Rudy Rucker

The Weirdest Stories Are Sometimes the Most Real

For years, I thought of weirdness and personal storytelling as sort of opposites. You can have surreal, cartoony, acid-trippy, logic-melting insanity, or you can tell a grounded emotional story about people. But the big epiphany I had while writing All the Birds in the Sky is, sometimes weirdness is intensely personal. I don’t know why…

Help the EFF Save the Future, by Reading Some Brand New Science Fiction!

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is out there fighting for civil liberties and privacy on the Internet and the digital world generally. And now, you can help support them—by reading a brand new science fiction book! The EFF just published a new book Pwning Tomorrow, featuring short fiction by Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, Cory Doctorow, Annalee…

How To Write About Sex Without Being Boring

Sexuality is one of our most basic drives, but it’s also fundamental to our identities as people. Which means sex is the subject of a million cliches, and tons of terrible writing. Not to mention, stupid prejudice. The good news? Science fiction and fantasy writers have a special opportunity to look at sex afresh. Here’s…

Crowdfund Larry Elmore’s SnarfQuest And Rudy Rucker’s New Trilogy

Larry Elmore is collecting the complete SnarfQuest in a single volume for the first time, and you can get it if you help fund it. You can also fund Rudy Rucker’s new project, a Mockingjay fan film, and a webseries set in an alternate 1970s. Top gif from Once Upon a Time in the 1970s.…

Eileen Gunn’s strange thought experiments will unravel your mind

Plenty of science fiction and fantasy authors do “thought experiments” — but few of them disregard experimental safety protocols with quite as much gleeful abandon as Eileen Gunn. And now, at long last, Gunn is publishing a second book of demented tales. Gunn’s new book Questionable Practices comes out in March from Small Beer Press,…

Rudy Rucker’s The Big Aha is a psychedelic futurist’s dream come true

Rudy Rucker’s latest novel, The Big Aha, is pure transreal Ruckeriana featuring extreme biological and quantum technologies, steamy techno-sex, nasty aliens from higher dimensions — and all soaked in the unique atmosphere of the magical 1960s. “Regarding the origins of The Big Aha, one of my basic inspirations was that I’ve always felt like the…

The lineup for Transhuman Visions is taking shape, a one-day conference that’s bringing together extreme futurists, biohackers, immortalists, Singularitarians and others. Speakers include Aubrey de Grey, RU Sirius, Rudy Rucker, Zoltan Istvan, and Rachel Haywire (pictured). The event will be held on February 1, 2014 from 9:30 am to 9:30 pm at the Conference Center,…

Robot Separatists: The Best Stories About A.I.s Leaving Humanity Behind

When we finally create artificial intelligences and supersmart robots, everybody expects the very next thing they’ll try and do is wipe out humanity. Right? Maybe not. Some artificial creations just want to be left alone, to do their own thing. Here’s our semi-complete list of stories about robot separatists. Top image: Mass Effect. Note: These…

What’s the worst thing that could happen when objects start talking?

Rudy Rucker is one of our best science fiction writers when it comes to imagining a future where technology enables a higher level of weirdness. And now he’s done it again, with the story “Apricot Lane,” about a world of networked matter and micro-payments. Check out an animation above, featuring art by Daniel Martin Diaz,…

Science Fiction Authors Who Could be Hollywood’s Next Philip K. Dick

When Hollywood wants a futuristic, paranoid thriller where nothing is what it seems, the studios reach for the work of one man. This week, Philip K. Dick continues his reign as Hollywood’s idea spigot, with a remake of Total Recall. More PKD films are in the works, and there’s no shortage of material out there.…

After the Singularity, heaven will be filled with pop-up ads

Taking cues from Jim Munroe’s Everyone in Silico and Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular, Tom Scott (previously) put together this deliciously twisted short animation Welcome to Life. Scott describes this film as “a science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.” I’m loving the bit about memories of copyrighted…

Rudy Rucker explains why the quest for immortality is a waste of your limited time

Over at Boing Boing, there’s a must-read interview with rebel author Rudy Rucker, in which he reflects on weird physics and his various storytelling inspirations. And he delivers this gem, about the widespread obsession with living forever: When I was younger I was more attracted to immortality than I am now. I think I was…

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,…

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. Robopocalypse, Daniel H. Wilson (Doubleday) Anyone who’s ever tried programming a coffee maker knows it’s merely a matter of time before the machines rise against us.…

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? https://gizmodo.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-cyberpunk-346365 What is it about fantasy that appeals to many of the greatest cyberpunk authors? We asked the authors themselves and also cooked up…

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.” Transreal SF, which Rucker has talked about before in various forums, is “a form of…

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.” This isn’t the first collaboration between Rucker and Sterling — they also wrote “Colliding Branes,”…

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! In “The Gravity Fetishist,” we catch a glimpse of the future sexual underground in a…

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. Spoilers ahead! Although I’ll try to avoid giving away anything major. And not only that,…

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. Back to the Future Ship Breaker, Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl author’s latest, about an ecologically…