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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.

LOS ANGELES -- I'm back to the blog. There is an uneasiness in my step, and it's not the war-time shuffle. I move uneasily because today I tread in the path of a giant, following Kevin Sites stint albeit brief as guestblogger here on boingboing and at www.kevinsites.net.

It was easy to step aside for him when the war started, a now a hundred times harder to try to fill his shoes, because sharing time from the front line of an epic armed invasion in lands of Biblical proportions is altogether different from the kind of hacker tourism that sometimes seems my lucky lot in life. I enjoy sharing my journeys, and will learn to jot and dash more than screed, I promise, but for the moment I insist upon a metaphorical tip of the hat to the person who preceded me here, Kevin Sites, because from the edge he pushed the edge, sharing the journey in an instantaneous, direct way that is changing journalism from the inverted, dry trapezoid of wire service copy to in-your-face, here and now messages that deliver visual, aural and textual glimpses of the Hell that is war and life in the zone of conflict.

Life's drama has balance. In the midst of this death and destruction the regime change couldn't be more clear around my house, because after my last trip to Finland we returned home to find my wife Stacie is expecting a child -- both of our first -- in seven months now, an election-time baby blessing that promises new joys to forever remind me of a time beset by fear and uncertainty about the future. Like a Phoenix this child will arise from the ashes of this world.

I've just returned from a trip to Vienna, Austria, and travel during the conflict is difficult, even on Swiss International Airlines through Zurich. Americans draw more than the usual skeptical eye in Europe today, though for many countries the track recording of choosing wars is a glass house from which stones should be harder to throw.

Vienna is an amazing city, proof that much of art's greatness could never be financed voluntarily. Wein is grand, but the vast majority of its glory has come from public treasures and treasuries. It is a reminder that our current situation cannot hold for long, with payment for art and knowledge and creative endeavor subject to waves of technical innovation and therefore increasingly voluntary as regards payment.

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posted by Jim Griffin at 1:38:27 AM | permalink

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