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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.

It's Rodney Alan Greenblat's World,
We Just Live In or On It

The Motherlode of Whimsy: Start here and I'll catch up with you by the time you get here. Greenblat is the artist behind PaRappa and Um Jammer Lammy, subjects on which I find it hard to remain cool and collected.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 11:07:54 PM | permalink

And By Cool I Mean...

It's been far too long since this has been linked on boingboing.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 10:49:35 PM | permalink

2/3rds of The Snowfall Trilogy

I don't read much science fiction anymore...and when I do, it tends to be very fringy stuff, such as Super Flat Times. But I will make an exception for Mitchell Smith, no matter what kind of book he writes. Smith, who has written a handful of excellent crime/suspense novels (including the gruelling Stone City), and once wrote a bunch of westerns as "Roy LeBeau," is two books of the way into a trilogy set in an icelocked future...yes, yet another postholocaust series. What makes these books remarkable is...I don't know exactly how to describe it. Fine, sinewy prose? Psychological realism? Gritty naturalism? Horrifying and emotionally wrenching battle sequences? Nothing is easy in his novels; the characters struggle, suffer, and their victories are truly hard-won. If you can get past the godawful covers, I can't recommend these highly enough. The first is Snowfall, the second, Kingdom River.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 6:25:14 PM | permalink

Scenes from Fatal Frame 2

The original Fatal Frame was one of the scariest anythings I've ever experienced. By anythings I include books, movies, other games, and actual scary things happening to me personally. It was just unearthly and frightening and, as a bonus, fun. Developing the shutterbug skills to face down ferocious Japanese ghosts was a blast. Here's a trailer for the sequel, which is devoid of gameplay, but suggests a game mechanic similar to that of the even more amazing Ico, wherein you spend a lot of the game protecting a helpless ally.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 5:19:48 PM | permalink

The Ultimate Messier Object Log,
and other Desperate Stratagems to Fill Up Blogspace

Okay, I'm obviously just going through files looking for things that might be remotely interesting to other people even if I haven't thought about them myself in a long time. Like, I'm feeling sort of vulnerable because I haven't touched my telescope in a few years after convincing my wife that it was really worth the expense because I was going to use it all the time, and anyway I bought a factory-second with a huge ding in it so it really wasn't all that much. But...has it really been that long? Sheesh. Buying a Dobsonian scope was my version of a midlife crisis I guess; I'd been in a head-on collision with a British driver enjoying her American SUV on the wrong side of the road and I was re-evaluating my existence, trying to figure out what interests I had that were truly, cosmically significant, and I figure I saved myself lots of money by not suddenly thinking, "Lamborghinis. Lamborghinis are cosmically significant." Anyway, I logged about 30 Messier objects on this handy little app: The Ultimate Messier Object Log. Yeah, it's really, really, really time to get the scope out again because Mars is getting close. This is going to be a totally Martian August, I swear. Every night I'll be out there. Looking at Mars. If I'm not, I'm an idiot.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 12:44:01 AM | permalink

A Boy and His Shog

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 2:12:36 PM | permalink

(Thanks David Sawyer)

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 11:06:33 AM | permalink

It hasn't escaped my attention that the only stories of mine that are still somewhat "in print" are, by some strange fluke, the ones that appeared online. Some of these were posted years ago and still persist, while everything that was consigned to paper has vanished, except from a few boxes in my garage. Here they are, in reverse order of composition, and longer and longer line lengths:

"Great Breakthroughs in Darkness"

"To Lie Between the Loins of Perky Pat"

I'm not bitter or nothin. Just sayin.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 10:19:17 PM | permalink

Stuck in radio wasteland? I'm fortunate enough to live in broadcast range of Seattle's 90.3 FM (KEXP), but even if you're in Poughkeepsie you can stream webcasts of superb programs, a great collection of in-studio performances, and an awesome streaming archive containing the last two weeks' worth of broadcasts. I don't know why I said that. Some old Laurel and Hardy routine surfaced right there; I apologize. For all I know, Poughkeepsie has a fine, fine, independent, listener-powered local radio station. But you can't have too many. Especially these days. Anyway, KEXP.ORG. Look through the realtime playlists, ransack the archives, discover a bunch of bands you never knew existed but whom suddenly you cannot live without.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 9:52:50 PM | permalink

The Shoggoth Photo They Don't Want You To See

Our Dark Source scouts have dug up the original, unaltered image which was suppressed immediately by the Chilean navy. (Thanks Ted Backman.)

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 2:14:51 PM | permalink

"Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!"

Finally, a photo of yesterday's gigantic washed-up maritime blob. I dunno about this. It's awfully close to Antarctica. My first thought is: Shoggoth. Then again, that's always my first thought.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 11:33:27 AM | permalink

THE SPAM NAMES GENERATOR PROJECT

A recurrent problem writers have is that of coming up with names for characters. I'm not talking about main characters. Clearly a lot of thought ought to go into those. But say you need a hundred faintly strange names in a hurry. Say you've got a crowd scene and you want a loudspeaker to call attendance to pad out your novel. Or, if you're not a writer, say you have the more common problem of requiring a name for your 15th Diablo 2 Necromancer and you just don't have an hour to spend working out all the possible cool-sounding combinations of "morbi-" and "-lizer." Well, worry your pretty little head no more.

