Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 65

In Oz

I'm going to be in Australia for a few weeks, first in Melbourne, then in Sydney, then in Cairns. Plans are somewhat vague—"My way is foggy," as Burning Spear says.

What calls me down under is that, thanks to Leon Marvell, I'll be a guest of Deakin University in Melbourne for a week, where I'll be giving a talk on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 on "My Life as a Writer."

Also I'm giving a presentation with Leon at the oddly named Re : live conference at the University of Melbourne, on the...

"The Mummy," 1932, with Boris Karloff

Last night we watched the 1932 Boris Karloff film classic from Universal Pictures, The Mummy, I borrowed it from the library. Great, great film. And great research material for me, given my interest in spicing up the plot of Jim and the Flims with some Egyptian spells and a mummy.

In the first scene, it's 1922 (echoing Carter's opening of King Tut's tomb in 1922), and two archaeologists are in their field quarters, studying their haul. In the corner leans an open sarcophagus with Karloff m...

Hieroglyphs, Flimsy, DEVO and the Mandelbulb

I'm thinking about Ancient Egypt for two reasons. For one thing, having seen the King Tut show , I'm thinking of bringing the mummy of Amenhotep into my novel, Jim and the Flims.

And for another, I enjoyed my daughter Isabel's re-invention of hieroglyphics in some of the panels of her graphic novel Unfurling . I'll reproduce a couple more images from Isabel's graphic novel today—if you're in the San Francisco area, you can still go see the show this month—see Isabel's Unfurling page for...

Unfurling — A 400 Foot Graphic Novel Scroll

"Unfurling" is a graphic novel drawn on a scroll of paper by my daughter, Isabel Rucker, going on display from November 5-27, at the SOMArts gallery in San Francisco.

"Unfurling" stretches over 400 feet long, is a foot high, and is drawn in black ink pen with watery washes. The comic panels vary in length (up to ten feet long) to mirror pauses, vast scenery, or thought patterns.

Most of the panels are too long to fit into the narrow column of this blog, so I'll just post a few details...

Happy Halloween!

I'm celebrating Halloween at the World Fantasy Con in San Jose. It's nice to see so many writer friends and to discuss our craft and biz. I talked about my paintings on a panel yesterday with some other writer-artists.

[See my previous post for info about the Japanese paintings.]

If you have too much fun, Emilio sent in a link to a "lifelogging" article about 22 "lifebox" tools, starting with the SenseCam, which takes a picture of just about every damned thing you see—it's said to be "aimed ...

Popping an Electron for King Tut

In order to hook up Earth with my fictional land of Flimsy in Jim and the Flims, I've been thinking about using an STM (Scanning Tunneling Microscope) to poke a hole in an atom or, even better, into an electron. And this produces a tunnel to an alternate world. Simple!

Really you'd need some SFictional way to amp up the power of the thing—maybe I fall back on that hoary SF-movie expedient of a well-timed stroke of lightning on a nearby power pole. I see this happening on some slacker's...

Tarzan, Help With Biotech?

This week I read he 1912 Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Bourroughs. The 1990 Penguin paperback edition has a great cover by Frank Frazetta.

[Copyright (C) Frank Frazetta:]

I enjoyed the book a lot, and now I have to get hold of the first of the many sequels, the 1913 The Return of Tarzan , to see if Tarzan manages to hook up with Jane—who slips through his noble fingers in the final scene of Tarzan of the Apes.

I'm curious about Philp Jose Farmer's Burroughs/Burroughs pastiche, "The Jungle...

Cruz Rave, Demons' Night Parade, Interviews

The other day we were in Santa Cruz, and we came across a rave-like street party, it was kind of an after-party for Burning Man.

I took a few pictures, and I'm going to mix them in with some pictures that I snarfed today from a Japanese yokai or "mythic monster" scroll showing the "Demons' Night Parade."

A fan named Lex Berman sent me a link to a BoingBoing post about this scroll, and I found a fairly complete copy of this scroll on eBay, where it's for sale for $15,000, which, in a way...

Synthetic Biology

I recently read a fascinating article about synthetic biology by Michael Specter, "A Life of its Own," in the New Yorker of Sept 28, 2009. The article is online here.

As old-timers may remember there was a fad for so-called artificial life in the 1980s. Artificial life was largely about computer programs that emulated living things—such as ant colonies, flocks of birds, or growing plants. Synthetic biology is different, it's about building slippery wetware entities that might live in the...

If Everything is A Computation…

Today it's raining hard for the first time in about seven months. What we call a "storm" here in the Bay Area.

So naturally this morning I was on the freeways, driving up to the Executive Briefing Center at HP between Sunnyvale and Palo Alto. I was there to give a talk for the Institute of the Future, who were hosting a meeting on the theme, "When Everything is Programmable." I've written about this line of thought in my book The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul—and of course it's...