Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 58

On the Beach with Sylvia and Turing

Just back from hike-in camping with my wife, Sylvia, at the Point Reyes National Seashore Coast Camp. It's a two mile hike in, not too bad, and you end up in a site right by the Limantour Beach. I never manage reserve campsites in advance—it's just too big a hassle and too much thinking ahead—but if you show up at the Bear Valley Visitor center shortly after 9 a.m. on a weekday, you can normally get a site. Not that managing this is easy, but every couple of years I can.

When I visit...

Turing and the Happy Cloak

I'm working on my third short story about Alan Turing. In the back of my mind I'm hoping that these stories can congeal into a novel with the working title, The Turing Chronicles. If the new story works, I may push on ahead with this.

Some SF writers have written Turing stories, but my feeling is that it hasn't been done quite right. The guy really had something of the beatnik and the rebel about him.

In 2006, I put up a longish post on my initial findings "Alan Turing". , while working...

New Paintings: "Davenport Cave," "Buddha & Mouse," "Sarah Rucker"

I finished two paintings in the last couple of weeks. As always, you can buy quality art prints of my paintings at Imagekind. And you many of my originals are for sale at my Paintings site.

"Buddha and the Mouse". Oil on canvas. 18″ by 24″. July, 2010.
I took a photograph of an interesting statue of a twelve-armed Buddha in a small Asian art museum in Pasadena, California. The somewhat sinister pattern of the arms and shadows interested me. So when I got home, I painted the image, and I ...

New Paintings: "Davenport Cave," "Buddha and the Mouse," "Sarah Harris Rucker"

I finished two paintings in the last couple of weeks. As always, you can buy quality art prints of my paintings at Imagekind. And you many of my originals are for sale at my Paintings site.

"Buddha and the Mouse". Oil on canvas. 18″ by 24″. July, 2010.
I took a photograph of an interesting statue of a twelve-armed Buddha in a small Asian art museum in Pasadena, California. The somewhat sinister pattern of the arms and shadows interested me. So when I got home, I painted the image, and I ...

Bisson & Rucker: "Billy's Picture Book" NOW

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.

Billy's Picture Book contains Terry Bisson's thirteen off-kilter tales about an eager lad named Billy—including "Billy and the Spacemen," "Billy and the Ants," "Billy and the Talking ...

David Foster Wallace on Surreal Lit

I've been reading parts of David Lipsky's book-length interview of the writer David Foster Wallace, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself. Tragically, Wallace (1962-2008) suffered from depression, and he hung himself at the age of 46.

The interviews in this book were done back in 1996, when Wallace was only 34, and at a high-point, having just published his thousand-page novel, Infinite Jest. Originally the interviews were going to serve as source material for a long profile in

Podcasts from Pasadena

So I'm back from Pasadena where I was a Guest of Honor at a small science-fiction convention called Westercon.

I was busy as an idol with eight hands at the con, they had me give a lot of talks…more than I'd expected. One talk was on Transrealism, starting with a reading of my brief 1983 "Transrealist Manifesto". The other talk on "New Futures in SF." I'd outlined what I planned to say in this talk and posted it on my blog last week. But my actual talk was somewhat different. To hear my...

New Futures in SF II (Talk for Westercon, July 4)

Here's a draft of the talk on "New Futures in SF" that I'll be giving at the Westercon in Pasadena, CA, at 11:30 AM on Sunday, July 4, 2010. I'm the Guest of Honor! Woo-hoo! I'll be on a some panels and such on Friday, July 2, and on Saturday, July 3, as well.

Ideas and Stories

Living art forms change—think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. SF people are always sad to see the most recent "Golden Age" slip away, but it's sadder still to keep doing the same ...

New Futures in SF (Talk for Westercon, July 4)

Here's a draft of the talk on "New Futures in SF" that I'll be giving at the Westercon in Pasadena, CA, at 11:30 AM on Sunday, July 4, 2010. I'm the Guest of Honor! Woo-hoo! I'll be on a some panels and such on Friday, July 2, and on Saturday, July 3, as well.

Ideas and Stories

Living art forms change—think of painting or popular music or literary novels or even TV sit-coms. SF people are always sad to see the most recent "Golden Age" slip away, but it's sadder still to keep doing the same ...

What Universe Next?

[In the last three days, people have downloaded fourteen thousand copies of my new CC-licensed edition of The Ware Tetralogy. Go get yours!]

This week I went to visit my old pal Kevin Kelly at his house near Pacifica, a foggy town on the coast just south of SF. We took a long walk along the ocean, talking things over. (Some of the photos today are from Pacifica, a few are from my drive on Rt. 1 down the coast, like at Pigeon Point, and some are from San Francisco and Berkeley.)

Kevin was...