Rudy RuckerBesprekingen
Auteur van Software
Besprekingen
Spacetime Donuts door Rudy Rucker
"I have no idea," I admitted.
Devo dire che sono stato piuttosto deluso da questo libro, che pure pare essere un long seller (per quanto possano esserlo i libri di saggistica). Mi pare che Rucker abbia fatto un mischione, tra capitoli matematici molto tecnici - persino io ho avuto qualche difficoltà a seguirli, e il testo dovrebbe essere a livello divulgativo - e capitoli pseudofilosofici, con una contrapposizione tra Uno e Molti che a me sa più che altro di New Age. Diciamo che non penso lo rileggerò mai.
A quick and enjoyable read, refreshing after my last book which a bit of a slog. I love me some Rudy Rucker!
--The Roots in the Box and the Roots in the Bones by T.K. Rex
--Woman of the River by Genevieve Williams
--Cigarettes and Coffee
--Jamais Vue by Tochi Onyebuchi
Robert Silverberg's article, "Reflections: Farewell to the Vinland Map" was well done as usual.
Well, that was weird as hell. Fun too.
Rudy Rucker's As Above, So Below — A Novel of Peter Bruegel
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 22, 2019
See entire review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1139169-rudy-bruegel
I've read 14 Rudy Rucker bks prior to this one. They've all been SF. I like them. I was delighted to find this, a non-SF bk based around the life of one of my favorite painters. I respect diversity in people's creative outputs & w/ this bk of Rucker's my perception of his diversity goes up a notch (whatever that metaphor may mean here).
""I have to draw this," he told de Vos. He shrugged the strap of his satchel from his shoulder, peeled off his skirted jerkin, and sat down cross-legged upon it. He found ink and pen and a bottle of water in his satchel, and pulled a sheet of paper out of a special flap in his jerkin's lining. All the while he was staring at the mountain. "It's quite unlike what we've seen in paintings back in the Low Lands, Martin. Different than what we've been taught. It's less contorted, more like a living thing. It's saying hello to me."" - p 12
Wch brings me to Hylozoism, an idea that I recall Rucker's writing introducing me to. Prior to that, I thought of myself as more of an Animist. In Hylozoism, everything has life; in Animism, everything has a soul. Hylozoism stays open to philosophies that question the concept of the soul. Does a mountain need a soul to say hello? Maybe a Mountain Dew.
Bruegel lived in a time & place far worse than anything I've had to go through & he managed to tightrope walk his way across the perils. Religious intolerance ruled. It could happen again. Let's hope it doesn't.
"To add to the pomp of the reception, an exemplary heretic had been hung upon a gibbet to one side of the arch, a stocky weaver who'd made so bold as to own a printed copy of the Bible." - p 16
Yes, owning a bible was considered to be a heresy punishable by execution. After all, the church wanted a monopoly. Is it any wonder if greed's involved?
"A sleek priest offered him a fresh-printed indulgence, good for one hundred years off from the time that was owed to Purgatory as a residual "temporal debt" even after a sin was forgiven. The curtained confession booth resembled an outhouse." - p 36
What a racket. Charge people to lessen an imaginary punishment in an imaginary after-death world. In the meantime, make the real world hell for everyone except the racketeers. Fortunately, there was another world competing for conceptual dominance, a world where cartographers were paying attn to reality.
"Ortelius loved maps, he took pride in moving them from city to city, spreading the new God's-eye worldview far and wide. There was a kind of alchemy to a map. First the mapmaker refined the ore of travelers' and surveyors' reports into numbers on an ideal mathematical globe—even if some reports were given only as sun positions and hours of travel. Next came the mysterious algorithmic transformations that projected the curved path of Earth's ideal globe down into a flat rectangle. And then came the illumination of the map." - p 51
""I despise the Church," said Williblad quietly. "I'd like to see it wiped off the face of the earth. There is no God, Abraham." Williblad stopped and smiled oddly, his lively eyes gauging Ortelius's reaction. "I speak these thoughts to keep from bursting. In so doing, I place my life into your hands. But I sense your readiness to be more than a passing friend."" - p 101
Well would ya look at that!: I'm already up to page 101 & I ain't hardly sd nuthin'!
Yes, the church. I think somebody sd something like "Thou Shalt Not Kill" a long time ago but they didn't really mean it. The Church's true precept is "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not who I'm preaching to."
"on the left was a gallows with three dark, ragged shapes suspended beneath it. Crows circled the gibbets, cawing and feeding. And on the other side of the road, red-shirted soldiers sat drinking before the inn. Seeing them filled Bruegel with a visceral fear. Thanks to the Blood Edicts of the foreign tyrant King Philip, the crime of heresy was to be punished only by death, with no lesser penalties to be contemplated. Out here in the country there were no limits upon what the occupying soldiers might do.
""I heard about these hangings earlier this week," said Franckert. "Two women and a man. They preached that all property should be held in common, but in the end, these three rebels couldn't share things any better than the rest of us. It seems the two women came to a falling-out over the man, and one of them set the Inquisitors upon the other two.["]" - pp 114-115
Never collaborate w/ an Inquisitor. What we need instead of Inquisitors are Councils of Talking-to-Yourself.. no, that's not right.
"Present for the Landjuweel were more than a dozen amateur theatrical groups—the so-called Chambers of Rhetoric." - pp 136-137
"The Cornflowers fully lived up to their reputation for irreverance. Their play was about a young man name Strotkop who wants to be an artist but whose father makes him become a priest. Nevertheless Strontkop keeps on drawing. His bishop tells that art is permissible only if he will paint religious scenes that the church can sell to pilgrims. But Strontkop wants to paint naked women. Unable to think of a way to find models, he hits upon the expedient of getting sinful women to undress for him inside the confession booth.
"On the stage, the women an Strontkop were mostly hidden by the mock confession booth, but the priest's arm motions were clearly not those of a man drawing. He was pulling himself off. Complications followed, and at the finale, one of the women's boyfriends showed up in the confession booth and farted in the priest's face, the fart stimulated by a great blast of bagpipe music. The audience became riotous with glee." - p 141
It's nice to know that they respected the most important thing of all: the spirit of Rabelais. Personally, the last time I tried to pull myself off it was like trying to pull myself up by my bootstraps, I just fell off the chair. Strotkop's mistake was in not hiring models to pose as the Virgin Mary getting impregnated by God. No matter how far she split her beaver the hymen wd still be there so what's to complain about? What I want to know is: is it true that Mary got the clap from God? That might just be a matter of his orgasm being confused w/ a clap of thunder.
