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Upcoming Guest Blogger: Rudy Rucker

Surprise! Over the festive season, we have a new guest blogger; I'm excited to introduce Rudy Rucker, SF author, mathematician, and computer scientist.

Rudy has published over thirty books, winning the Philip K. Dick award for both his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware (which are available as part of the Wares tetralogy). He has a Ph.D. in mathematics and has worked as a computer science professor at San Jose State: he took up painting in 1999, and he's had three shows of his pop-surreal works in San Francisco.

Rucker's fantastic, transreal novel of the afterlife, Jim and the Flims appeared this year, as did his autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Nested Scrolls received the Emperor Norton Award for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason."

For the last five years Rucker has also been editing a speculative fiction webzine called Flurb, attracting contributions from across the field. For more links and ongoing updates about his activities, see Rudy's Blog.

And he's going to be keeping us company over the next two weeks!

19 Comments

1:

This ought to be good! Rucker's books are always a lot of fun--and his blog too. I'm really looking forward to his autobiography, and his upcoming novel "The Turing Chronicles". Very curious about what he'll write about here.

2:

Yay Rudy! Everything he's written that I've read, I've kept turning over and over in my mind for a much longer period of time than it took me to do the actual reading ("White Light" being particularly "guilty" in this regard). I'm not sure I can say that about very many authors.

3:

Awesome! Lifebox, the seashell and the soul is one of my favorite books in my library. You just made my morning.

4:

I keep buying Rucker's books and not finishing them. I'm sure that's me, not him. I am going love what he says, I think. Talk about a idea man. I'm bookmarking his blog.

5:

Great! Now all we need is a joint literary venture between the two of you. It would be fun! (For those of us who like to see our brains melt of over-excitation whilst we`re reading, that is.)

6:

You're going to have to make do with my collaboration with Cory Doctorow for a while longer, I'm afraid.

7:

The only RR book I've read ( & still have a copy of ) is "White Light" - co-incidentally ??) ALSO a novel of the "afterlife" .... And erm wierd.

8:

What fun! Aside from having a transfinite class imagination, Rudy Rucker is one of those odd writers with a sense of humor. I look forward to his visit here.

9:

White Light was amazingly stuffed with OTT ideas. Worthy of Barry Bayley at his best :-)

10:

Oooooo...cool. That guy can stretch a reader's head like nobody's business.

11:

Rudy was kind enough to publish one of my tales in the Spring 2010 issue of Flurb, so he's very obviously an extremely cool dude.

I wrote the story in response to a comment in Making Light where someone, presumably (cough cough) a science-fiction fan, wrote a comment criticizing the idea of a veteran suicide bomber. Maybe someday someone will annoy me again and I'll write Rudy another story...

12:

...and there I was, hoping to have a peaceful and productive evening. No, they're not mutually contradictory.

Curse you AlexR for the phrase "veteran suicide bomber!" My evening is still peaceful, but my productivity has been shot to hell.
[Gets next edition of Flurb...]

13:

There were a number of Japanese Special Attack (aka Kamikaze) pilots who survived the war even after flying one or more missions.

15:

Not difficult to imagine: People whose families have been killed/tortured by "the regime" and who feel thay have nothing to lose. Heinlein imagined such as far back as "revolt in 2100" IIRC.

Or people who know/suspect they are going to be captured and killed themseleves, but expect their "martyrdom" will bring forward the day of "the cause"(TM) - there were one or two cases of that in Tudor England, where, even given the efficiency of the legendary Walsingham's secret service, one or two Catholic agents-provocateurs were captured with very suspicious ease. One always wonders if they were either deliberately betrayed by their controllers (in modern parlance) for effect, or they deliberately allowed themselves to make an example. ( Campion & another, whose name escapes me at present, are examples of both categories )

16:

I'm a big Rudy Rucker fan! I hope to meet him!

Steve

17:

And there was that Dave Langford story from the 70's (I forget the title) that he recycled as the opening chapter of "The Space Eater" (a novel I strongly commend to you all, if you can find a copy -- published 1979 and rather obscure). Not a veteran suicide bomber, exactly, but a soldier who had been killed and put together again more times than he could remember, mostly in training (so that he'd have zero qualms about doing it for real if the time came when it was necessary).

18:

This is so exciting, I'm just reading the Ware Tetralogy for the first time, and it is having an immense impact on me. Anything that combines cyberpunk, edgy humor, and non-dualistic philosophy, in a fantastically-written package, is just of course going to be one of my most favorite things ever!

19:

Then there's the Robert Sheckley story If the Red Slayer from sometime in the early '70s. The protagonist is a conscript soldier who's sick and tired of getting sent out on suicide charges and dying in high-tech trench warfare. So he makes sure that the next time out he gets hit in the head, since the resurrectionists can't rebuild brains. Surprise!

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This page contains a single entry by Charlie Stross published on December 20, 2011 5:13 PM.

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