Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 67

Three New Poems from 1976

Back in 1976, when I was starting to be a writer, in Geneseo, New York, at night I'd write poems on my red IBM Selectric typewriter. Not that I bothered sending the poems out to magazines—submitting my math papers was heartbreak enough. A friend on the English faculty encouraged me to join in the periodic faculty poetry readings, where I'd hand out my works in mimeographed form.

Thirty years later, I'd run into Thom Metzger, who'd been a student of mine at Geneseo, and has since become a succes

Pseudospheres

I recently acquired a copy of my old friend Clifford Pickover's new tome, The Math Book , a really attractive and reasonably priced volume with 250 full page color illustrations, each illustration accompanied by a single-page description.

In Pickover's words, "My goal in writing The Math Book is to provide a wide audience with a brief guide to important mathematical ideas and thinkers, with entries short enough to digest in a few minutes."

[Breather Pseudosphere, Copyright (C) 2006 by Paul Nyland

All nouns, All verbs

It occurs to me that the yuels and the jivas in Jim and the Flims going to be better characters if they can talk—but that their speech should be strange.

[A jiva and a yuel.:]

I think of the Unipuskers in Frek and the Elixir, who only talk in imperative sentences, that was rich, a great gimmick for expressing bossiness. And the devilish-looking wackles in Spaceland, they talked in a kind of Beat poetry.

Here's a simple and powerful idea: the yuels speak in strings of verbs. and the jivas speak

Resurgo. "Offer Fan" in JIM AND THE FLIMS

Yesterday I was out a favorite spot on Four Mile Beach, north of Santa Cruz. That forest fire they had inland has pretty much died down. I did a little ritual that I've often done while working on a new novel in recent years—I draw a logirthmic spiral in the sand and I letter the slogan, "EADEM MUTATA RESURGO", which is Latin for "The Same, Yet Changed, I Re-arise."

The mathematician James Bernoulli (1655-1705) had this inscribed on his tombstone in Basel along with a picture of the logarithm

Clarion Video. Another Flimsy Model.

The personable Tamara Vining of Seattle has posted a 50 minute video of my Clarion-sponsored appearance at the University of Washington Bookstore. First I read from the first chapter of Hylozoic for half an hour, and then I do some Q & A.

Thanks, Tamara!

This week I'm cranking up work on my novel Jim and the Flims again. I want my characters Jim and Durkle to tunnel down through purgatory beneath Flimsy and to drop out of a floor hatch in the lowest level of purgatory, and to find themselves f

"Bad Ideas" and the Center of Flimsy

The other day I mentioned being inspired by J. G. Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life, in which he stresses that SF is the best way to write about the present. And while I was on the road, I took this dictum to heart (not for the first time), and started looking for things about society that I might transmogrify into gnarly SFnal objective correlatives.

[Awesome giant graffiti mural in Kamloops, Canada.:]

Idea #1: living ideas. The internet is still quite new and undigested, some fresh SF w

Topology of the Afterworld

As I mentioned last month, in my post, "The Afterworld as A Monad with an Infinite Center," I've been working on a painting called Topology of the Afterworld. I finished it yesterday.

As I mentioned before, this painting has to do with my mental image of Flimsy, an afterworld that I'm describing in my novel Jim and the Flims. I wanted to fit an endless world into a finite volume—I'm thinking that maybe a copy of Flimsy is inside each electron. And I used M. C. Escher's idea for fitting infinit

Seattle and Canada. Ballard & Pynchon.

So now I'm back home from Clarion and a road trip to the Canadian Rockies. One slogan I forgot to tell them at Clarion: "You're not doing your job as a fantasy/SF writer unless your readers wonder if you're crazy."

On the trip, I read J. G. Ballard's autobiography, Miracles of Life—he wrote it in the last year or so of his life—he was dying of cancer at age 77. It reminded me of how my own brush with death galvanized me into writing a memoir, albeit at age 63. Comparing my memoir to Ballard's

How to Write (Clarion West, 2009)

This week (July 27 - July 31, 2009) I've been teaching some emerging writers here in Seattle at the Clarion West workshop in Seattle. It's a full schedule, with all the group workshopping of stories, one-on-one conferences, and reading the stories to be workshopped the next day. Many thanks, by the way, to the organizers, Leslie Howle and Neile Graham.

It's been interesting for me to read so many different types of stories, and to hear the students' concerns and ideas. It reminds me of my orig

How to Write, 1

I'm talking to some beginning writers here in Seattle at the Clarion West workshop. It's a full schedule, with all the group workshopping of stories, one-on-one conferences, and reading the stories to be workshopped the next day. I'd kind of dreamed that, while I'm here, I might write a transreal story about teaching writing, but I feel a little too scattered for that today.

But I do want to write something—my way of getting my head together. So what I'll do is to work up some Q & A in this po