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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.

There are Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses, who walk amongst us, royalty rubbing shoulders with those of us cut from more common cloth.

Many people reading this know how it feels. A recent magazine cover depicts a Gap employee selling khakis with the caption to the effect that the salesman was making $300,000 a year two years ago working as a dot.com executive. For almost everyone associated with The Bubble, it is easy to sympathize with a man who would be a king but is today, say, an under-employed fashion photographer in New York City.

In the Summer of 1918, Finland's leaders decided it should become a monarchy, and so chose the prince of Hesse[-Cassel]. His name was Friedrich Karl, and had Finland's plan for monarchy borne fruit, he would be its first king. Though motivated by a desire for great protection from its voracious neighbor to the East, the plans for a king fell through.

But if they hadn't, Philipp Robin Prinz und Landgraf von Hessen would today be King of Finland. I believe this because a Finnish daily newspaper, the Helsingin Sanomat, last August invited Philipp von Hessen on an all-expenses paid trip via Finnair from New York City to Finland, where he could survey his would-be kingdom. In England this could be a send-up, a whopping lie of the first order purely arranged as a monstrous practical joke, but the Finns are too serious to carry off a prank of that magnitude. Take this story at face value; It's better fact than fiction.

Philipp von Hessen is a New York City fashion photographer, 31 years old, the great grandson of Friedrich Karl. Educated to work in the hotel business, his passion is photography, and he's been pursuing it in New York City for the past four years. He's worked as an assistant to Annie Leibovitz, and is hoping to follow in her footsteps.

By all accounts von Hessen's visit to Helsinki was unremarkable, hardly the stuff of a century of reign denied.

For my part, I can't get enough of this story, but my Finnish is not up to the task of translating much more from the Finnish edition of the paper, and there is little in English about the visit. But it stimulates the imagination, the idea that those who would be royalty are today returned to the common breeding stock, left without their royal tools, their destiny ultimately unfulfilled.

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posted by Jim Griffin at 1:27:31 AM | permalink

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