<![CDATA[io9: Rudy Rucker]]> http://cache.io9.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: Rudy Rucker]]> http://io9.com/tag/rudy rucker http://io9.com/tag/rudy rucker <![CDATA[The Death of Philip K. Dick and the Birth of Cyberpunk]]> Rudy Rucker was the first author to win the Philip K. Dick Award, right after Dick's death in 1982. Around that time, Rucker was becoming aware of the new "Cyberpunk" movement and meeting the rebellious authors who were reimagining the union of humans and computers. In this exclusive excerpt from Rucker's new autobiography, Nested Scrolls, he talks about how both events influenced his writing, and what it was like to be a science fiction writer in those strange days. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5865721&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[June Books Bring Space Opera, Angry Robots, and a Zombie Coming-of-Age Story!]]> Looking for something to stick in the beach bag? This month brings new novels by Jacqueline Carey and Laurell K. Hamilton, plus zombies, vampires, robots, and some levitating kids. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5810261&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Why do so many former cyberpunk authors now write dark fantasy?]]> Cyberpunk has fallen from its peak in the 1980s and early 1990s, but the great cyberpunk authors are still writing. And many of them have turned to fantasy. Why is this? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5795217&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Why Burroughs' Naked Lunch is a science fiction classic]]> People worship Burroughs' Naked Lunch, but don't give it its props as a science fiction classic, argues Rudy Rucker on his blog. Rucker, whose new novel about Alan Turing includes Burroughs as a character, describes Naked Lunch as "Transreal SF." More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5746076&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling's twisted future Hollywood story will provide you with endless catch-phrases]]> You might think there's a limit to how weird Rudy Rucker or Bruce Sterling can get, but when they team up, their combined weirdness limit rises exponentially. Witness their strange, unsettling — and highly quotable — story "Good Night, Moon." More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5663543&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The future of sexual fetishism in the asteroid belt]]> A new issue of Rudy Rucker's scifi magazine FLURB went live yesterday, and it's full of great free stories from Bruce Sterling, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Carter Scholz, Madeline Ashby, and more. Plus, my story "The Gravity Fetishist" is there too! More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5628702&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Ted Chiang redefines how everybody will write about artificial intelligence]]> Science fiction's full of wishful thinking about artificial intelligence: It'll spring up on its own. It'll become smarter than us in no time. Ted Chiang's new novella, The Life Cycle of Software Objects, will change how you think about A.I. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5597704&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The best science fiction and fantasy books for summer escapism]]> Summer is the most escapist time of year, with vacations and long voyages. And no escapist jaunt is complete without a visit to other worlds. Here are the best science fiction and fantasy books for this summer's beach reading. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5582419&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[The Dance Of The Quantum Zombies Fills Your Head With AquaCrunk]]> A new issue of Rudy Rucker's rebel webzine Flurb is always cause for major celebration. It only comes out a couple times a year, packed with enough weirdness for a thousand regular SF mags. The Spring/Summer issue is out now. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5490297&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Don't Remake These 21 Movies, Film These Books Instead!]]> There's only one thing Hollywood loves than a movie based on a toy: remakes. Dozens of science-fiction classics are slated for do-overs. But instead of remaking films that were fine the first time, here are 20 books Hollywood should film. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5481559&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[What Do You Do When Your Novel Goes Off Course?]]> Novel-writing is like an interstellar voyage: disorienting and lengthy. Go off course, and it can be nigh-impossible to backtrack. What do you do when your novel's taken a wrong turn? Scott Westerfeld, Brad Meltzer, Cherie Priest and Rudy Rucker explain. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5406901&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[10 Best Robot Bodies To Load Your Brain Into]]> You can't be beautiful and immortal until you abandon your meatsack! Surrogates, opening Friday, shows a culture that's gone over to robot avatars. But here are ten other universes where you could abandon your flesh for a shiny, perfect robo-body. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5365553&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Is There Such A Thing As A Gloriously Unfilmable Book?]]