Rudy Rucker's Blog, page 69

Two New Podcasts of My Readings

This weekend I taped a couple of performances. Charlie Jane Anders introduced me for a short reading at her monthly live show, Writers With Drinks, at the Make Out Room bar near Valencia Street—a visually lovely place.

Among the other writers whose readings impressed me there was the young Chelsea Martin, reading bad-attitude thoughts in a flat voice.

The crowd at Writers With Drinks isn't at all like the usual science-fiction crowd, it's more like a hipster literary salon.

I also read at Dark C

Norway 1. Bergen, Midsummer.

[Reminder: I'm giving two readings this weekend, Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. The following is from my travel journals, written during a recent trip to Norway.]

June 22-23, 2009.

We're in Bergen now, in a new country. The Norwegians are even better-looking than the Danes.

We passed through a maze of traffic and dull-seeming neighborhoods between the airport and downtown Bergen, but here, near the water, it's very cute, a little like Gloucester, Mass, with wood frame clapboard houses on h

Hylozoic Hype

A couple of good reviews of Hylozoic came out recently:

One is by Charlie Jane Anders on io9, and

And the other is by Paul DiFilippo on Sci Fi Wire.

I did a couple of interviews this week. One was with Mike Perschon, about The Hollow Earth, for his blog, Steampunk Scholar.

And the other was with John Joseph Adams, about Hylozoic, for a piece to appear on Tor.com pretty soon.

I updated my cumulative PDF file of "All the Interviews," and you can also find these interviews in there, as well as a few ot

Copenhagen 2.

June 20-21, 2009

The Tivoli amusement park is sweet, cozy, European. I only went on one ride, a small roller coaster. No point giving myself a stroke with some neck-whipper. He had a late lunch of smørrebrod, that is, buttered bread with…you pick. I had fjordrejer on mine, local shrimp. The place was called Grøften, meaning Ditch. One of the guys I met the other day, Morten, told me that his grandparents used to take the train into town for a big day at Tivoli, ending with a great beer-drin

Copenhagen 1

[I wrote these notes by hand in a small notebook, typed them up when we got home, and I'm now editing them into blog entries.:]

June 18, 2009.

Københaven means "buy" plus "harbor."

We just ate a big breakfast at the Kong Arthur Hotel buffet. Great stuff. The eggs and butter from this green glove of a peninsula in the North/Baltic seas. From the name, I'd thought maybe the hotel was Chinese-run, but it turns out "kong" means "king" in Danish.

[Death at my heels in the State Museum of Art. I'm gl

Two More Readings

I'm back—we were vacationing in Denmark and Norway. I'll be blogging some of my travel notes and photos over the next couple of weeks. I'm pretty jet-lagged, so today I'll just do a quick post with info on two readings coming up next weekend.

[Cod, salmon and Norwegians at the aquarium near Alesund.:]

Saturday, July 11, 2009,

7:30 to 9:30 PM, (doors at 7:00 PM).

The Writers With Drinks show .

I'll be reading from Hylozoic at this monthly show at the Make Out Room bar/club in San Francisco. The s

Better Worlds, 2nd Edition. iPod ware.

I’m going to take a couple of weeks off from the blog and let my mind open up.

I’ve been tuning up my iPod today. I’d noticed that when you use the automatic “get album art” in iTunes, there’s a number of albums that get left out. Here’s an interesting site that helps you download and install album art for your iTunes display. If this doesn’t work, you can Google for the album name, find an image and drag it into a box in a File|Get Info dialog that iTunes can show you for the imageless album

Reading HYLOZOIC. The Ramones.

I did three readings from Hylozoic over the last few days. The picture above shows me at Borderlands Books in San Francisco, photo courtesy of Bogeon Kim.

At Books, Inc., in Mountain View, I recorded a podcast of me reading the first part of Chapter Two of Hylozoic, along with about a half hour of questions-and-answers with the friendly crowd. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via my Feedburner podcast station.

When I went to Berkeley to read at Moe’s Books, I got together wi

Alicia Boole, Charles Hinton, and the Fourth Dimension

I’ve decided that my character Weena Wesson in Jim and the Flims should be a very old living person from Earth, like 150 years old. And she should have some knowledge of the fourth dimension.

And thus I’m led to Alicia Boole Stott (1860-1940), an intuitive geometer of the fourth dimension, known for her cardboard models of the 3D cross-sections of the 4D polytopes, which are more sophisticated cousins of the “hypercube.” Above is a photo of Alicia with her mathematician friend Pieter Schoute.

“The Abduction”

I finished a new painting today, “The Abduction.” You can click on the image below to see a larger version.

I painted this scene to help visualize a chapter in my novel, Jim and the Flims. In the background we have a giant geranium plant that’s being used as a castle by a race of flying people called the flims. In the foreground, a man’s girlfriend is being abducted by an alien yuel who’s taken on the shape of a dinosaur. The sun is a glowing alien being that’s known as the Supreme Jiva and