Kadrey and Shaw Live

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

I saw Richard Kadrey and Heather Shaw reading at the SF in SF series this weekend.

The readings were good and somewhat cyberpunk/urban-fantasy. Heather read her story "LIttle M@tch Girl," and Richard read from his Sandman Slim novel, due out in July, 2009.

"Little M@tch Girl," by the way, exists online, but in the context of incredibly weird zine called Tumbarumba. In order to read the stories in Tumbarumba, you go to their site, download a Firefox add-on, and wait for random story scraps to show up on pages that you're browsing. If you click on one of the story scraps you get more of the story in question. Not exactly the kind of presentation that most writers would pick! I'm kind of hoping to see "Little M@tch Girl" in an easier-to-access format one of these days...

Before the reading we had dinner at a place near this great collaborative graffiti mural at 2nd St. and Minna St. in San Francisco.

I dig that savage alien fire hydrant. "Bad dog!"

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist--with thirty-two published books. In the 1980s he received two Philip K. Dick awards, for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, which are available as part of the Wares tetralogy. Rucker has a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he worked as a computer science professor at San Jose State in Silicon Valley for twenty years. He took up painting in 1999, and he's had three shows of his pop-surreal works in San Francisco. Rucker's latest publication is his autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Nested Scrolls received the Emperor Norton Award for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason."

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Sean Craven

Hmmm… I’m guessing it’s a spray can, not a fire hydrant — look at the nozzle on top.

Just to be a pedantic jerk about it.
mattohara

what he said ^
Rajio

^ What #1 said
nosehat

also what #1 said.

Tumbarumba looks really interesting! It looks particularly interesting as a business model. Especially if your business is aggregating and selling people’s online browsing behavior to advertisers. =P I think I’ll pass for now, at least until they link a privacy policy on their website.
Anonymous

Well, to be fair, a fire hydrant full of paint WOULD be pretty bitchin’.
flashdadi

Don’t have the address but a few years back there was a great wall of artwork from Vaughn Bode in San Francisco.

I wonder if it is still there.
mattofdoom

^ Yes, I also clicked through to make that same comment.
Anonymous

Hey we’re all on the same page. It’s weird people can see different things while looking at the same subject.
Ethan

@ #11 Nosehat

We’ve had a privacy policy from the beginning. You can read it on Mozilla’s site: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/policy/0/9746 or on Tumbarumba’s site: http://www.turbulence.org/Works/tumbarumba/faq.html#tracking

Also, the add-ons JavaScript isn’t obfuscated (except for some light-weight encryption on the stories’ text), so code-minded folks are welcome to audit the code to confirm we aren’t doing anything underhanded.
Halloween Jack

Not familiar with Shaw, but Kadrey is hella cool. That’s just the sort of T-shirt that I’d imagine him wearing.
Rudy Rucker

Okay, I thought it was a fire hydrant, as it’s painted right down at street level but, yeah, the little ellipse on the top does suggest the nozzle of a spray can.

The killer alien spray can…well, I like that too!
Matt Katz

I’m a HUGE fan of tumbarumba. I often skip short stories that are posted online. Tumbarumba turns the stories into whimsical magical events, it is impossible not to read them.

Ethan Ham, who also worked on http://add-art.org did an amazing job with it. One of the best pieces of net art I’ve seen.
eideal852

yessum.
das spraycan.