Eileen Gunn sez, "The incomparable Rudy Rucker describes his visit to one of the greatest mathematicians of our time. Surreal, philosophic, mathematical."

Mandelbrot is waiting for me at the end of his driveway, he's worried I might not find the house as the address on the curb is covered by snow.

Hurrah! Rudy Rucker's just posted the Fall/Winter issue of his glorious sf webzine Flurb, with a wicked contributor list: "Armstrong, Ashby, Byrne, Callaway, Goonan, Hendrix, Hogan, Kek, Laidlaw, Metzger, Newitz, Rucker, Saknussemm, Scholz, Shirley, Sterling, Watson."

Flurb 10

How cool is this: Rudy Rucker painted a series of illustrations for Terry "Bears Discover Fire" Bisson's series of "Billy" short stories, and they've released the resulting ebook as a free download:

In our never-ceasing quest to shock and enlighten the world at large, Terry Bisson and I are releasing a Creative Commons free ebook edition of Terry's incredible collection of tales, sometimes known as Billy's Book, but now transmogrified into Billy's Picture Book, thanks to some painted illos I created for it.

Hey, San Francisco! Here comes the next SF in SF reading series event, with Rudy Rucker and Michael Shea! You lucky bastards.

The SF in SF May authors reading takes place on Saturday May 22nd. The guests will be the multi-talented Rudy Rucker, whose art exhibition has been running at our venue for the past six weeks, and the multiple World Fantasy Award-winning Michael Shea.

Hurrah! It's time for another issue of Rudy Rucker's absolutely ass-kicking free sf zine, Flurb. The new ish has stories by Paul Di Filippo, Rudy Rucker, Richard A. Lupoff, Danny Rubin, and Kathe Koja and Carter Scholz (incidentally, I've been reading Koja's new book in manuscript form and I am agog at its brilliance — watch this space in the months to come for a review of Under the Poppy). — Read the rest

Cause for celebration: the new issue of Flurb, Rudy Rucker's wonderful free sf zine, is live, including work from Greg Benford, Paul Di Filippo, Howard Hendrix, and many other talented and lovely individuals.

We have a lot of great stuff in Flurb #8.

Rudy woke up earlier than I did this morning, so he started blogging before I had a chance to introduce him!

I met Rudy Rucker around 1987 when he gave a reading at a High Frontiers Monthly Forum meeting in Berkeley, California. — Read the rest

Stephen "Mathematica" Wolfram, author of the tome A New Kind Of Science, has been developing a new browser search engine called Wolfram|Alpha. BB pal Rudy Rucker, a brilliant mathematician in his own right, spent two hours on the phone with Wolfram and wrote up his notes for h+ Magazine. — Read the rest

Reminder: I'm doing a benefit reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco tonight along with Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. Hope to see you there:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow.

I'm thrilled to announce that I'm doing a benefit reading for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco on March 23, 2009 — a week this Monday — along with Rudy Rucker, Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders. Hope to see you there:

Join EFF on Monday, March 23rd, for a fundraising event featuring award-winning writer Cory Doctorow.

Issue #7 of FLURB, Rudy Rucker's astoundingly awesome free sf zine, has just hit the net, with a collection of stories from some of my favorite authors, including a collaboration between Rudy and John Shirley, and work by Madeline Ashby and Terry Bisson. — Read the rest

Two of Rudy Rucker's terrific earlier science fiction novels — The Sex Sphere, and Spacetime Donuts — have been re-released with Rudy's own paintings for the cover art.

I really like Rudy's paintings, and have been trying to get him to trade one of his paintings for one of mine.

On his blog, Rudy Rucker writes about his recent visit to New York City. In addition to the many nice photographs he took, he included this old YouTube clip of Camper Van Beethoven's video, "Take the Skinheads Bowling," because he saw the band with his daughter Georgia, while he was there. — Read the rest

Cyberpunk legend Rudy Rucker has put a volume of high-quality reproductions of his delightful, surreal paintings up for sale on Lulu.com. It's called "Better Worlds." Rudy explains,

I took up painting in 1999 and quickly I fell in love with the medium.

Rudy Rucker has a great blog entry (an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls) about Hollywood's 11-year-attempt to make a movie based on his novel Software, which is one of my favorite science fiction novels.

The scripts kept getting worse—we were up to version ten before long.

Rudy Rucker's posted an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Nested Scrolls, recounting the early days of the cyberpunk literary movement, in which drugged-out weirdos from around America discovered each other and were abused by science fiction fans:

I'd meet the other canonical cyberpunk, John Shirley, two years later, when we were both staying with Bruce and Nancy Sterling in Austin, Texas, in town for a science fiction convention that was featuring a panel on cyberpunk.

Issue 5 of Flurb, Rudy Rucker's wonderful, bizarre science fiction ezine, is out. Here's Rudy's description: "This issue features a Beat SF story of Rudy Rucker's in the form of letters from William Burroughs in Tangiers, excerpts of John Shirley's lost cyberpunk novel Black Glass, Terry Bisson's hilarious anti-mundane story 'Captain Ordinary,' a Lovecraftian novella by Lavie Tidhar, and some amazing pieces by new SF writers." — Read the rest

Science fiction writer and mathematician Rudy Rucker takes a running swing at the idea of the Singularity, the moment in human history when we disassemble raw matter, turn it into "computronium" and upload ourselves to it, inhabiting a simulation of reality rather than real reality. — Read the rest

Rudy sez, "As part of the launch for his new book, Postsingular, Tor Books is helping Rudy Rucker stage a three-day exhibition and sale of about 20 of his paintings at the Live Worms Gallery in San Francisco.

The show will run November 9 – 11, Friday through Sunday. — Read the rest

Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular is pure Rucker: a dope-addled exploration of the way-out fringes of string theory and the quantum universe that distorts the possible into the most improbable contortions.

In Postsingular, a mad scientist creates a race of nants — nanites — that digest the planet and turn it into a computational simulation of Earth, called Vearth. — Read the rest