Writings about Writing

by Rudy Rucker

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What I Write

List of Books

Reviews of the Books

How To Write

A Writer's Toolkit
My working notes for teaching writing workshops. Always under revision and to be radically expanded one fine day. I used this as a starting point for a writing workshop at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorardo, June 7 - June 13, 2004.

Essays and Talks on Writing

1) A Transrealist Manifesto
Reprint of my 1983 manifesto, which is, in a way, a blueprint for my career.

2) What SF Writers Want
My 1985 attempt to survey the topography and subtextual menaing of the known SF tropes.

3) What Is Cyberpunk?
Something like another manifesto, from 1986, with an information-theoretic Postscript.

4) Power Chords, Thought Experiments, Transrealism and Monomyths
Text of a talk I gave at Readercon in Burlington, Mass on July 12, 2003. Readercon is an annual print-oriented science-fiction convention and I was a guest of honor for 2003.

5) Seek the Gnarl
Text of my Guest of Honor address at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, March 27, 2005. A variant of this talk appeared in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

Interviews About Writing

All the Interviews
A PDF file of all the email interviews I've done.

Web Pages for my Books

I have made special websites for my more recent books, including reviews and other information.

Postsingular. (Tor Books, 2007).

Mathematicians in Love. (Tor Books, 2006).

The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. (Thunder's Mouth Press 2005).

Frek and the Elixir. (Tor Books 2004).

Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (Tor Books 2002).

Spaceland. (Tor Books 2002).

Saucer Wisdom. (Tor Books 1999).

Writing Notes

I habitually make up near-book-length notes for the novels and nonfiction books that I write. Here are links to them.

Notes for Postsingular. (Tor Books, 2007). 2.5 Meg PDF file with links, 145,000 words.

Notes for Mathematicians in Love. (Tor Books, 2006). 2.6 Meg, 100,000 words.

Notes for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul. (Thunder's Mouth Press 2005). 1.5 Meg, PDF file, 62,000 words.

Notes for Frek and the Elixir. (Tor Books 2004). 1.2 Meg PDF file, 75,000 words.

Notes for As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (Tor Books 2002). 1.4 Meg PDF file. 64,000 Words.

Notes for Spaceland. (Tor Books 2002). 400 K PDF file, 40,000 words.

Notes for Realware. (Avon Books 2000). 500 K PDF file, 48,000 words.

Notes for Saucer Wisdom. (Tor Books 1999). 660 K PDF file, 50,000 words.

Notes for Freeware. (Avon Books 1997). 500 K PDF file, 50,000 words.

Notes for The Hacker and the Ants (Avon Books 1994, Four Walls Eight Windows 2003). 160 K PDF file, 14,000 words.

Other Articles On My Websites

The CA Lab Manual. An introduction to cellular automata.

The Boppers Artificial Life Lab Manual. An introduction to artificial life.

Paper on Cubic Julia sets, Cubic Mandelbrot Sets and the "Rudy set". A math discussion of what comes after the regular Mandelbrot set.

Paper on Kappatau Space Curves. A math paper about a new kind of gnarly space curve.

Treatment for "Search for Infinity," an IMAX Movie about the Mandelbrot Set. We never got the NSF grant to make this, but it's still kind of a cool SF story.

Review of Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science(American Mathematical Monthly, November, 2003). I liked this book a lot.

Review of David Foster Wallace's Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity, (Science, January 16, 2004). I didn't like this book.

All of the email interviews with me in one big document.

Some of My Writings on Other Sites

The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club. SF/Horror story. In the online magazine Infinite Matrix.

Jenna and Me, Political Satire / Science Fiction story, by Rudy Rucker, Sr., and Rudy Rucker, Jr. In the February, 2003 edition of the on-line SF magazine Infinite Matrix.

Frontwheeldrive.com interviews by Tom Georgoulias. Two interviews about SF and computer science, latest was June, 2002.

Web Mind Columns . In 2000, I wrote four columns for a webzine called Galaxy Magazine. I think they only ran two of them. And now they're out of business. This link goes to a directory on my site where you can find my columns, which are about the mind and the web.

Big Bang Bust: Interview With Cosmologist Andrei Linde, by Rudy Rucker. Article for WIRED magazine about Andrei Linde's theory of a "fractal chaotic inflationary universe."

Robot Obstetric Wards, by Rudy Rucker. Article for WIRED magazine about Rudy's tour of the clean rooms at AMD and Intel chip fabs.

Use Your Illusion: Kit-Bashing The Cosmic Matte, by Rudy Rucker. Article for WIRED magazine about Industrial Light And Magic's special effects.

Ten Mathematical Favorites, by Rudy Rucker.   Posted on an interesting site by Wade Powell, reprinted from The SF Book of Lists by Maxim Jakubowski and Malcom Edwards.