Alas, Bruegel, too, is a blasphemer & he gets BUSTED b/c his girlfriend snitches on him. Gotta watch those girlfriends, they have no sense of proportion. He slighted me, I think I'll have him tortured! Fortunately for our pal Bruegie, his talent as a painter was recognized enough for him to become penalized by exploitation.
""Do you mean a dungeon, Your Worship?"
""An artist needs light," said Granvelle. "And a bit of comfort. No, my fine fowl, you'll have a gilded cage. I'll give you a room at the Regent Margaret's provincial palace in Mechelen, halfway between Antwerp and Brussels. I'm there regularly to visit the Regent. I'll keep a close eye on your progress."
""I'm to leave Antwerp?" This seemed to disturb Bruegel more than anything that Gravelle had said so far. Anja knew him as a creature of habit who hated to break his rituals of work. "For how long?"
""Let's try something like a year to start with," said Granvelle. "And then—who knows. We might send you into exile, or keep you on as Margaret's court painter, or mayhap hang you by the neck until dead. It depends on your actions."" - p 147
Yes, our boy Pieter gets spirited away by the naughty people. Further intrigue happens in wch Bruegel gets forced into an assassination intrigue against an aristocrat who's been good to him but not necessarily to others.
"Lazare brushed past Bruegel and pressed forward towards William, speaking rapidly in a low penetrating voice. "A word with you, Prince," said the Walloon. "Do you know that your tax assessor took my father's farm? And that one of your soldiers dishonored my sister? Eh? Do you know how many you've ruined in Luxembourg?" Matters were coming to a head." - p 203
Alas, it appears that Lazare's desire for vengeance was justified but Bruegel had managed to forewarn William so poor Lazare bit the dust instead. I don't blame him, Bruegel had his own problems.
"He poured a few inches of apple vinegar in each of the pots, and then had Bengt and Mayken put a number of beaten sheets of lead into each vessel. The sheets, pounded to the thinness of paper, were separated by pebbles so that the vinegar would touch all the surfaces. They covered the stack of pots back up with rotting compost and household dung."
[..]
"According to Peter, the decay of the offal released a fire element, which over the period of a few weeks would combine with the fire within lead and vinegar to turn the earthen elements of lead into an air element of fine, flaking white." - pp 217-218
Seem like a professional hazard to you? It does to me, these paints can be toxic & Bruegel's using them constantly. I remember once being stopped by a State Trooper for speeding. He explained that more people died in road accidents than they had in the Vietnam War. I've pointed out elsewhere that he must've been excluding the Vietnamese casulaties. Anyway, imagine a similar authority figure who stops you & informs you that more people died from falling afoul of the Catholic Church than from excessive exposure to lead paints.
"There was hardly a man or a woman in the Low Lands who wasn't technically subject to execution, and where facts were lacking, they could easily be made up. The Spanish rulers and their clergy were free to kill whomseover they chose. Not only did they seek out the rebellious, the wealthy people and landowners were also being executed so that Spain could claim their goods." - p 235
Williblad Cheroo, a man of Native American origin who's been whisked away & forced to live in European culture, proposes painting an abstraction to Bruegel. Since Rucker's source material is sd to be sparse, I have to wonder whther he has any basis for this at all other than knowledge that Native American culture had abstract art long before the Europeans did.
""Religion's in those panels, just the same," said Bruegel, "Nature is God's body."
""And men the lice upon her," said Cheroo, "Why not leave us vermin out of your next picture entirely? Paint the land alone, and, once you've mastered that, paint a landscape with no land at all."
""How do you mean?" said Bruegel, smiling a little at Cheroo's fantasy.
""Paint something with no human name on it. Paint a color or a shape . . . something that's not a picture of anything. When I was a boy, there was an elder of our tribe who'd pour out different-colored sands to make wonderful patterns. Sunbursts and stars and whorls and zigzags."" - p 246
One of the things I particularly like about this bk is the way that Rucker manages to bring in major historical elements via his characters's connection to them. I'm glad to have Mercator placed in time w/ Bruegel & the Inquisition.
""Are you the first to think of a book of maps, Abraham?" said Mayken, sidestepping the quarrel that Williblad perversely sought.
""The Italians have made some attempts at such a thing," said Ortelius. "But they mix everything into a jumble with no two images laid out the same way. I discussed the idea of a uniform map book with Mercator not so long ago, and he said he'd been considering something like the same idea. He'd wanted to call his book an Atlas, after the mythical Greek giant who carried the earth upon his back. Be that as it may, he's being good enough to let me finish my version first." - p 257
"The first world atlas to be published was the Theatrum orbis terrarum (Theatre of the world) in 1570. The Flemish cartographer, Abraham Ortelius' orig[i]nal collection was in Latin and contained 70 maps on 53 pages. Between 1570-1612, numerous updated editions were published including those in six other languages: German, Dutch, French, Spanish, English and Italian.
"Although the word 'atlas' here is retrospective (i.e it did not exist as a term in Ortelius' time), the collection was the first time maps had been presented in this way." - https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/first-published-atlas/
Uh, oh! Is Rucker busted here w/ his use of the word "Atlas"? Or is the Guiness Book of World Records wrong? They misspelled "original" (I corrected it) so that's one strike against them.
Now it seems that back in them thar days there were Christian ICONCLASTS.
""It will be a small matter to destroy these graven images, which are only a species of idolatry," the Swiss preacher shouted. "For think, my Brethren, the Romish Church has done us a thousand times more hurt and hindrance through their persecutions. We propose to burn paintings and to smash stone statues, but the ecclesiastics have burnt and broken those 'statues' which God Himself has made, namely our dearest friends, fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers."" - p 260
It's always something, right? You've got the religious nuts who're killing people & then you've got the religious nuts who're destroying the things the people make. If more people concentrated on making interesting things & stopping the nuts from killing people then most people wd be much better off.
"With a wild shout, the crowd dragged the Madonna's effigy out onto the floor, tore off her vestments and hacked her to pieces—yes, some of the men turned out to be carrying axes, sledgehammers, and crowbars beneath their loose gray Beggar robes. More image breakers came streaming in the cathedral's side doors, several of them bearing ladders." - p 263
Now breaking art instead of killing people is an improvement but I have a respect for the skill of the makers & hate to see it disrespected. But, HEY!, that was the 16th century, not NOW, eh?!
See entire review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1139169-rudy-bruegel
review of
Rudy Rucker's Postsingular
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 26, 2015
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/388646-upping-the-nante
At 1st this just seemed like reruns to me. The "nants", life-as-we-know-it-threatening nanotechnology intent on eating the Earth & its inhabitants & recreating them virtually in order to create a super-computer more in keeping w/ the nants's own self-organization, seemed like a rerun of Rucker's own The Hacker and the Ants (1994) from 13 yrs before in wch there were "ants" as the threat instead of "nants".