> Click to viewHollywood has taken everything, from your childhood toys to the novels that haunted your dreams, and turned them into splashy vehicles for young Scientologists to gallop through. Are there any books that Hollywood absolutely can't turn into movies? Or shouldn't? More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5318079&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Rudy Rucker's Hylozoic: Even Weirder Than His Last Book]]> Rudy Rucker pushed the boundaries of how much weirdness you could fit into one science-fiction novel, with last year's Postsingular. But the sequel, Hylozoic, goes much further into the realms of the twisted, the disturbing and the post-everything. Warning: spoilers! More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5309469&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[4 Ways Virtual Reality Living Could Suck]]> Virtual reality sounds like paradise: we'll upload our consciousnesses, ditch our smelly meat bodies, and be beautiful, immortal rockstars in a scarcity-free wonderland, forever. But technology never quite works out the way you hope it will, and science fiction writers have already pointed out four ways virtual reality could suck. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5274180&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[From The Page To The Canvas: SF Writers Make Art]]> It used to be, everyone who wrote science fiction was a scientist, or full-time scribbler. But now, authors like Audrey Niffenegger, Rudy Rucker and Mary Robinette Kowal also make art. We talked art/SF with them. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5238329&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Cory Doctorow Headlines Geek Reading to Support EFF This Monday in San Francisco]]> Join scifi greats Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker, with io9 editors Annalee Newitz and Charlie Jane Anders, in San Francisco Monday night at a benefit for high tech civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5177551&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Autobiography Can Be Science Fictional]]> The main character of White Light was a math professor, closely modeled on me, and the setting was very much like Geneseo. The practice of writing science fiction about real life is what I came to call transrealism. In White Light, my life in Geneseo was the real part, and the trans part was that my character in the novel leaves his body and journeys to a land where Cantor’s infinities are as common as rocks and plants. — Rudy Rucker More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5082937&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Secrets Of Great Characters, According To 6 Science Fiction Authors]]> Click to viewAmazing stories need great characters. And when you're writing a story set in a futuristic or fantastical world, it's more important than ever for readers to be able to relate to your characters. It's also harder than ever, because your characters' lives and experiences will be totally different than your readers'. How do you make people identify with someone who lives in the future, or on another planet? How can your main character stand out, against a bizarre and colorful backdrop? We asked six great science fiction authors for their advice. Get to know them as individuals, rather than types. If your characters are cut off from all the present-day cultural references, like "lawyer who went to Harvard," then it's even more important to think of them as individuals, says Elizabeth Bear, Campbell- and Hugo-winning author of Carnival and Undertow. "Try very hard to know them as people," she urges. "That goes for any setting, past or present or future - or alternate reality." In particular, you should think, "'This is a person who happens to have the following traits, and all that they imply,' rather than 'this is a nuclear physicist who grew up in Iowa.'" Try making your characters scientists. Or at least, have them be obsessed with stuff that's relavant to your storyline, advises Kim Stanley Robinson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of the Mars trilogy and the Science In The Capital series. Having scientists as your characters lets you "explore the setting and the character at once." And it helps if your characters obsess about the mysteries and explanations in your story. They can also be obsessed with a planet, spaceship, new procedure or alien. Base them on people you know. The most realistic characters are often based closely on your friends or people you've met, says Rudy Rucker, Philip K. Dick-winning author of the -Ware novels and Postsingular. That goes double for your aliens, A.I.s and robots, he adds. It's always better to copy your friends than to lift from "received ideas about how SF characters might behave. Who wants to see yet another a humorless talking head with a BBC accent? The absolute worst thing in Matrix III was when Keanu gets to the virtual office of the Big Computer Mind, and he meets, like, a tweedy professor with a white beard. Ugh! At the very least it should have been a fat hacker in a T-shirt, preferably high on pineal extract." Also: to make your characters stand out, try having them say quirky, unexpected things. "Forget your Star Trek memories, and remember your wild and crazy friends - the ones who say things that Make No Sense," Rucker advises. Give them a thought-out world. The more carefully thought out the world you're placing your characters into, the more we'll be able to believe that they live there, says Tobias Buckell, author of Sly Mongoose. And that also makes it easier to "contrast them against this imaginary place." Figure out what they love, and what they fear. Try to find what drives your characters, including what they want and need, Bear urges. And understand what traumatizes them. "I tell people I like to know what they'd want on their tombstone: that seems to give me a really good handle on who they are." She adds:
Characters we can relate to have fears and damage, but moreover, for me they have to be devoted to something - an ideal, a person, whatever. Even villains become much more sympathetic when we're introduced to whatever it is that they love.
