BOOK
Science fiction author-hero Rudy Rucker is an oddity and a treasure. In his new collection of nonfiction, Seek!, Rucker explains his preoccupations as mathematician, professor, family man, and limit breaker with a novelist's attention to freaky and convincing details. In these days of neat little marketing categories, few writers attempt to cover so much ground.
Taking its name from the manual for one of his artificial-life programs,the book is a frenzied, sometimes spastic tour of Rucker's life story and driving obsessions. Die-hard fans (of which Rucker has many) love snippets of an author's life, and hero worship aside, it's a pleasure to read the wry and often profound observations of someone accustomed to viewing himself through the filters of sci-fi, mathematics, and a strong dose of unrestrained playfulness. When he narrates a visit to a chipmaking laboratory, for instance, he's impressed by some mechanical arms that portend "robot obstetric wards."
Rucker delivers the facts with whatever funny notions or personal insights strike him, even when they're not so diplomatic. He slags compatriot Robert Anton Wilson for being a self-important grouch; his descriptions of people sometimes include attention to physical flaws worthy of a fairground caricaturist.
The author also indulges in some self-comparisons that would make the modest blush. He likens himself, variously, to William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Pieter Bruegel, and others. Maybe that's part of the fun of being a science fiction writer: When you've already used self-replicating robots to illustrate the world's social problems, you can get away with using artistic demigods as a way of approaching your own work. Seek! is a twist on Rucker's idea of transrealism, his authorial style that uses sci-fi as a setting in which to transform and examine the everyday world. (And rabid Rucker fans take note: Another volume, Saucer Wisdom, from Forge Books, is due out in bookstores this summer - a first-person narrative in which the author makes prognostications.)
A life that's deep in the bowels of Silicon Valley manufacturing one minute, partying in a Tokyo cyberpunk bar the next, and later wandering the streets of Antwerp contemplating Bruegel is a rich reminder that the future is now - and that we don't have to abandon the complexity of our selves now that we're here.
Seek!: Selected Nonfiction by Rudy Rucker: $35 hardcover, $16.95 paperback. Four Walls Eight Windows: (800) 788 3123, www.fourwallseightwindows.com.
STREET CRED
Basement Area Network
Hacking the Vacuum Tube
Free of Attachments
Polaroid's Sticky Portal
Burnt Rubber, Chicago Style
Booting Up Beelzebub
Out of the Celluloid Closet
ReadMe
Music
Saar-Sighted
The Transreal Thing
I, Nicklaus
American History f/x
Just Outta Beta
Little Big Screen
"It Was Just the Law of Large Numbers at Work"
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