The Sex Sphere (25 page)

Afterword

I wrote
The Sex Sphere
in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1981-1982. This book is what I call a transreal novel, that is, it’s a science-fictional elaboration upon my actual real-life experiences.

In this case, the autobiographical core is that my family and I lived in Heidelberg, Germany, during the years 1978-1980, where I had a grant to do mathematical research on the nature of infinity. And we did indeed make a trip to Rome with our two younger children one Easter, staying at an inexpensive hotel off the Via Veneto. But, of course, in real life, I didn’t get kidnapped, and I didn’t meet the sex sphere.

Where did I get the idea for the sex sphere? I might blandly say that, as I’m interested in the fourth dimension, I wanted to echo the
Flatland
theme of a sphere that lifts a lower-dimensional being into higher space. But that doesn’t address the
real
question, that is: Why did I write a book about a giant ass from the fourth dimension?

Visually, I think the sex sphere may have been inspired by the paleolithic Venus of Willendorf sculpture—perhaps I saw a photo of the little statuette in the
Scientific American
. Less highbrow inputs might have been the drawings in the underground comix I read at the time—I’m thinking particularly of the work of Robert Williams.

Another reason why I wrote about the sex sphere was that, quite simply, I wanted to be outrageous and to flout conventional notions of propriety. I was chafing at the fact that I was living in the preppy home town of a well-known right-wing television evangelist, while teaching mathematics at a namby-pamby college for women. I was well aware that I was likely to be relieved of my teaching job very soon, and I was singing lead in a half-assed punk band called The Dead Pigs.

In terms of iconography, the sex sphere interested me as she’s an objective correlative for a certain way that men may think of women. And combining her appearance with higher dimensions makes her a male scientist’s image of a love goddess. But it’s important that, in the end, our hero Alwin would rather be with his real, human wife.

My editor for this book was Susan Allison at Ace Books. This week I came across a wonderful letter from her in my files, with one sentence in particular that still warms my heart: “You’ve created a marriage here that for all its looniness is rounded and wonderful, and you may not even be aware how rare it is for a writer to be able to do that at all—to say nothing of doing it with one hand while playing the most unlikely arpeggios with the other.” Thanks, Susan.

—Rudy Rucker
,
Los Gatos, California, August 28, 2008