Kage Baker, author of the Company novels, agrees: "It isn't the way a person relates to his hovercar that makes him memorable; it's what's going on in his heart." No matter what planet or time you're living in, there will be "certain constants in human existence: struggle against poverty, rebellion against authority, love and desire, loneliness, curiosity. Any reader can relate to those." Make sure your character has loves and hatreds that readers can see themselves in, and the rest will take care of itself. Don't aim for larger-than-life - and overshoot. One pitfall with science fiction characters is that authors sometimes make their characters "bigger than life, or archetypal" to let them compete with the big, brash colorful worlds they live in. A common mistake is veering past archetypal, all the way into "over the top, or maybe somewhat cliche." If you do try for archetypal characters, think of the classics from all genres, like Sherlock Holmes' quirky genius or Captain Ahab's drive. Don't obsess too much about setting and toys. If you spend pages and pages on dense descriptions of your settings and how exactly your hovercar works, you're distracting the reader from your characters, says Baker.
It's enough to say "He climbed into his hovercar" and your reader will get the idea. You don't need to give a geography lesson: "They were sitting in the courtyard drinking fire-palm wine" or "She trudged back from the well, balancing her water jar" or "They looked out across the desert and saw the yellow mountains of Califia before them" all give brief, intense impressions of a place, without stopping the narrative in its tracks or drawing focus from the main character.
Find out who's hurting. If your story involves a new situation or technological breakthrough, figure out who suffers as a result - maybe that should be your main character, says Robinson, quoting from Damon Knight (who was quoting James Blish in turn.) Keep your characters grounded. The stranger the setting, the more ordinary your characters should be, says Terry Bisson, Hugo- and Nebula-winning author of Bears Discover Fire. "For example, in my most recent story, the narrator 'had a job and an apartment, but that was all.' The story wasn't about the setting but about the character." Your characters should be "totally convinced they live in the present, rather than the future. Because, of course, it IS the present to them," says David J. Williams, author of The Mirrored Heavens. Make sure your world, and your characters, both have a believable past, that anchors their present. "As Gibson said, the future's already here, it's just unevenly distributed. Same is true for the past: it's always with us, but sometimes beneath the surface. How one handles that is the key to character." More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5065556&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Step Inside Rudy Rucker's Crazy-Quilt Writing Salon]]> A new Rudy Rucker story (or book) is cause for major celebration just by itself. But a new Rudy Rucker story, plus a whole site full of weird and inappropriate fiction edited by Rucker? Calls for, quite possibly, a naked body paint flashmob or something. Rucker has just posted the sixth issue of his ezine Flurb, which collects stories too weird, transgressive or genre-warping for regular magazines. I think I know what you're going to spend the rest of your afternoon/evening doing. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5051989&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Rudy Rucker Gives You Nine Ideas for Scifi that Breaks the Rules]]> People are still trying to wrap their minds around the idea of the singularity, as a rather random article in the New York Times yesterday made clear. Meanwhile, Tor's Jo Walton and Rudy "Post-Singular" Rucker have moved way beyond the singularity onto the next big idea. Walton wrote about how she was sick of SF writers feeling constrained by the idea that the future will contain a "singularity" where sci/tech becomes so advanced that nothing in the world would make sense to us present-day types anymore. Rucker responded by offering nine ideas for scifi creators that have nothing to do with the singularity. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5042118&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Rudy Rucker's Math Orgy Classic "Sex Sphere" Gets Reissued]]> We've written about scifi author Rudy "Postsingular" Rucker's forgotten 1980s classic The Sex Sphere before — it's the novel where a bunch of hypermatter creatures take the forms of blobs with breasts and genitals and try to conquer Earth. It almost works, too. Everybody gets so into having sex with the blobs that they become obedient alien slaves. Luckily, our heroes figure out a way to deal with the genitacular menace using extremely complicated math. Long out of print, the book is now about to be reborn as a print-on-demand deal. And Rucker has just released a picture of the book's new cover, which he painted himself. Check it out below (NSFW) — it must be seen to be believed. