Rucker, Rudy 1946- (Rudolf v.B. Rucker, Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, Rudy v.B. Rucker)

PERSONAL:

Born March 22, 1946, in Louisville, KY; son of Embry Cobb (an Episcopal priest) and Marianne (a potter and artist) Rucker; married Sylvia Bogsch (a teacher), June 24, 1967; children: Georgia, Rudolf, Jr., Isabel. Education: Swarthmore College, B.A., 1967; Rutgers University, M.A., 1969, Ph.D., 1973. Religion: Episcopalian.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Los Gatos, CA. Agent—Susan Protter, 110 W. 40th St., New York, NY 10018.

CAREER:

Mathematician, computer scientist, software/freeware developer, author. State University of New York College at Geneseo, assistant professor of mathematics, 1972-78; University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, West Germany, von Humboldt research fellow, 1978-80; Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, VA, associate professor of mathematics, 1980-82; freelance writer, 1982-86; San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, professor of mathematics and computer science, 1986-2004; Autodesk, Sausalito, CA, software programmer, 1988-92; freelance writer, 2004—.

MEMBER:

American Mathematical Society, Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), Honorable Order of the Kentucky Colonels, Church of the SubGenius.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Philip K. Dick Award for Software, 1982, Wetware, 1988, and Freeware.

WRITINGS:

Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension (nonfiction), Dover (New York, NY), 1977.

(As Rudolf v.B. Rucker; editor) Charles H. Hinton, Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton (nonfiction), Dover (New York, NY), 1980.

White Light; or, What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1980, HardWired (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

Spacetime Donuts (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1981.

Software (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1982.

Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite (nonfiction), Birkhauser (Boston, MA), 1982, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NY), 2005.

The Fifty-seventh Franz Kafka (stories; includes "The Man Who Ate Himself," "Inertia," "The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics," and "The Indian Rope Trick Explained"), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1983.

The Sex Sphere (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1983.

Light Fuse and Get Away (poems), Carp, 1983.

The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality (nonfiction), foreword by Martin Gardner, illustrated by David Povilaitis, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1984.

Master of Space and Time (novel), Bluejay Books (New York, NY), 1984, reprinted, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2005.

The Secret of Life (novel), Bluejay Books (New York, NY), 1985.

Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality (nonfiction), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1987.

(Editor and contributor) Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (stories), Arbor House (New York, NY), 1987.

Wetware (novel), Avon Books (New York, NY), 1988.

(Editor, with Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson) Semiotex(e) SF (nonfiction), Autonomedia (Brooklyn, NY), 1989.

The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia (novel), William Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

Transreal! (poems, stories, nonfiction collection), WCS Books (Englewood, CO), 1991.

All the Visions: Space Baltic; The Science Fiction Poems, 1962-1987 (memoir), Ocean View Books (Mountain View, CA), 1991.

(Editor, with R.U. Sirius and Queen Mu) Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge (nonfiction), HarperPerennial (New York, NY), 1992.

Artificial Life Lab, Waite Group Press (Corte Madera, CA), 1993.

Live Robots: Two in One Volume of Software/Wetware, Avon Books (New York, NY), 1994.

The Hacker and the Ants (novel), William Morrow (New York, NY), 1994, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2002.

Freeware (novel), Avon Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Seek! Selected Nonfiction, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 1999.

Saucer Wisdom (novel), Forge (New York, NY), 1999.

Realware (novel), EOS (New York, NY), 2000.

Gnarl! (stories), Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2000.

Software Engineering and Computer Games (textbook), Addison Wesley (New York, NY), 2002.

Spaceland (novel), Tor (New York, NY), 2002.

As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (historical novel), Forge (New York, NY), 2002.

Frek and the Elixir (novel), Tor (New York, NY), 2004.

The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy (nonfiction), Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2005.

Mathematicians in Love (novel), Tor (New York, NY), 2006.

Postsingular (novel), Tor (New York, NY), 2007.

Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker, Thunder's Mouth Press (New York, NY), 2007.

Author of foreword, Fourfield: Computers, Art, and the Fourth Dimension, by Tony Robbin, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1992. Contributor to anthologies and to periodicals, including Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, PKDS Bulletin, SFWA Bulletin, and Washington Post Book World. Contributor to audio CDs and VHS videos. Author of gaming, simulation, and educational software. Maintains a blog.

SIDELIGHTS:

Rudy Rucker exercises his curiosity about mathematics in both fiction and nonfiction, including in his science fiction, which has a mathematical foundation. His novel White Light; or, What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem? features a mathematician trying to solve a problem regarding degrees of infinity. Rucker mixes black comedy, satire, religion, drugs, and metaphysics in the story of the mathematician's adventures in other worlds and dimensions. Reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, Andrew Hislop deemed White Light amusing and educational but judged that "for the layman there are too many dimensions or at least the vital one is missing." He felt the book lacked "the sustained dramatic force of the best science fiction." Thomas M. Disch of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction admired Rucker's unusual use of pure mathematics as the basis for an alien world, concluding that "White Light is a good, intelligent, powerful novel, and [an] auspicious debut in the SF field."

