Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 63

White Noise, Back to Mono

I just finished reading Don Delillo's White Noise, which was first published in 1985, and is out in a very nice Penguin Classic Deluxe paperback.

Somehow I didn't read the book when it came out, even though there was considerable buzz. Maybe I was bitter and envious that Delillo was getting the lit-crit attention that I wished we cyberpunk SF writers were getting. You can't really trust writers' opinions about other writers books—many of us are, at least some of the time, mean-spirited...

Photoblogging

This week I've been working on the final revisions of Nested Scrolls: A Memoir, my autobiography. I've contracted for it to come out in a collector's edition from PS Publishing in England, and then in a trade edition from Tor/Forge Books in the US. I'm not sure about the publication dates yet, either 2011 or 2012.

Today I'm running an excerpt from some material that I just added, a passage about blogging and photography. The photos are mostly from a recent walk on St. Joseph's hill near...

Revision: "Work on What Has Been Spoiled"

It's raining like a mofo here in California this week. I love the winter rains, I like how every little spot of the landscape gets watered. It reminds me of the hylozoic Zen koan:

Q: "Does a stone have a soul?"

A: "The universal rain moistens all creatures.

It's absurd how the news-media always try and put a disaster-and-crisis-and-watch-your-television slant on some a healthful and revivifying natural process that is in no sense a harsh surprise. But why even worry about them? The rain is ...

The "Orpheus and Eurydice" Pattern

I'm revising my novel Jim and the Flims this month, getting ready for a final push to the end. I haven't taken any new pictures since last week, so I'll just recycle some images from 2009.

In my novel, Jim is in the afterworld (called Flimsy), and he may or may not bring his dead wife Val back to life on Earth. It's a take on the Orpheus and Eurydice legend, but I'm considering a happy ending, although I keep wondering if a "happily ever after" ending is best.

I gather that, in romance...

Edge Question 2010

Every year the literary agent John Brockman poses a question and gets people who have worked with him to supply answers. This year's question was:

HOW IS THE INTERNET CHANGING THE WAY YOU THINK?

All the answers can be found at the Edge site. I'll reprint my answer below, along with some pictures I took in Vasona Park in Los Gatos today.

Search and Emergence

Twenty or thirty years ago, people dreamed of a global mind that knew everything and could answer any question. In those early times...

My Photo Prints

This post responds to a friendly comment made the other day by a regular reader called Womansvoice, suggesting I make my photos available as prints. Alex and Neatmouse, among others, have suggested this in the past as well.

For illos today, I'll just use a few golden oldies.

I tried marketing prints of my photos a year or two ago, but then I dropped it. But now I'm giving it another shot, this time with a little more organization and push. What I'm doing is to amass a Photos gallery of my ...

Avatar

I saw Avatar in 3D last night. What a thrill. It made me think of the early days of cinema, back in the early 1900s, when they showed a movie of a train speeding towards the audience and everyone jumped to their feet. The 3D and the computer graphics really come together in Avatar, and you get the feeling that a new medium is being born.

One of the effects I liked especially were these little critters like thistledown, who were beating their fronds like jellyfish. Air-jellies. And the...

Starting 2010

So happy 2010. Sylvia and I went to a masked ball at the San Francisco Symphony, thanks to my friend Jack Vad. I like the pulpy quality of a cell-phone picture for this kind of scene.

Whither now?

On the other side of the photographic spectrum, I'm happy to be home with my heavy-duty Canon 5D (Mark 1, alas,) rather than the lighter Canon G10 that I took to Australia. With a large format single-lens reflex camera, you have more of a chance of actually shooting the picture I want to shoot....

Australia #10. Final Days in Cairns.

[This is my last post about our Australia journey.:]

After the dive trip, they dropped us on Lizard Island, a largely deserted spot that has an airstrip, a small and posh $1000-a-night resort, and a $10-a-night campground. The first European to live on Lizard Island was a guy called Watson who was trying to make a living by harvesting "beche de mer" or sea cucumbers, to be sold to the Chinese trade. Any edible thing that's shaped at all like a penis has always been culinary gold in the far...

Australia # 9. Diving the Great Barrier Reef.

(I'm still finishing my series of posts about a trip my wife and I took to Australia last month. This is the second-to-last of the Australia posts.)

We made our way into downtown Cairns, returned our rental car, and hooked up with our live-aboard dive boat, the Spirit of Freedom. It's nice and big, we have a room with a private bathroom, a double bed, and four portholes. Good stuff.

[Our boat.:]

We tooled out about thirty miles to the Saxon Reef and did two dives. It turns out the Great...