Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 66

Surf Pilgrim

I've been painting pretty much this week, working on a large (40 by 30 inch) acrylic painting that I started at Four Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz about three weeks ago. That day I trekked down there from the parking lot with my painter friend Vernon and got the canvas covered with a light layer—when I'm en plein air, it's all about getting the composition blocked out, and finding some of the colors, although often, back home, I'll dial up the colors to match my memories and my aesthetics, ...

District 9, Stross, "The Anthologist," Updike

Man, when was the last time I saw a good movie in the theaters? We do like to get out, and there's a movie house within walking distance from our house, so we hit the theater fairly often. It's potentially more fun than watching a rental at home.

But…Matt Damon in Informant! — ugh! I've always found the Matt to be physically repellent, and to see him play an unbalanced, lying sleaze-bag, wearing a kids-Halloween-costume mustache, in a seemingly endless series of scenes set in beige plastic ...

On and Off a Roll. Introducing Infinity.

Last week I finished doing a major revision on Jim and the Flims. I'd had my character Weena talking in the familiar Phil-Dickian California-speak that I've learned to do so smoothly. But if she's really from 1907, it really makes more sense if she has an old-timey manner of speech. So I'm going through the book, searching for every occurrence of "Weena," and rewriting all her lines.

I have a slight worry that I'm losing some nice Val-girl zingers, like "Don't worry," but those are, after ...

The Quest Rose

Today's blog offering is an excerpt from the current draft of my novel in progress, Jim and the Flims. What I'm posting today is based on the notion that my characters Jim and Weena are off in the afterworld called Flimsy, visiting with the mathematician Charles Howard Hinton. Hinton is carrying out an exceedingly extravagant computation along the lines that I outlined in my recent post, "Breaking the Bank of Computation."

Hinton's not using a computer. He's using a giant geranium plant...

Breaking the Bank of Computation

I have this idea that there are some mathematicians in my fictional afterworld Flimsy who are bent on doing some extremely demanding mathematical computations. The chief among these guys is the ghost of Charles Howard Hinton, a quirky character whom I've blogged about before, an early advocate of higher dimensional geometry.

My idea is that Hinton, who now lives in the Earth-based region of the afterworld, is computing such outré mathematical objects that he's had to borrow energy from the...

My Story Arc

I think I already mentioned that I recently finished a rewrite of my memoir, Nested Scrolls: The Memoir of a Cyberpunk Philsopher. Here's a bit from the very end of the book, and some photos I took recently around the SF Bay Area.

[A back entrance to Three Mile Beach north of Santa Cruz.:]

When my father was on his last legs, he said, "What was I so worried about all those years? What difference did any of it make?"

Like many writers, I spend an inordinate amount of time fretting about the...

In Search of the Mandelbulb

This post is an update about a project I've been working on for twenty years. I recently did some work on it with Mathematica, and I've posted my latest version of my Mathematica notebook, Mandelbulb, Ver 5, not so much because I'm finished, but rather because I'm sick of working on it, and I'd like to share the gain and the pain. This post presents most of the material.

The Mandelbrot set M is defined in terms of a plane map mandelmap[z,c:] which takes z into z*z + c. We add plane points ...

The History of Flurb

I mentioned that I've been busy revising my autobiography, Nested Scrolls: The Memoir of a Cyberpunk Philosopher. As part of the revision, yesterday I wrote up a little history of my webzine Flurb. Here's that passage, which is relevant as Flurb #8 went live this week—and is off to a strong start, with five thousand visits in the first two days.

By the way, you can click on any of the Flurb covers below to see the issue in question.

Flurb #8

Flurb #8 is now live.

Flurb is a free online Webzine of Astonishing Tales, edited and published by Rudy twice a year. The previous issue of Flurb has gleaned sixty thousand unique visits so far.

Check us out at www.flurb.net!

And return here to comment.

Many thanks to the wonderful writers who are helping to make Flurb possible.

Becoming a Writer

It's starting to look like I'm going to find a publisher for my autobiography, currently titled, Nested Scrolls: The Memoir of a Cyberpunk Philosopher. I'll give more details if and when I actually get an offer.

But with encouragement in the air, I've started doing a revision of Nested Scrolls, starting with reading through it and patching things that seemed either too roughly phrased or too flat. I'd been a little uneasy that the manuscript might be really weak—given that I hadn't looked...