Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

The One That Got Away

There is no better place to write about herring than Finland, and so I will. Here they serve herring at least a hundred ways, but unlike most things Finnish, I've not yet acquired a taste for it, and so it was with Red Herring the magazine.

Like lots of bad journalism, they followed, oh, yes, they followed very well, but they never led.

They encouraged the bubble, hot on its trail, blowing smoke up its ass with a special reverence for Hollywood. They bought the premise hook-line-and-sinker that analog distribution would bring digital distribution in much the same way that others thought you could port practically anything from the old world to the "new world" and make plenty of money along the way.

I am sad Red Herring is gone because many of my friends liked it, and because at its best it was chock-full-o-numbers and statistics that could prove useful to anyone measuring the dimensions of the bubble. But I will not much miss it, because it ultimately failed to be anything more than new-new-journalism cheering on the sidelines for the next new-new-thing, and both its audience and the revolution deserved better.

Could anyone need more of an example than the August 2002 Red Herring cover story featuring John Fanning?

It claimed that by the end of 2002 Shawn Fanning's uncle would launch with Blockbuster's backing a new movie download service that would revolutionize Hollywood. Here's hoping none of you held your breath, or parted with a dollar of investment capital. At the time I laughed out loud and checked the cover to see if it was somehow actually the April issue.

Wrap this dead fish in a newspaper, preferably one with decent digital coverage, like the Financial Times or San Jose Mercury News. The Red Herring started stinking long before it died, it's eyes turning cloudy shortly after its birth. If it had put up more of a fight, it would've been a lot more interesting.

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posted by Jim Griffin at 3:43:35 PM | permalink

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