Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 60

Fractalmania!

I've been printing out big images of the new fractals I've been working with. Full info is at my Rudy Set post, which now has a short-cut address tinyurl.com/rudyfractals.

I'll be selling some of these prints at the closing party for my art show, to be accompanied by readings with author Michael Shea. It'll be on on Saturday, May 22, from 6-10 PM, you can find more info in my original post about the show.

And you can also buy the prints online at my new Ultrafractals gallery at...

SF and Quantum Mechanics, #1

Some comments by Ted Chiang, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Nathaniel Hellerstein and others in my recent post on got me to thinking about the relationships between science fiction and quantum mechanics. This is a big topic, so I'm going to break it up into two or possibly more posts.

First, a throwaway remark—a chemist friend of mine once remarked that it would be entertaining if fundamentalist religious types got into attacking quantum mechanics. They're always just hammering ...

Fnoor Everywhere

A week or two ago, I did a post called "

Is the purple jelly shoe by that little chair a piece of fnoor?

Again, I'm using "fnoor" to mean "some odd aspect of a person's world that leads a person to suspect that there is more to this world that he or she had imagined." The fnoor might indicate that the world is in fact a virtual reality. Or the fnoor might suggest that...

Is Jaron a Cephalopod?

I got to know Jaron Lanier a little bit in the 1990s, when Virtual Reality was becoming a craze. Jaron was one of the very first people to talk about VR—see his April, 2001, Scientific American article, "Virtually There." By the mid 1990s, his company VPL Research was making one of the first "Data Glove" devices, and the Advanced Technology group at Autodesk was using these gloves for their so-called Cyberspace project.

I was working at Autodesk at this time, writing some demos for the C...

"True Names" and Fnoor

A couple of posts ago, I was writing about "Virtualization." And my attention was called to "True Names," a 2008 novella by Benjamin Rosenbaum and Cory Doctorow, about competing layers of VR. You can find "True Names" either or in print in Lou Anders' Fast Forward 2 anthology—I don't like reading long thing on the computer screen, so I actually got a used copy of Fast Forward 2 for about $3. And I read "True Names" this week. And it sets off all kinds of thoughts, as did a comment...

SOFTWARE: Monkey Brain Feast … Southern Style

Yesterday I got some early proofs of my forthcoming Prime Books omnibus, The Ware Tetralogy—consisting of my four novels Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware—we're talking about some 750 pages of phreakadelic cyberpunk goodness here.

I'll be copy-editing the proofs for the next two weeks—they were put together from optical-character-recognition scans of the decades old originals, and the work takes a little care. The tome should be available in early to mid June, 2010, dropping from...

Art Show Party, Saturday, May 22, 2010

I had two art show parties in the lobby of the Variety Preview Room in the Hobart Building on Market St. in San Francisco. It's a small space, but it has a bar. Here's a link to a Google map. It's not easy to park right there, so you might plan to park in one of the garages a block or two away.

I squeezed in 23 of my recent paintings. Rina Weisman of SF in SF fame is doing a lot to make this happen—thanks, Rina.

The opening party was Friday, April 9, from 6-9 p.m. (We had a nice crowd...

Art Show Parties, April 9 and May 22, 2010

I have two art show parties coming up in the lobby of the Variety Preview Room in the Hobart Building on Market St. in San Francisco. It's a small space, but it has a bar. Here's a link to a Google map. It's not easy to park right there, so you might plan to park in one of the garages a block or two away.

I squeezed in 23 of my recent paintings. Rina Weisman of SF in SF fame is doing a lot to make this happen—thanks, Rina.

The opening party was Friday, April 9, from 6-9 p.m. (We had a...

Art Show Opening Party This Friday

I have an art show opening party coming up in the lobby of the Variety Preview Room in the Hobart Building on Market St. in San Francisco. It's a small space, but it has a bar. Here's a link to a Google map. It's not easy to park right there, so you might plan to park in one of the garages a block or two away.

I think I can squeeze in 23 of my recent paintings. I've been figuring out the selection and the prices. And we're planning the opening party, which is Friday, April 9, from 6-9 p...

Virtualization

I've been thinking about "virtualization" in various senses this week.

First of all, I've recently read some SF in which some characters are living (or might be living) in a virtual world that might be a subprocess of our own reality. I'm thinking both of Jonathan Lethem's brilliant novel Chronic City and of Christopher Shay's great Flurb story "IntheBeginning."

Secondly, I've been listening to my son, Rudy, Jr., talking about how his and Alex Menendez's internet company, Monkeybrains, can s...