For the past few months I've been sorting through my spam quarantine files, pulling out the senders' names. I don't know how and where they come up with these things, but these spam senders have some kind of awesome random name generator at their disposal, and I don't feel shy about reaping its benefits. It's the least they can do for me. Check out these names, just a small sampling of the wacko names that inundate my mailbox every day:

Dante Jones
Beulah Phelps
Julio Shoemaker
Oscar Belcher
Paolo Pun
Curtis Cobb
Lashawn Mainwaring
Wanzer O. Reynolds
Anton Askew
Tijuana Whitney
Etsuko Clacher
Bryon Beaver
Florrie Whipps
Venice Hagwood
Otto Nickerson
Vertie Proudfoot

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 11:27:42 AM | permalink

Sea Oak & Others

I read George Saunders's collection Pastoralia the other day and there's this one story I can't get out of my head: "Sea Oak." It's a horror story, sure, the same way that his "CivilWarLand in Bad Decline" is a ghost story. I figured I would tell you to go dig up the collection for yourself, which you should, but rather than just take my word for it, here's a link to the text of that particular story online. "Sea Oak," folks.

And while we're at it, what the hell, here's another story of his that can't be linked to often enough: "My Flamboyant Grandson."

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 1:53:10 AM | permalink

Lucky Wander Boy

I know Mark and Cory blogged this not too long ago--but they said I could blog it when my guest stint came up. Lucky Wander Boy, by D.B. Weiss, is not yet another nonfiction book about games, but an actual living, breathing novel in which videogames are the narrator's lifeblood (as they are, to an embarrassingly large extent, mine). Great comic pacing, fine characters, and a surreal ending that doesn't cave in to mundane plot formulae. Read it and drop the author a note at his website.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 10:37:23 PM | permalink

Super Flat Times

I discovered Matthew Derby's amazing collection, Super Flat Times: Stories, while killing time at a nearby Barnes & Noble during a fire drill. "Raymond Carver crossed with Philip K. Dick" is how one blurber describes it, and that sort of scratches the surface. Scary, sad, hilarious, beautifully written black-comic dystopian science fiction (yes, that's almost more qualifiers than your average Starbucks latte--almost). My happiest happenstance literary discovery in a long time. (Despite the book being great, I can't make sense of the associated website. Seems a bit broken.)

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 12:09:35 PM | permalink

Daguerrilla Warfare

Dennis Waters is my favorite writer...of Daguerreotype descriptions. That may or may not be a burgeoning field. His website is a constantly shifting museum of fine historical images with amusing captions. I have been known to search ebay for "Daguerreotype" or "Daguerrotype" or even "old pitchers," just to catch fleeting glimpses of unique antique images as they pass from their original owners to, well, someone else. I don't want to give the impression I'm some kind of crazed "Dag" collector. I only own two, although for some reason, the guys in both Dags are crosseyed. I'm told that every collection needs a theme.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 11:37:20 AM | permalink

I always like to warm up the crowd with a lecture:

MICROSCOPIC MILESTONES

1912
First microscope introduced to the United States by Dr. Raelph Beuendeuk, Boston surgeon emigre, who uses it to entertain local politicians in his study. One journalist, invited to a private showing, hails as 'spectacular and revolutionary' his first view of 'an eerie time-lost landscape concealed in a wad of common lint.'

January 7, 1913
First microscope-related editorial cartoon appears in Baltimore Stentorian, depicting Mayor peering at Key to the City. Caption: 'Egad! How will this Monster fit in the Lock?'

1915-1921
Amateur microscopy craze sweeps the nation. Considered too long-lived to be a fad, the proliferation of microscope salons eventually comes to be seen as a menace to progress and industry. Anonymous leaflets decry the captivation of American ingenuity by 'these tiny Frontiers that can never be breached by Pick or Rail, nor settled by any Pioneer, no matter how indomitable his Spirit!'

May 16, 1922
Outspoken members of grassroots movement, Christians Against Minutiae, present petitions to the White House, citing the microscope as 'an instrument of the Devil, by which the innocent have been familiarized with the nether regions of depravity and afflicted with blindness, cataract and myopia from staring at the heads of lucifers, pins and Pthirus pubis.'

April 1, 1924
April Fool's Rebellion in Chicago. Clovis Dauber, chief insurrectionist and author of The Paramecium Manifesto, incites mob violence by describing in lurid detail the 'mass of tiny and defenseless creatures which daily are trod upon by even the most downtrodden of masses.' He is referring to protozoa which dwell in cracks of streets and sidewalks.

November 12, 1924
Passage of the Microscopic Prohibition Act. The Little League of Lens Grinders proclaims this, 'A dark day indeed for liberty.'

December 25, 1924
From prison, Clovis Dauber issues the statement that he will not celebrate another holiday until amoebas have been granted their inalienable rights and allotted Federal reservations where they might 'teem in peace.'

1929
FBI confiscating black-market Dutch 'Leeuwenhoeks' in increasing numbers; clamp-down on 'hoekleggers' avails little. Government admits to existence of a thriving underworld with 'pseudopods extending to every level of society, beginning with the smallest and lowest.'

1930-1935
Heyday of illicit clubs known as 'Peek-easies.' Mafia promotes brisk trade in glass slides, cover slips, and Gentian violent.

1936
After years of fruitless, expensive attempts at suppression, Prohibition is repealed and a profitable 'Microscope Tax' approved. The sole remaining member of Christians Against Minutiae declares this, 'A dark day for liberty indeed.'

1937-Present
The Age of the Microscope.

posted by Marc Laidlaw at 10:03:27 AM | permalink

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