I'd 1st encountered the idea of technological insects in Stanislav Lem's great The Invincible (1967) when the idea struck me as highly original (but may not've been). Then there was Greg Bear's Blood Music (1985) in wch nanotechnology gets into humanity's bloodstream & dramatically changes human reality. THEN there was Greg Egan's Permutation City (1994) in wch people attain 'eternal life' by becoming code on an electronic chip. These 1st 3 bks all struck me as visionary. THEN, in June of 2000, Ghanesh & I interviewed writer Damien Broderick In Australia ( http://youtu.be/OhiGt9eJ9bw ) & he touched on his more hopeful imaginings for nanotechnology. THEN there came Michael Crichton's Prey (2002) wch featured nanotchenology as predator wch just struck me as derivative of Blood Music & not much more.
Finally, we get to Rucker's Postsingular (2007) wch is even later in the chronology &, therefore, not likely to provide much novelty. "By way of keeping people informed about the Nant Day progress, the celestial Martian nant-sphere put up a full map of Earth with the ported regions shaded in red. Although it might take months or years to chew the planet right down to the core, Earth's surface was going fast. Judging from the map, by evening most of it would be gone, Gaia's skin eaten away by micron-sized computer chips with wings." (p 32)
However, what makes Rucker's story a furtherance of the preceding is that the 2nd chapter runs thru the nanotechnology-threatens-life-as-we-know-it trope in short order: the drama happens & is curtailed & we move onto a different variation. As such, the 1st 2 chapters greatly condense the type of story that might've previously constituted an entire novel.
As such, as is so often the case w/ Rucker, I'm reminded of Philip K. Dick. I often say that Dick had so many ideas that his novels wd reach a spectacular (penultimate) climax halfway thru the bk: a climax that many writers wd be hard-pressed to come up w/ for their (ultimate) ending - & then Dick goes on to build to an even more fantastic actual ending. Rucker's 1st 2 chapters here somewhat compress that Dick strategy to a preface of sorts.
Moving on, the 1st chapter starts w/ some formative back-story in wch 2 boys make a rocket: "The rocket's sides were adorned with fanciful sheet metal fins and a narrow metal pipe that served as a launch lug." (p 14) I'm reminded of my own childhood when my neighbors made a mortar from a pipe That was used to launch CO2 canisters emptied of their gas & stuffed w/ match heads. The match heads wd be lit & the canister wd take off to wherever the pipe was pointed. &, uh, no, it wasn't safe. In Postsingular the boys time the launching of their rocket for when there's minimal likelihood of their hitting a passing jet:
""You can really see the jetliners on that blue map?" asked Carlos, his handsome face gilded by the setting sun.
""You bet. Good thing, too. We'll squirt our rocket when there's a gap in the traffic. Like a bum scuttling across a freeway."" - p 16
My friend Doug Retzler, who in the early to mid 1980s was making Sky Art, did a piece at a public arts festival in BalTimOre called the "Ad Hoc Fiasco" in wch he made a large painting of clouds on cheesecloth & had it held aloft by helium-filled weather balloons - floating above the festival & tethered to the ground to prevent the painting from floating away.
The tethering failed & the painting did venture upward. Given that it was something like 30 ft wide, Doug was seriously worried that it wd get in the path of a passing aircraft & foul its props or jets & cause a crash. He phoned the FAA & explained the situation to them & they assured him that the likelihood of that was very slim indeed. As far as I know we never found out where the cloud painting landed. Imagine the surprise of anyone who might've witnessed its coming back to ground: The sky is falling! The sky is falling!
The nants are defined: they're "a line of of bio-mimetic self-reproducing nanomachines" (p 20) & their risk is speculated on: "The nant swarms develop their own Wolfram-irreducible emergent hive-mind behaviors. We'll never really control the nants". (p 21)
But, of course, the nants are let loose or where wd the drama be?: "["]But Dibbs's advisers like it. We'll save energy, and the economy can run right around the clock. And, get this, Olliburton, the vice president's old company—they're planning to sell ads."" (p 24) Hopefully, this is transparent political satire to Americans alive at the time of the release of this novel but that might not be the case even 20 yrs from now. Dibbs is obviously Bush, Olliburton is clearly Haliburton & the vice-president is none other than Dick Cheney. &, yes, Cheney was the Chairman and CEO of Halliburton Company from 1995 to 2000 before becoming VP of the USA.
& for those of you who still don't get the satire here: "former Vice President Dick Cheney took a shot at Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.). But Paul is not likely to be fazed by criticism from Cheney, for several years ago the Kentucky senator was pushing the conspiratorial notion that the former VP exploited the horrific 9/11 attacks to lead the nation into war in Iraq in order to benefit Halliburton, the enormous military contractor where Cheney had once been CEO." ( http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/rand-paul-dick-cheney-exploited-911-... ) In other words, where Haliburton tromps, ethics are left-behind (even more than kuffar during the Rapture) & greed isn't even bothered to be leashed in its ravenous plunge forward to rend & tear - & so it is w/ Olliburton in Postsingular.
Rucker's parody of Bush imagines the worst: "President Dick Dibbs—now eligible for the third and fourth term thanks to a life-extending DNA modification that made him legally a different person—issued periodic statements to the effect that the nant-sphere computer was soon coming online." (p 26) Fortunately for the reader who wants at least the mild vicarious pleasure of seeing Bush come to a bad end as punishment for his crimes, Dibbs gets his come-uppance.
""And you're saying your string of symbols can stop the nants?" asked Nektar doubtfully. "Like a magic spell?"" (p 30) This idea of sequences of symbols as magic spells was also in Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants. Some refer to mathematics as 'the language of nature' & think that the more closely one describes natural processes in this language the more ability one will have to move from pure math to applied math: ie: to control the processes described. As such, the similarity to ceremonial magik, in wch esoteric incantations are inscribed & chanted are thought to channel specific occult forces, is obvious.
""I've written a nant-virus. You might call it a Trojan flea." He chuckled grimly. If I can just get this code into some of the nants, they'll spread it to all of the others—it's written in such a way that they'll think it's a nant-designed security patch."" - p 30
These days, computer viruses are anathema to just about everybody - but I remember when my friends & fellow neoists Boris Wanowitch & Barnoz were the editors of Cacanada's 1st Macintosh computer magazine, MacMag, in the early 1980s & they sent out a virus that caused a smiley-face (or some such) to appear on computer desktops that had a msg w/ it to the effect of "Have a Nice Day - from MacMag". Yeah, they got into alotof trouble for that since they infected the products of at least one major software designer but the intention was fairly benign.
One of the main characters is "Chu", an autistic child w/ an interest in computers. At one time he might've been called an "idiot savant". These days that's probably 'politically incorrect'.
