Seek!: Selected Nonfiction

by Rudy Rucker

The essays and memoirs collected in Seek! trace Rudy Rucker's trajectory through the final decade of the second millennium. His topics include artificial life, chaos, the big bang, Pieter Brueghel, the church of the subgenius, live sex, mathematics, science fiction, and TV evangelism. A computer scientist and programmer, Rucker is an articulate, engaging guide to the world on either side of the computer screen.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Essays

356 pages, Hardcover

First published May 28, 1999

About the author

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre. He is best known for his Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which won Philip K. Dick awards. Presently, Rudy Rucker edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.

Reviews

[Nita · Rating 2 out of 5]

These pieces did not age well. As someone who started programming at the age of six (in 1982), used a modem heavily starting in 1991, wrote an essay for physics class in 1993 about how amorphous solids and fiber optics were going to let us watch TV whenever and wherever we wanted ... from this perspective it was fun to read about the author's goings-on in an adjacent space. (Not a narrator; these nonfiction works are definitively written from an 'author' POV.)

Sadly, there are too many eye-roll-y asides within the writings where the author uses the language equivalent of second-hand smoke (we didn't notice it until after Y2K but once we did we realized how gross it was!) which I can forgive if the author wrote something in his teens or early twenties but when you write something as a fifty-year old and use language to describe women in a way that makes it seem like you're simply trying to impress your equally juvenile buddies ... ** stifles yawn **

I sort of feel bad because here's how his work got on my radar:
1. Many years ago his books were props in a catalog for Saks Fifth Avenue or Neiman Marcus or something like that--some thick-stock promotional insert in September Vogue or whatever for fall fashion
2. Knowing that writing can be lonely and this writer probably had no idea that his book was in the catalog, I found his academic email address and emailed him, said I'd be happy to mail him the pages from the advert if he wanted
3. He replied and said he would only send his mailing address if I read the books photographed first
4. So I bought the books
5. And they sat on my shelves for over a decade
6. And I finally read them this winter
7. And now I realize that the same kind of person who responds to my gesture in bullet two (2) above is _of course_ the same kind of person who would have, in his adulthood (despite being married and have daughters who at that point were already adults themselves) casually used language to describe women the way he did: emotionally stunted (and I know what emotionally stunted looks like because I regard it every time I look in the mirror).
8. But hey, at least now I can toss those catalog pages into the recycling

Super interesting piece about a tour of AMD though

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some types of non-fiction writing does not age well for me, and a third of this book contains that type of writing. Seek! is divided into three sections: science, life, and art [although I may have forgotten what the title of the mid section was since I finished it, but you get the gist]. Because this is a collection of pieces, published and unpublished, mostly written in the late-80s to mid-90s (and admittedly published 15 years ago, so any sense of "dated-ness" is my personal struggle, not one of the author's) it is about a world that has greatly affected the one we live in now, but is very much a vision of the future set in the past. The life section is best, with autobiographical essays about Rucker's life, with great stories about living in Lynchburg, VA during the height of Fallwell's reign and living in the Bay Area during the weird days of the early 90s. It serves as an encapsulation of a portion of the cyberpunk days of twenty years ago, like leafing through old issues of Wired and Boing Boing (where many of these pieces first appeared). But as soon as swerves out of culture and writing, and into science, it is like the worst parts of leafing through old issues of Wired. Nothing is worse than the certainty of predictions of how science will change the world read with the hindsight of how it hasn't. But the essays that I loved have reignited my interest in the cyberpunk fiction that I only skimmed at the time, so I expect to see a lot of familiar authors, and twenty year old titles, showing up in my feed in the next few months.

[Guy Ferguson]

A collection of formerly published articles, plus quiet a few never before published, by Rudy Rucker, on a various topics. To myself, halfway through an IT degree, this was a great insight into the realities of the commercial world of IT.

And being an existing Rucker fan I was not surprised to find hos works motivating and philosophical on topics such as the nature of life, what distinguishes us from a program, and much text on chaos and complexity.

I have long thought R Rucker to be one of our foremost scientific thinkers, and this book supports my belief.

[Janet Guss Darwich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seek Ye The Gnarl! Seriously, if you love fractals, and math, and art, this book will thrill your senses!

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rucker never fails to ignite.