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Archive for the ‘Rudy’s Blog’ Category

Proofing NESTED SCROLLS

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

I’m still hanging out in Gotham. Love the roar and bustle. Had a nice reading with Brendan Byrne. Eventually a tape should appear on the Hour of the Wolf radio show, I’ll let you know when it’s streamable.

Tor Books is about to produce a trade paperback edition of my autobio, Nested Scrolls. I’d like to clean up any remaining typos in this book, so if you’ve found some, please let me know over the next week or two—you can simply post the typo as a comment here or email me.

My Complete Stories ebook is selling some copies, thanks for that! (Only $4.95 for a mammoth tome.) I’m glad to have found the self-published ebook alternative to the Kafka castle of traditional publishing. Toothless Inuit on an ice-floe or…rat leaving a sinking ship?

I’ll be publishing issue #13 of my webzine Flurb at the end of this month, I have 13 good new stories edited and ready to go, all I need at this point is a few days of production work.

But meanwhile, as mentioned, post any Nested Scrolls typos you find or email me about them.

Rucker and Byrne Reading in NYC, Tuesday, March 13

Thursday, March 8th, 2012

The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings presents:

Rudy Rucker and Brendan Carney Byrne

WHEN: Tuesday, March 13th. Doors open at 6:30 — event begins at 7

WHERE: The SoHo Gallery for Digital Art, 138 Sullivan Street (between Houston & Prince St.) Map. $7 suggested donation.

HOW: By Subway: 6, C, E to Spring St.; A, B D or F to West 4th; 1 train to Houston St; or R, W to Prince St.


[Photo by Brendan Byrne]

Brendan Byrne’s fiction has appeared in Flurb; his nonfiction has been published in Strange Horizon, The Brooklyn Rail and Rhizome. His novella The Showing of the Instruments was published in 2011 by Phone Booth Press. He is the editor of the webzine The Orphan.


[Photo by Sylvia Rucker]

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a former computer science professor. He received Philip K. Dick awards for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, now available in the Ware Tetralogy. His fantasy California novel of the afterlife, Jim and the Flims, appeared in 2011, as did his autobiography, Nested Scrolls, which received the Emperor Norton Award. Rudy recently finished writing a 1950s alien invasion novel called Turing & Burroughs, featuring a love affair between Alan Turing and William Burroughs. Rucker took up painting in 2000, and he’s had three shows of his pop-surreal works in San Francisco. For ongoing updates, see Rudy’s Blog.

Thanks to:

* Reading organized by Jim Freund, Producer and Executive Curator of The New York Review of Science Fiction Readings, and known for his long-running live radio program, Hour of the Wolf, which broadcasts and streams every Wednesday night/Thursday morning from 1:30-3:00 AM. Programs are available by stream for 2 weeks after broadcast.

* The SoHo Gallery for Digital Art is dedicated to re-establishing SoHo as an international center for the development of new artistic forms, concepts and ideas. A screens-instead-of-canvases approach allows a wide selection of art from around the world which would otherwise never make it to the City. The SGDA is available for private gatherings and events of all kinds.

* The New York Review of Science Fiction magazine is celebrating its 21st year!
Subscribe or submit articles to the magazine at New York Review of Science Fiction, PO. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY, 10570.

Epic Dorkbot SF

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

My son Rudy and I both did presentations at the Dorkbot San Francisco meeting. Dorkbot has groups in cities around the world. Their motto: “People Doing Strange Things With Electricity.”

The Dorkbot people managed to to a live streaming video of the show, and the stream is preserved online at ustream.

Rudy the younger started his routine about 30 minutes into the stream, and I came at the end. Rudy younger was talking about his punk-ethic wireless company, www.monkeybrains.net. They’ve put maybe a thousand small parabolic antennas up around the Mission district and beyond, using a surplus Jordanian military infrared laser for their long-haul connection. He unbolted his giant laser from its building-top mount and brought it in to point at the audience, you can see it here. People were flinching. Since it’s infrared, nobody was sure if it was on. A gig per second of unseeable data.