"Ond gave his son more food, then paused, thinking. He laid his sheaf of papers down beside Chu, thirty pages covered with line after line of hexadecimal code blocks: 02A1B59F, 9812D007, 70FFDEF6, like that.
""Read the code, he told Chu. See if you can memorize it. These pages are yours now."" - p 32
I'm reminded of Crispin Hellion Glover's movie What is it? featuring a cast of actors w/ Down syndrome. If I remember correctly, when Glover introduced the movie at a screening of it that I witnessed he explained that people w/ Down syndrome are very gentle. I'm also reminded of a friend who was temporarily paralyzed. During this time she cd sense when people entered the rm by the increase of temperature from their bodies. The point being that there's always the possibility that a deficiency in one area may be partially compensated for by a strength in another.
& here I am still in the 2nd chapter, barely getting started - this prefatory bit is fast-moving: ""The Trojan fleas just hatched!" shouted Ond.
Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 14, 2015
For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/387996-phreak
Woah. I'm glad I read this back-to-back w/ Rucker's Master of Space and Time from 10 yrs before. Rucker's come a long way since then. Master of Space and Time was fun but in a somewhat 'light-weight' kind of way. The Hacker and the Ants is far more immersed in computers & much more detail oriented AND it's still completely entertaining. & The Hacker and the Ants references Master of Space and Time: "He could even speed up and slow down time, or run time backward—he was the master of space and time." (p 238)
I started studying computers way back when in the days of flow-charts & the like in 1973 but back then I certainly didn't have access to a computer at home - computers were most likely to be found in big businesses & at universities. Thru my neoist connection Boris Wanowich I at least got to see home computers in the mid-80s (see his early computer animations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPYjSnWB6aYuse computers on an almost daily basis.
& then, in late 1994 or early 1995, my friend "Sarmad" Brody sent me a Mac SE to use so I finally had my own. In 1997, my friend John Berndt sent me an even more recent Mac & I was set. Since then computers have become much more familiar household items for me but in some respects I still don't know shit. One might say that the amt of exercise I've gotten since 1997 has diminished considerably as I've sat more & more in front of one. I'm sitting at one now in order to write this review.
The point of this blather being that anyone whose life has interfaced w/ computers to the extent that mine has is likely to read The Hacker and the Ants in the context of that timeline - if only by 'comparing notes'. The Hacker and the Ants was copyrighted in 1994 & 1st published by AvoNova in 1995 - nicely overlapping my 1st ownership of the primitive Mac SE. If I'd read it then I might've found it very futuristic. Reading it now, it just seems prescient of things that've come to pass - Rucker was aware of what was happening w/ computers, of what might happen w/ them in the near future - he was teaching computer science.
In the novel it's the age of digital tv. As I recall, the switchover to digital tv in the US began on Saturday, June 13, 2009 - 25 yrs after the novel's copyright date. As a part of Ian Page's End of Television project, my group HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) was broadcasting on analog tv right around the time of the changeover (there's a short movie from the night here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsncOO-sql0 ).
Rucker's character hates tv, something that I can always identify w/ - even tho I've been on tv a few times I don't watch it. "Everything on TV enraged me, because everything on TV was the same: the ads, the news, the shows. In my opinion, all TV was all part of the huge lying Spectacle that the government kept running to oppress us all. Data compression had brought us a thousand channels, but they all sucked same as ever." (p 12) Have you ever sat in a motel rm flipping thru the channels just for the sheer novelty of accessing what you don't usually have access to or care to have access to? The main thing amazing about it for me is the sheer quantity of same-old, same-old. It's like having the ability to get a dump truck of junk mail empty itself into yr living rm every day instead of just the usual handful of paper-waste.
"Thinking of Hungary and the police made me wonder if our own USA would ever be free. Would we ever get rid of the earth-raping, drug-warring social oppressors who'd made the public treasury their own latrine and hog wallow? Well, the Hungarians had gotten rid of the Communists, hadn't they? Some day the Revolution was going to come to America, too. One of the secondary reasons why I worked on ants and robots was that I hoped they could help bring down the Pig.
"Tonight the ants had ruined television. There could be no more important step in crippling the Pig. I started grinning. the GoMotion ants had done a good thing. I was proud of them." - p 128
I was contacted by the SciFi channel way back in 1999 by someone who sd that they'd heard that I was the guy whose work they wanted. In other words, they wanted free samples. After I sent the guy a perfumed letter telling him how glad I was to be finally reunited w/ my separated-at-birth conjoined twin (or something like that) & sending him a DVD-R of some brief snippets of work of mine & telling him that I didn't really believe that I was the guy whose work they wanted I was, indeed, rejected. Did I say something wrong? Well, yes - & I did it deliberately - but I knew there was no way they were interested in work that wasn't about outer-space-monsters-threatening-Earth-w/-lots-of-CGI.
"Over my walls and in the far background I would see whatever landscape I was currently hottest for—in those days it was a swamp with simmies that looked like dinosaurs and pterodactyls. It was called Roarworld; I'd gotten it off the Net." - p 9
I'm reminded of Second Life, a user-created online world, something in wide use today (except by people like myself whose computers are too old to support the software or, again, people like me, who aren't computer savvy enuf to work around their computer's limitations).
"When I toggled on the mighty Roarworld sound module, it was more than awesome, GAH-ROOOOONT!" - p 9
Ha ha! Over a decade ago, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History was seeking someone to design a dinosaur sound to "scare the kids" who wd do campovers there. I submitted an 'outrageously' long resumé of my 'sound art' experience & claimed that I cd make a sound to "scare the kids" but that, of course, I didn't think that was what they really wanted.
There's GPS, not so-named, too:
"While I was driving 280 across town to East San Jose, I fished out the scrap of paper that Nga's cousin had given me—5778 White Road. I flicked on the electronic map attached to my dash and told it Nga's address.
"Intense green lines appeared, showing a diagram of San Jose, with a highlighted path indicating the best route from satellite-calculated current location to Nga Vo's." - p 104
People take GPS for granted now but that was hardly the case in 1994. The 1st time I ever used it was when I was a passenger in Lizard's RV driving cross-country to my 1st & last Burning man in 1999.
"Even though I typed in thin air, it felt as though I was touching something, for my gloves had tactile feedback. Woven in with the Spandex were special piezoplastic touchpads that could swell up and press against my hand. The touchpads on my fingertips pulsed each time I pushed down on a virtual key." - pp 9-10
When I read about Virtual Reality & think about the technical limitations of my own home set-up I have to be honest & realize that if I were a little more ambitious in this direction I cd have something like this going to for very little money. I remember when video artist Alan Price made a VR headset in a very clever & efficient way in the early 1990s for something like less than $150 out of commonly available parts. That's the way to go.
