Frek and the Elixir would seem to be a complete fabulation: it’s set in the year 3003 and involves travel to utterly alien worlds. But Frek’s hometown is transreally modeled on the town of Lynchburg, Virginia, where I raised my children, and Frek himself includes elements of my own childhood memories as well as images of my son. Frek’s personal difficulties with his father mirror both my own relations with my father and my son’s relations with me. And the political subtext of the book is a direct expression of my feelings about Y2K America.
    My next novel Mathematicians In Love is set once again the contemporary Bay Area of California, and my main characters are young mathematicians incorporating many characteristics of people I’ve known. The main character shares much of my sensibility, but his life experiences are quite different from mine.
    One practical reason for no longer putting my life into my books has to do with something John Updike talks about: a writer’s problem of bit-by-bit using up his or her past. And it may be that as I get older, the more recent parts of my life become less interesting to describe—or in any case less interesting to my youngish target audience.
    In any case, the point is that you can write transreally without overtly using your own life or specific people that you know. Even without having any characters who are particularly like yourself, you can write closely observed works about your own life experiences. And if you’re transmuting these experiences with the alchemy of science fiction, the result is transreal.
    To this point, in his afterword to his great transreal novel, A Scanner Darkly , Philip K. Dick writes, “I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel.”
    Thinking of Philip K. Dick brings a caveat to mind. A transrealist author really does need to model most of his characters upon observations of people other than himself or herself. For in Philip K. Dick’s less successful