[Photo by Karen Marcelo.]

I taped and made a podcast of my part of show. I was reading a chapter called “Jane and Me” from my novel-in-progress, which has the working title The Big Aha. It’s about the advent of some serious biotech in Louisville, Kentucky, and it’s kind of darkly funny.

You can click on the icon above to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

The space where we had the event was like a ground-level loft, totally full of Bay Area hipsters. The residents of the space had built these weird benches up on the walls. It felt like a Russian Revolutionary meeting of kulaks. Planning our digital revolution. None of the speakers really mentioned politics, though. At this point all that goes without saying. Internally, we’ve already seceded.

The Dorkbot SF organizer has been Karen Marcelo, a key scene-jammer who describes herself as a “bandwidth waster.” I snapped a picture of Karen with the Mondo-era SF superfreak V. Vale, famed for his RE/Search publications. I was reminiscing with Vale about the shock value of his 1989 Modern Primitives which was the first place where many of us saw photos of people with incredibly gnarly piercings and tattoos. Who can forget Sailor Sid’s highly decorated penis? Of course now the modern primatives are baristas in your local café, but Vale led them out of the darkness.

The other speakers besides the two Rudys were the post-art artist Mike Estee, who talked about his cardboard robots, and the post-science scientist Liam Holt who helped build a Syneseizure device that converts images into vibrations in speakers held against your face by a bondage mask. Somehow all the talks fit together.

An epic evening!

Transreal Books

Saturday, February 25th, 2012

At this point in my career and in the history of publishing, it seems reasonable for me to abandon—at least for some of my titles—printed books and commercial publishers. So I’ve started my own Transreal Books. I see at least three kinds of advantages to this move.

(1) I’m freed from commercial constraints to the formatting of my books—in particular an ebook can be very long, as in my Complete Stories ebook, or it can include color images, as in my projected Better Worlds ebook. And I’ll be able to sell my books at a reasonable price.

(2) I can repeatedly revise a book without having to go through the complex process required for new print editions. For instance, as time goes by, I can keep adding more stories to Complete Stories.

(3) By becoming a publisher, I have the final say over what books I put out—and I receive a larger share of the royalties.

I’ve been seriously crunching the HTML and EPUB formats for a week or two—I’ll say more about all that nutsy-and-boltsy stuff in some other post. But for today, here are the current and planned releases from Transreal Books!


Complete Stories
Buy as Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Collected together in one mammoth volume: all of Rudy Rucker’s science-fiction stories, a trove of gnarl and wonder. This, the first edition, includes stories from 1976 through 2011. As well as a volume’s worth of fifteen new stories, Complete Stories includes all the tales from The 57th Franz Kafka, Transreal, Gnarl!, and Mad Professor. As well as Rucker’s solo stories, we have collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn.


The Hollow Earth
Buy as Amazon Kindle or Barnes & Noble NOOK.

Hollow Earth is a classic work of American steampunk. In 1836, Mason Algiers Reynolds leaves his family’s Virginia farm with his father’s slave, a dog named Arf, and a mule named Dammit. Branded a murderer, he finds sanctuary with his hero, frustrated genius Edgar Allan Poe, and together they embark on an extraordinary expedition to the South Pole, and the entrance to the Hollow Earth. It is there, at the center of the world, where strange physics, strange people, and stranger creatures abound, that their bizarre adventures truly begin. 1st print edition Avon Books, 1990. 2nd print edition Monkeybrain Books, 2006. Transreal Books ebook version of 2nd edition, 2012.


And what’s ahead? Here are some of the titles I’m planning:

Complete Essays
Better Worlds (paintings)
All the Visions. (early memoir)
Infinity and the Mind
The Fourth Dimension
Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension
Mind Tools
Journals 1990 – 2011

Yeah, baby. Free at last.


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