Is this a pioneering Cyberpunkspace novel? Weeelllllll.. not as much so as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) or G. C. Edmondson & C. M, Kotlan's The Cunningham Equations (1986) or Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (1988) (to name a few I've read) but I found its technical explications more accessible - maybe just b/c the lingo is actual in-use lingo.
Since Rucker won the Philip K. Dick prize twice & since he's based in California (as Dick was) & since the writing's very 'readable' as was Dick's fluid pulp, it's 'inevitable' that Rucker be compared to him. What I find comparable is the dysfunctionality of Rucker's characters love lives. Dick was married 5 times & Rucker's primary character is going thru a divorce & gets involved in 2 other problematic relationships.
Rucker's description of women, like those of writers like Raymond Chandler before him, is of the variety of women-can-fuck-you-up:
"The phone rang.
""Hello, Mr. Rugby?" A woman's brisk, aggressive voice.
""Yes."
""This is Louise Calder from Welsh & Tayke realty. Do you mind if I bring a client by in half an hour? They're quite interested in the property."
""I'm very busy today. I don't want to show the house."
"The voice was instantly, unforgivingly venomous. "I'll pass that along to the owner, Mr. Rugby. Good-bye."" - p 6
There's much more to the Dick connection than just that: "we liked to test it in a full-size simmie-house that we called Our American Home. We had simmies of a family who supposedly lived there: clumsy Walt and Perky Pat Christensen, with son Dexter and daughter Baby Scooter." (p 17) While Rucker doesn't explicitly mention Dick this is clearly an homage to people who've read Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) (a personal favorite):
"Perky Pat Layouts were the biggest thing going in the extra-Terran colonies. Entire artificial worlds for a miniature golden-tressed doll and her muscular, artificial boyfriend—beginning with landscapes, and complete to every detail down to topless bathing suits." - inside front cover blurb of the Book Club edition of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
"He was Walt. He owned a Jaguar XXB sports ship with a flatboat velocity of 15,000 miles an hour. His shirts came from Italy and his shoes were made in England...
"It was always Saturday.
"In the bathroom he splashed his face with water... staring into the mirror at his familiar features, he saw a note tacked up, in his own hand.
"THIS IS AN ILLUSION. YOU ARE SAM REGAN, A COLONIST ON MARS. MAKE USE OF YOUR TIME OF TRANSLATION, BUDDY BOY. CALL UP PAT PRONTO!" - back cover blurb of the Book Club edition of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
It seems that many or most or ALL of the fictional bks I read & like & identify w/ have underdogs for protagonists. I suppose that's a pretty cliché trope but I still much prefer it to 'Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous'. The Hacker and the Ants starts off w/ the beleaguered hero being harassed by real estate agents. This is banal, sure, but these things pick away at a person's spirit:
"Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets. They came swarming in and scattered to every corner of my great dry-rotted California manse. Several of them had video cameras. What a thing to wake up to." - p1
Now this guy's hardly the underdog that he cd be, he's a middle-class guy w/ a well-paying job that he gets to do from home - something certainly more common now, thanks to computers, than it was when this was written. Nonetheless, his life proceeds to go down the drain BIG TIME & the resultant struggle is quite the engaging tale.
One of the most fun things about reading this for me was the didactic introducing of computer jargon & slang. I either knew most of it already or cd easily figure out its meaning b/c the etymology is so transparent but to have it laid out in such a brisk entertaining fashion helped reinforce it all for me:
"An exceedingly hostile or schizophrenic e-mail message is called a flame. Even though Russ and I were still exchanging scientific information, we were at the same time in the throes of a flame war." - p 172
"The simulated objects of cyberspace were known as simmies. My hand images were simmies, as was the virtual phone in my cyberspace office." - p 7
"But what was cyberspace? Where did it come from? Cyberspace had oozed out of the world's computers like stage-magic fog. Cyberspace was an alternate reality, it was the huge interconnected computation that was being collectively run by planet Earth's computers around the clock. Cyberspace was the information Net, but more than the Net, cyberspace was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space." - p 8
"How did I look? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body simmies tuxedos." - p 14
"The funny thing about the "cyber" prefix was that it had always meant bullshit.
"Back in the 1940s, the story went, MIT doubledome Norbert Weiner had wanted a title for a book he'd written about the electronic control of machines. Claude Shannon, also known as The Father of Information Theory, told Weiner to call his book Cybernetics. The academic justification for the word was that the "cyber" root came from the Greek word for "rudder." A "kybernetes" was a steersman or, by extension, a mechanical governor such as a weight-and-pulley feedback device you might hook to your tiller to keep your sailboat aimed at some fixed angle into the wind. The practical justification for the word was contained in Shannon's advice to Weiner: "Use the word 'cybernetics,' Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will put you at an advantage in arguments."" - p 19
This is obviously a pet peeve for Rucker b/c he also referred to it in Master of Space and Time 10 yrs before. In my review of that I wrote:
""Cybernetics. That was a word Harry and I had always laughed about. Nobody had any idea what it means, it's just some crazy term that Norbert Wiener made up." - p 13
"Really? Paul Pangaro has this to say:
""What does the word “cybernetics” mean?
""“Cybernetics” comes from a Greek word meaning “the art of steering”.
""Cybernetics is about having a goal and taking action to achieve that goal.
""Knowing whether you have reached your goal (or at least are getting closer to it) requires “feedback”, a concept that comes from cybernetics.
""From the Greek, “cybernetics” evolved into Latin as “governor”. Draw your own conclusions.
""When did cybernetics begin?
""Cybernetics as a process operating in nature has been around for a long time.
""Cybernetics as a concept in society has been around at least since Plato used it to refer to government.
""In modern times, the term became widespread because Norbert Wiener wrote a book called “Cybernetics” in 1948. His sub-title was “control and communication in the animal and machine”. This was important because it connects control (a.k.a., actions taken in hope of achieving goals) with communication (a.k.a., connection and information flow between the actor and the environment). So, Wiener is pointing out that effective action requires communication.
""Wiener’s sub-title also states that both animals (biological systems) and machines (non-biological or “artificial” systems) can operate according to cybernetic principles. This was an explicit recognition that both living and non-living systems can have purpose. A scary idea in 1948." - http://www.pangaro.com/definition-cybernetics.html"
Note that in the The Hacker and the Ants incarnation of this pet peeve Rucker 'quotes' a conversation between Shannon & Weiner. Really? Was that somewhat incriminating conversation recorded in the 1940s? I think not. Rucker is putting forth someone's imagined version of a hypothetical conversation. It may be very accurate - but it's probably not an actual quote. Naughty, naughty, Rudy.
