Posts Tagged “
Rudy Rucker
”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]
futurism
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 »
must read
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 »
steal this pitch
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 »
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]
must read
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 »
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