Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 5

Logic, Gnarl, Writing, Painting

Talk by Rudy Rucker for the Bridge conference on Art and Mathematics at Aalto University, Helsinki, 11am, August 1, 2022. Many thanks to the organizers for inviting me, particularly George Hart, Kirsi Peltonen, and Eve Torrence. For more on my art see my Paintings page. For more of my thoughts, see my books, including my […]

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Spacetime Fix-Up, or, Time’s a Goon

I recenlty read Jennifer Egan’s great novels A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House. She uses an interesting style.  These novels are what writers call “fix-ups,” that is they are sequences of collaged-together stories with overlapping casts of characters. After the fact, the writer might pretend they did this on purpose, but that’s […]

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Jingle Jangle

Ten or fifteen years back Bruce Sterling told me that the blog as a communications medium would die. And I felt he was wrong; I was like, “I’ll never stop.” But by now I do like tweeting a lot. The haiku-like comression of a tweet with a single image, yes. And most recently I’ve been […]

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The Best of Rudy’s Worlds

The Best of Rudy Rucker Bundle from Jason Chen includes twelve volumes. I describe the bundle on Jason’s site, and I also describe the bundle on this blog post.  On this post, I descrbe them chronologiccally, then I excerpt some reviews. In 1972 I wrote my Ph. D. thesis on the mathematics of higher infinities—and […]

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Be High

About three weeks ago, I went for a hike in Castle Rock Park, alone, going far, and I talked to a plant for a long time. A madrone with a duckbeak snag and a moss beard.  I haven’t used pot or alcohol for twenty-five years, but I still like to be high.  When I find […]

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How To Write: Getting Ideas, Part II

Where do I get my ideas for science fiction? This continues my earlier post on the topic. The material is taken from interviews. That 3d plastic slug was 3d printed for me by Chuck Shotton. Interviewed by Heath Row for The National Fantasy Fan, July, 2009. New York. You asked how I between the value […]

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Poems: “Light Fuse And Get Away”

These poems were my way of beginning to be a writer. I wrote them in two batches. The first batch came during 1975-1978 while I was teaching math at the state college of Geneseo, in upstate New York—the five of us: Sylvia, me, and our three kids. I’d read my poems at English department readings. […]

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How To Write: What SF Writers Want

You can have anything you want. But what do you want? Some of the appeal of SF comes from its association with the old idea of the Magic Wish. Any number of fairy tales deal with a hero (humble woodcutter, poor fisherman, disinherited princess) who gets into a situation where he or she is free […]

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How To Write. Getting Ideas, Part I

Lately I’ve been writing some “How to Write” posts for my blog and for Medium. For this one, I’m using excerpts from my huge document All the Interviews, which you can read as a PDF online. Today’s topic is “Getting Ideas.”  And I have a Part II on my blog and on Medium as well. […]

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Here’s to the Real World

Musings on whether a virtual reality or a computer generated reality could ever match our real reality. I wrote my first version of this essay in 2008, while in Pinedale, Wyoming, visiting my daughter Isabel and doing some cross-country skiing among the aspen trees. The trees have great patterns like eyes on them. Nice examples […]

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