Rucker seems to have other pet peeves. In The Hacker and the Ants an annoying character is described thusly: "He was a lawn dwarf, five-foot-two with full beard, bald pate, and long greasy locks, he was (I would soon learn) a vegetarian, a pagan, a libertarian, and
a deep thinker with a dozen crackpot opinions, all furiously held." (p 97) Now cf that to his description of "Professor Baumgard" (I take "Baumgard" to be a parody of "tree-hugger" since a German-to-English translation of this name might be "Tree Guard"): "The guy was a real square. He had long, greasy gray hair and a beard. A microcomputer in the pouch of his sweatshirt. And—ughBeatles music playing softly on his radio." (p 136 of Master of Space and Time)
"In the Valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who'd turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into someone's company machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle—the cryps' security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide." - p 90
When I see "phreaks" I think of "phone-phreaks" & I think of the magazine "2600" whose name references the frequency of the whistle used by phone phreak Captain Crunch to make free calls on pay phones. Anyone interested in my own feeble connection to phone phreakery might enjoy this TESTES-3 movie from 1979: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0toRU7wYDvQ .
As I've pointed out in at least one previous review, references that are of keen familiarity to the reader make sd reader identify w/ the bk more. If I read a reference to Jackson Mac Low or the music of Morton Feldman in an SF novel (wch I'm fairly sure I have before) I feel 'right at home'. In this case, the reference is to SRL:
"The man who actually built our physical robot models was called Ken Thumb. Ken was a slim blue-collar type; soft-spoken, brilliant, implacable. Before signing on as GoMotion's machinist he'd worked with the Survival Research Lab art/robotics group putting together his big crazy machines out of parts he would find in abandoned factories and warehouses." - pp 21-22
Then there's a reference to an entomologist known to & loved by all entomologists (well, so it seems from my superficial entomology POV): "fitting our shapes to official E.O. Wilson entomological data." (p 66) I 1st heard of Wilson from my friend Irene Moon, the entomologist/noise-performer. I've also read Wilson's novel Anthill (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6944565-anthill ).
Probably somewhat thanks to Wilson there's some nice entomology in here as well as computer nerdiness: "Biological anthills usually contain a wide range of the myrmecophilous or ant-loving creatures who live in the colony as parasites, symbiotes, or as the ant pets collectively known as as myrmecoxenes or symphiles. There is a certain small beetle, for instance, which is kept and fed by the ants simply because the ants enjoy licking tasty waxy secretions from the beetle's antennae." (p 72) Myrmidon snacks, anyone?
& then there's the Church of the SubGenius:
""That's too gnarly, Dirk. Why can't you make the control be . . . " I looked over at the businessman figure with his pipe clenched between the teeth of his shit-eating salesman grin. I now recognized the figure as the old underground culture icon known as "Bob" Dobbs. "Give my clown a copy of the pipe of 'Bob' Dobbs."" - p 214-215
Now Rucker's not the 1st to reference SubGenii. John Shirley's 1988 SF novel Black Hole of Carcosa has this passage: ""Don't fuck with me, 'Bob,'" Stang snarled." (p 133) Of course, it all pales in comparison to 'real' life: http://youtu.be/FfDCnTR03dg . & then there's Robert Anton Wilson. What's w/ all the Wilsons? My mother's maiden name was Wilson.
Rudy Rucker's Master of Space and Time
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 9, 2015
Reading Rudy Rucker is like reading about a Ron Goulart wisecracking dysfunctional robot dropped into a bunch of stoners in Flatland. The 1st chapter is entitled "This Is the Name of This Chapter" - the type of self-reflexivity loved by me &, seemingly, by many mathematicians. Rucker was a professor of mathematics & computer science. His novels usually plunge right into the comedic weirdness & this one's no exception:
"Harry Gerber was sitting on my steering wheel. He was two inches tall. A much smaller version of him was perched on the gearshift as well. And the tiny dots darting around on my dashboard—something told me they were a flock of yet tinier Harrys. All of them wore gray polyester suits, white shirts, and no neckties. Oh, my. Who else but Harry?" - p 3
Rucker has won the Philip K. Dick award for best paperback original SF book twice. I can certainly understand why. Rucker's writing reminds me a bit of Dick's but even more it reminds me of Goulart's. Unlike Goulart, tho, there's usually something at least a little scientific to think about:
"Cybernetics. That was a word Harry and I had always laughed about. Nobody had any idea what it means, it's just some crazy term that Norbert Wiener made up." - p 13
Really? Paul Pangaro has this to say:
"What does the word “cybernetics” mean?
"“Cybernetics” comes from a Greek word meaning “the art of steering”.
"Cybernetics is about having a goal and taking action to achieve that goal.
"Knowing whether you have reached your goal (or at least are getting closer to it) requires “feedback”, a concept that comes from cybernetics.
"From the Greek, “cybernetics” evolved into Latin as “governor”. Draw your own conclusions.
"When did cybernetics begin?
"Cybernetics as a process operating in nature has been around for a long time.
"Cybernetics as a concept in society has been around at least since Plato used it to refer to government.
"In modern times, the term became widespread because Norbert Wiener wrote a book called “Cybernetics” in 1948. His sub-title was “control and communication in the animal and machine”. This was important because it connects control (a.k.a., actions taken in hope of achieving goals) with communication (a.k.a., connection and information flow between the actor and the environment). So, Wiener is pointing out that effective action requires communication.
"Wiener’s sub-title also states that both animals (biological systems) and machines (non-biological or “artificial” systems) can operate according to cybernetic principles. This was an explicit recognition that both living and non-living systems can have purpose. A scary idea in 1948." - http://www.pangaro.com/definition-cybernetics.html
I recently reviewed Robert Heinlein's SF novel Space Cadet (1948) ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3220256-space-cadet ). In the review, I neglected to touch on how the term "space cadet", used by Heinlein to mean a person studying to become an astronaut, became a derogatory term for 'air-head' - probably in the late 1960s or early 1970s. The implication is usually that a person is a space cadet b/c they're 'spaced-out' from consciousness-expanding drug use. "Who's this. Who do you think it is, space cadet?" (p 14) In this case, the discombobulating factor is time-travel.
The novel takes place in a near-future that's a minor variation on the near-past. Potentially familiar scenes for the reader are tweaked slightly: "There was a bus station too, and next to it was place called the Terminal Bar. Some terminal-type guys gimped past in the wet, one of them an obvious wire-head. He was so far gone that he used a mechanical walker. You could see the bulge of his stim-unit under his overcoat." (p 15) There's really no need to explain such neologisms, it's easy enuf to imagine a person w/ wires going directly to their brain that a stimulation device wd send signals to to make them high. I'm reminded of the story (is it true? - or an urban legend?) of research done on monkeys w/ electrodes attached to their brain to stimulate orgasms by the touch of a joy-stick (how aptly named in this instance). The story goes that the monkeys stimulated themselves to death. Shades of Jose M. Delgado's Physical Control of the Mind: Toward a Psychocivilized Society.