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=381666&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[New Issue of Rudy Rucker's FLURB Hits the Interwebs]]> Science fiction writer Rudy "Postsingular" Rucker has just posted issue #5 of his speculative fiction webzine FLURB, which is always full of bizarro delights. In this issue, Terry Bisson writes about a superhero called Captain Ordinary who teleports around the world via hidden portals in Starbucks outlets, triggered if you order the right kind of soy latte. John Shirley gives us a tasty excerpt from his dark new cyberpunk novel Black Glass Samples, and Nathaniel Hellerstein takes on the persona of the entire Web to humbly request that people stop accusing it of trying to end the world. Plus, there's a lot more, including a new story from Rucker and plenty of Rucker's art too. [FLURB] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=374191&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Virtual Reality Will Always Suck]]> Many futurists and science fiction writers are adherents of the theory that we're heading towards "Vearth," a state where the entire world is essentially replaced by a giant virtual reality made of "computronium." (Computronium is Charles Stross' jokey term for matter that's optimized for computing.) You see this fantasy cropping up in movies like The Matrix, where the world of 1999 has been completely replaced by a computer simulation; and in countless novels ranging from Greg Bear's Blood Music to Rudy Rucker's latest Postsingular. Now Rucker himself is railing against this idea of Vearth, in a terrific essay on why virtual reality will always suck compared to the real thing. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=364398&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Postsingular Is Rudy Rucker's Wildest Ride Yet]]> It's not much of a spoiler to say that the Singularity happens in Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular, since the title gives that development away. But what happens after the Singularity will surprise you. People usually define the Singularity as the moment when artificial intelligences improve themselves to the point where they surpass us, but Rucker's singularity takes many more forms, and is much more confounding, than that. Here are the ten things that will surprise you about Postsingular. It's all spoilers from here on out! More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=361680&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Your Face Cream Will One Day Eat The World]]> Artificial intelligences aren't going to take over Earth by building a bunch of robotic fashion models to karate-chop us to death. Instead, the A.I. takeover will come from a nasty nano-tech sludge that consumes all matter in its path to recreate itself endlessly. This "gray goo" scenario has popped up in novels by Walter Jon Williams, Rudy Rucker and Greg Bear, but it hasn't yet appeared in any major movies. Here's how we would tell a Hollywood-friendly "gray goo" story. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=361162&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Michel Gondry's Dictator Son Channels Rudy Rucker]]> Remember how Michel "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" Gondry had an animated film in the works, about a dictator and a rebel, based on his relationship with his teenage son? (The son being the dictator.) Turns out celebrated indie comic book writer Daniel Clowes ("Ghost World") is writing the screenplay, and it may be based on Rudy Rucker's novel Master of Space and Time. [Slashfilm] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=344378&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Love Between a Mad Scientist and a Degenerate Speck of Hypermatter]]> Alien invaders tend to shoot acid, go invisible, or drive humongous ships. Not the ones in Rudy Rucker's 1980s classic The Sex Sphere, where an alien named Babs and her crew take the form of disembodied sex organs that attach to human hosts. Once attached, the humans go into orgasm pleasure dreamland, and never really do much again. How to stop such a clever attack? Our hero must battle the biggest vagina you've ever seen — a vagina from beyond space-time. Only trip-tastic writer Rucker, author of Postsingular, could imagine such a scenario. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=336884&view=rss&microfeed=true <![CDATA[Kiss My Singularity, Says Author Rudy Rucker]]> Computers will become self-aware and smarter than humans. And Baby Boomers will live forever. That's the basis of the Singularity, which predicts that technology will accelerate so rapidly that we'll be like gods in twenty years. Rudy Rucker's new novel deals with a world where the Singularity has already happened, called Postsingular. He used to mock the Singularity, but now he's become a believer because it opens up so many awesome story ideas. Just look at Postsingular. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=323772&view=rss&microfeed=true