Tag Archives: Rudy Rucker

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Rudy Rucker guesting at BoingBoing

Rudy RuckerRudy Rucker is one of the authors I go out of my way for, so I’m stoked to see he’s guest-posting at BoingBoing for a couple of weeks; he’s kicked off today with a brief introduction to his “gnarly” plotting methods.

Experience  shows that Rucker’s fiction divides opinion sharply between those who love it and those who loathe it; I’m firmly in the former camp, though I think I understand what it is about transrealism that puts others off. [image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

That said, he’s got lots of interesting and weird stuff to say outside of his stories: he’s a professor of mathematics with a psychedelic outlook, he was a core member of the cyberpunk movement (which means he has some great tales to tell about the other characters involved) and he’s got a unique eye for photographing the mundane and making it seem alien. Go pay him some attention; you may not agree with him, but I defy you to be indifferent!

So, any other Rucker fans in the house? Which story or novel would you recommend to a newcomer to Rucker’s body of work?

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Rudy Rucker defines UFO science fiction

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lenticular cloudMaverick mathematician Rudy Rucker is thinking about topics for his next novel, and it looks like UFOs might get a look-in. Partly in response to a recent Loving the Alien column by our very own Mac Tonnies, Rucker is at pains to define the subgenre carefully:

I think we should distinguish between, on the one hand, SF UFO novels and, on the other hand, alien invasion novels along the lines of, say, Greg Bear or Larry Niven. I think, for instance, Neal Stephenson’s recent Anathem, is more of an alien invasion novel, although it’s close to being an SF UFO novel as well.

So, with that distinction made, what should an SF UFO novel contain?

I’d say the essence of an SF UFO novel is point (a) below. Points (b) through (f) all follow from (a).

(a) The novel includes flying saucer alien encounters similar to those described in lowbrow tabloid newspapers, but is neither ignorantly credulous nor mockingly parodistic.
(b) The aliens use a fuzzy technology that might amount to psychic powers. The saucers, in other words, aren’t machines.
(c) The aliens are surreptitiously observing or infiltrating Earth rather than overtly invading—at least for now.
(d) We have some creepy human/alien sex acts.
(e) The aliens aren’t necessarily evil, they may be bringing enlightenment and transcendence.
(f) The aliens might be from somewhere other than a distant planet, that is, they might come from small size scales, from a parallel world, or might be made of some impalpable substance like dark matter.

Part of the game in writing an SF UFO novel is making up scientific reasons why the tabloid-level UFO phenomenon could in fact relate to something real…

As Mac’s essay pointed out, there is a distinct paucity of novels that deal with the UFO phenomenon – maybe 2009 could be the year for a UFO renaissance? [image by sabertasche2]

Hell knows it would make a refreshing change from sexy vampires.

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Rudy Rucker disassembles the Singularity

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simulated-solitons If I could choose one science fiction author in whose head-space I could spend a lengthy holiday (equipped with copious note-taking equipment and a barrel of synaptic cognition enhancers, naturally), Rudy Rucker would be my first choice by a country mile. Despite having a justified reputation as a quirky and colourful writer, he’s a ferociously smart guy. [image by JonDissed]

Here he is debunking the Singularity – or at least the “even better than the real thing” Singularity that some people advocate – by explaining that no Virtual Reality will ever be able to simulate Real Reality accurately, because Real Reality is already running on an incredibly complex and rich computational substrate:

“VR isn’t ever going to replace RR (real reality). We know that our present-day videogames and digital movies don’t fully match the richness of the real world. What’s not so well known is that computer science provides strong evidence that no feasible VR can ever match nature. This is because there are no shortcuts for nature’s computations. Due to a property of the natural world that I call the “principle of natural unpredictability,” fully simulating a bunch of particles for a certain period of time requires a system using about the same number of particles for about the same length of time. Naturally occurring systems don’t allow for drastic shortcuts.”

Rudy Rucker – substantial proof (if proof were needed) that science and hippiedom are two sides of the same coin. There’s masses of free fiction and non-fiction on his website, by the way.