Harry's surprising appearance in multiples in multiple sizes has an explanation provided early on that gives Rucker an excuse for fun:
""So Fred Hoyle was right," Harry exclaimed. "Everything is shrinking!"
""Nothing's shrinking, Harry. I'm the same size every day."
""That's what you think. But your house shrinks, your car shrinks, your wife shrinks—everything in the universe is shrinking at the same rate. That's why the distant galaxies keep seeming farther away. I've always wondered how to test it. But now—"
""Time travel!" I exclaimed. "I get it. If everything's smaller now than it was yesterday, then if I jump back through time to yesterday, I'm much smaller than the people there."" - p 18
Wonderful, Rucker really knows how to milk a premise.
"Sir Fred Hoyle was an English astronomer and cosmologist, primarily remembered today for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis, and his often controversial stance on other cosmological and scientific matters, such as his rejection of the Big Bang theory in favour of a steady state universe and the panspermia theory of the origin of life on earth. He is considered one of the most creative and provocative astrophysicists of the second half of the 20th Century." - http://www.physicsoftheuniverse.com/scientists_hoyle.html
A side-note here is that when I look up something online it's sometimes interesting to read takes on it from radically different philosophical perspectives. The above is from a scientific website & the below is from a religious one trying to co-opt science:
"Big bang critic dies (Fred Hoyle)
"by Greg Demme and Jonathan Sarfati
"Sir Fred Hoyle, the man who coined the term ‘big bang,’ died on Monday, 20 August 2001, from complications following a severe stroke.
"Born in Yorkshire, England, in 1915, Hoyle was one of Britain’s best-known mathematicians and astronomers in the last half of the 20th century. He spent decades searching for answers to questions of the origins of life and the origin and age of the universe. In the 1940s, he, along with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, proposed the ‘steady state’ theory, a belief that the universe had no beginning or end, but always existed and would continue to exist.
"All these men were strong humanists, so they rejected any theory that seemed to teach a beginning for the universe, because that would point to a Beginner—see the discussion in ["]If God created the universe, then who created God?["] Their bias was so strong that they were even prepared to violate the fundamental Law of Conservation of Mass/Energy, which states that mass/energy in the universe can neither be created nor destroyed. Of course, this fundamental law is consistent with Genesis—God’s creation of the space-time universe was finished after six days. But the Steady State Theory posits a continual spontaneous appearance of hydrogen atoms from nothing.
"But because the evidence of the rapid expansion of the universe exceeded the predictions of Hoyle’s theory, and because of the reluctance to believe that fundamental laws were violated, many astronomers began to postulate that an explosion of highly dense matter was the beginning of all space and time. In his 1950 BBC radio series, The Nature of the Universe, Hoyle mockingly called this idea the ‘big bang,’ considering it preposterous. Yet the theory—and the derisive term—have become mainstream, not only in astronomy but in society as well." - http://creation.com/big-bang-critic-dies-fred-hoyle
Interesting, huh? It seems that the Big Bang Theory is embraced by religious people as evidence of a beginner, of God. That wd've never occurred to me. I find this interesting too: "All these men were strong humanists, so they rejected any theory that seemed to teach a beginning for the universe, because that would point to a Beginner": when I think of "humanists" I think of people who care enuf about humanity to want to, eg, end war & starvation & poverty. Here it seems that "humanist" is meant to mean 'overly human-centric'.
What I then think of is the Catholic church torturing people for postulating that the Earth isn't the center of the universe - a violation of Aristotlian teaching. Why wd that upset the Catholics? B/c humans were supposedly made in God's image &, therefore, the home of humans must be the center of the universe, etc.. Like all co-opters, the church (in this case Creation Ministries International) can twist any argument to any purpose. One century being human-centric might mean embracing the notion of Man being made in God's image, another century being human-centric might mean rejecting God.
But I digress (& use "But" at the beginning of a sentence - as do Demme and Sarfati: "But because": we must be identical! (false syllogism?)).
""Well, yes. The idea of controlling space and time does happen to be something I've been thinking about recently. The way I see it, it's simply a matter of increasing the value of Planck's constant by many orders of magnitude."" - p 19
"["]Planck's constant, you know, it's a measure of the effect that the observer has on the universe. If I can temporarily increase the value of Planck's constant in my body, then the world will look more and more like I want it to."" - pp 19-20
Like I sd, "Rucker really knows how to milk a premise." I'm reminded of Christopher Priest's The Inverted World (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/142181.The_Inverted_World ) where imagining the effect of a fairly basic, but, nonetheless profound, premise is fully 'fleshed-out'.
Reading this makes me think of the way I thought when I was in my late teens & early twenties - or, perhaps, throughout my entire life. One of my favorite things to think about was whether it wd be possible to violate seemingly inviolable 'laws of nature' by will-power or other means. In my February 2, 1981 "attempt to undermine 'reality' maintenance traps" (see a movie of it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ababbr_8Xas ) I tried using self-hypnosis. As I explain on my "Mere Outline" website: "While embedded between 2 floors of a building I listened to a "hypnotic" tape that I'd made which attempted to convince me that I could walk thru walls & perform other extraordinary defiances of "consensus reality"." ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/MereOutline1981.html )
I wasn't expecting the only partially hoped-for results but I liked imagining the possibilities. It seems to me that Rucker's thinking along similar lines. For that matter, so are ceremonial magicians. Evoking Planck's constant & gluons appeals to me more than invoking spirits does but to an outsider w/o knowledge of or vested interest in either there might not be that much of a difference. Shades of alchemy.
Rucker seems to have a taste for pop culture wch is probably part of why his novels appear to be 'successful':
"a terrarium with a mean-looking little lizard in it. I squatted down to get a better look at the lizard. He was like a miniature Godzilla, with powerful rear legs and a long toothy jaw. He looked as if he'd been in a fight recently, and seemed to be in some pain." - p 16
I wonder what religious people make of the name "Godzilla"? Is it generally perceived as blasphemy? Backwards masking in Japanese monster movies!
""One thing about time travel," said Harry musingly. "There probably has to be a counterweight. Action equals reaction, you know.""
[..]
""If you jump an animal forward, it'll seem real big," I reminded Harry.
""That's right. Every object in the universe is shrinking, so if something jumps forward a few days it seems enormous. Did you ever see any Godzilla movies, Fletch? With the giant lizard?"" - pp 30-31
"Just a few hundred meters off was a huge predatory lizard" - p 32
"meters"! Rucker's an American writer. This bk having been written in 1984, there might've been more of a mvmt to make all common-use measurements more recognizably base-10.
""Say, Fletch. You're in time for lunch. Antie's stewing some chicken and my pet lizard, Zeke. He got some wounds and today he died." Harry gave me one of his wet, unfocused smiles.
""The lizard!" I yelped. "I saw him in your store window yesterday! Was he the—"
""That's right. Tonight, when I go back to visit you on Friday, Zeke will jump forward from Thursday to visit you on Saturday.["]" - p 43
This whole Godzilla section of the review might seem to be a spoiler but I think most readers will see this one coming from a kilometer away.
Our heros enter a mirror-world:
""It's your mirror self," said Sondra. "Your other nature. You've objectified the repressed side of your personality so as to do battle with it. How Jungian!"" - p 72
I don't know whether "Jungian" is the appropriate term here or not but it occurs to me that Rucker might be making a joke off of the more common expression: "Freudian". Jung & Freud weren't exactly left-right reversals of each other but Rucker's playing fast & loose here.
Rucker's very playful: he likes to imagine things, give them a loose justification w/in the basic framework of the novel, & then let 'em loose (Tou louse?):
""They won't be mad at you once they find out about the porkchop bushes and the fritter trees," said Nancy soothingly.
""The government won't like free food. What about all the people who just work to get enough to eat? People with menial, subsistence-level jobs. Those people will drop out of the work force if they got some of our seeds."" - p 107
That's about as close to getting political as I can remember Rucker ever getting. All in all, I find Rucker quite funny:
"The guy was a real square. He had long, greasy gray hair and a beard. A microcomputer in the pouch of his sweatshirt. And—ughBeatles music playing softly on his radio." - p 136
Things change. In the 1960s when I 1st started growing my hair long in the area where I lived it meant that I was taking the risk of being threatened or harmed by 'jocks'. By the 1970s the jocks had long hair. In Master of Space and Time, Fletch changes from a man to a woman. Then s/he has a conversation w/ another woman:
""You have to think about the genes," I said. I'd heard a theory about this. "Basically all a person wants is to perpetuate his or her genes. The best strategy for men is to have lots of children with lots of different women. The best strategy for women is have children and make sure the father stays around to help take care of them."
""Ha!" snapped the woman next to me. "Some man must have told you that. All a person wants is to perpetuate their genes. Boy, is that stupid."" - pp 164-165
For me, it's somewhat consistent w/ what I call "B.O.D.", Biological OverDrive. I do think that waaay, dowwwn, innn-side (sung like Led Zeppelin) our primary biological goal is to keep the old DNA perpetuating. Hence sex is very pleasurable. But I don't see why the drive might not include women wanting to have children w/ multiple men. Unfortunately?, practical matters intervene. Over. & over.
For people in the USA, at least, there's a new dating system: pre-9/11 & post-9/11. This bk is pre-9/11:
""Would you take me flying with you now? It's dark and no one will see us. We could fly over to the World Trade Center and back."" - p 169
Of course, there're other WTCs than the twin towers in NYC - there's a single tower one in BalTimOre. That's not mentioned in the relevant Wikipedia article. Once again, BalTimOre is too MORLOCK to be on the map. Long Beach & Portland make it to Wikipedia. Will there now be a post-post-9/11 dating system?
Rucker even manages to squeeze in a good paradox:
"["]A genie promises a man that he can have exactly one wish come true. Now, what if the man's one wish is that he gets all the wishes he wants?"
""He willl get all the wishes he wannts."
""But remember! An initial condition is that he is allowed to have only one wish."
""I ssseee. So he willl get nno wishes."
""But he was supposed to get one wish."
""Butt perhaps the mann's rreal wish was that he get nno wishes at all. He does gett his wissh."
"But then he doesn't."" - p 189
Ah, logic! Gotta love it!
All in all, this was a totally fun read. I hear-tell that Rucker writes math bks too. Maybe I shd read one of those some day.
For one thing, Rucker & Shook & co go to a Mondo 2000 party. Rucker uses this passage to both praise Mondo 2000 (a magazine that once promoted an event of mine - thusly aiding the quantity of participation enormously) & to humorously describe why he won't write for them anymore. This touch added immensely to the purported autobiographical approach - as did Rucker's attempts to withdraw from alcohol (although I have no idea whether Rucker, in 'real' life has had a problem w/ booze). Like everything else I've read by him so far, this is a very California novel - filled w/ New Age, Hippie, Stoner, Silicon Valley, & Surfer culture. Interestingly, the back cover says: "File Under Science/UFOs" & the inside copyright, etc, page has this:
"The right of Rudy Rucker to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988"
Is this a clever way of making the 'Frank Shook' story more believable? An actual requirement of the publisher to try to prevent claims on the work? Whatever the case may be, Bruce Sterling's Introduction contests the believability that there's really a 'Frank Shook' person behind it all. It seems unlikely to me too.. but not completely impossible! Regardless, the 'Shook' frame makes the story that much richer.
My friend Jona Pelovska reads Rucker's science bks, wch I've never read. "Saucer Wisdom" (the title of wch I don't particularly like) motivates me to read everything I can find by him - including the science stuff wch I might not ordinarily be that interested in.
Maybe the only thing that keeps me from giving this bk a "5 star rating" is the writing style. Rucker's writing is a very straight-forward 'pulp' style that makes for easy reading but, even though he plays w/ that in some interesting ways & even though there're other 'pulp' writers who have an astounding 'poetic' feel for language, it always seems to never really flow the way that 'pulp' greats like Hammett & Chandler do.
An interesting coincidence, for me at least, is that when I came to the "Devil's Tower" part of the story I was sitting 5 feet away from a VHS copy of a National Park movie about Devil's Tower that I'd had sitting around for a mnth or so. I stopped reading long enuf to check out the movie. I love that kind of synchronicity.
This is the earliest of the Rucker bks I've read & probably my favorite. The simple premise of a math professor who has out-of-body experiences when he naps is expanded to a wild ride that's part hallucinogenic daydream, part semi-serious attempt to address notions of how to demonstrate that there aren't one-to-one mappings of specific infinities. The result was completely engrossing & entertaining for me & is proof 'positive' that Rucker's one heckuva imaginative guy. Thank the holy ceiling light for nerd culture.
Onze site gebruikt cookies om diensten te leveren, prestaties te verbeteren, voor analyse en (indien je niet ingelogd bent) voor advertenties. Door LibraryThing te gebruiken erken je dat je onze Servicevoorwaarden en Privacybeleid gelezen en begrepen hebt. Je gebruik van de site en diensten is onderhevig aan dit beleid en deze voorwaarden.