The novels Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere also include mathematical concepts. In the former, Rucker experiments with the geometry of space in creating a utopia in which a computer is in charge, and drugs and three-dimensional television entertain humans. The Sex Sphere focuses on a highly sexual multidimensional alien trapped in a three-dimensional world.

Some of Rucker's science fiction departs somewhat from his math orientation. Software, for instance, examines the implications of artificial intelligence in robots. Having achieved a measure of equality with humans, self-replicating robots seek to dominate men by taping their brain patterns and promising to immortalize this "software." Master of Space and Time centers on a scientist who invents a machine that for two hours enables him to travel through time, visit other universes, and grant wishes. The book's humor prompted critics to compare Rucker with mathematician-writer Lewis Carroll.

In The Secret of Life, Rucker concentrates more on characterization and less on mathematics. The story revolves around a 1960s teenager who believes he is an alien in disguise. He remembers nothing from before the age of ten, possesses strange powers, and thinks he is on Earth to learn the secret of life. Like novels such as J.D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, it is a story about growing up and fitting in.

Rucker's nonfiction, dealing with many of the same topics as his fiction, endeavors to make mathematical and scientific concepts accessible to the lay reader. Whereas White Light addresses infinity in a fictional setting, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite shows the real calculations, paradoxes, and logic of serious inquiry into the subject.

In The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality, Rucker explains the complexities of its subject using well-known analogies to introduce his discussion, relating how a three-dimensional object would look as it passed through a two-dimensional world, for example, and extending the analogy to a four-dimensional object in a three-dimensional world. He explores his own variations as well, imagining a spherical two-dimensional world and a door between parallel two-dimensional worlds.

Showing how mathematics studies the world in terms of numbers, space, logic, infinity, and information, Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality is about the way we think. In addition to mathematical thought, Rucker comments on transcendental meditation, archetypes, and Chinese philosophy.

When Rucker first began teaching math at San Jose State University in 1986, he was urged to teach computer science, about which he knew next to nothing, but he was soon teaching courses, primarily computer graphics and game programming. In 2002, he published Software Engineering and Computer Games. Computer science had infused his writing, as well. His novels became flush with time travel, space aliens, future technologies, and computer-generated science. His collection Gnarl! provides a good sampling of his writing since the 1970s, with three dozen stories that, Library Journal contributor Edward B. St. John remarked, "combine hard science with a gonzo ‘sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll sensibility.’" St. John felt the best stories to be those written after 1986, when Rucker moved to California, including those on which he collaborated with Bruce Sterling and Marc Laidlaw. He felt that two Rucker-Laidlaw surfer stories stand out, "Probability Pipeline" and "Chaos Surfari."

In reviewing Spaceland in the New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas commented that Rucker's "usual protagonist is a horny Silicon Valley nerd whose social ineptitude lands him in difficulties that would try the ingenuity of Lewis Carroll's Alice." In this story, however, the central character, Joe Cube, has two women to worry about—his wife, Jena, and Momo, a woman from the fourth dimension with an offer he can't refuse. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that with Spaceland, Rucker "tweaks the dot-com Y2K subculture into a hilarious tribute to Edwin Abbott's Flatland (1884)." The reviewer called the novel "a belly-laugh-funny commentary on the Faustian dilemma facing a lumpish twenty-first-century tech-addicted everyman."

As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, is something entirely different for Rucker, who spent years researching the life of the sixteenth-century, politically subversive Flemish master. Each of the sixteen chapters focuses on a single painting and point in the artist's life, and the story is set against the horror of the Spanish Inquisition. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "Rucker's fictionalized life of Bruegel draws its readers into a teeming world of politics, art, love, sin, and loss." Characters include the homosexual mapmaker, Abraham Ortelius, part-Native American Williblad Cheroo, and Bruegel's much-loved young wife and business manager. Donna Seaman wrote in a Booklist review that "Bruegel's great gift was his perception of the sacred in the earthy, and Rucker follows suit in this vital portrait of a sweet-natured disciple of life's fecund beauty in a time of cold-blooded tyranny."

Frek and the Elixir takes place in the year 3003. The last of the animal species have been destroyed, along with the DNA records needed to recreate them. Instead, "kritters" have been designed to take their place. Frek Huggins is a twelve-year-old boy who has a talking dog named Wow, but in other ways is very much like all boys his age and who wants to grow up to design his generation's equivalent of video games. Frek's life becomes than ordinary after he discovers the Anvil, a small UFO, hiding under his bed. A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote: "Readers in search of something ‘different’ need look no further than this droll saga of the future."

The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy is a challenging read in which Rucker views life as a computation and everyday activities as part of the process. A Publishers Weekly reviewer called it "Timothy Leary meets Bill Gates." Rucker concludes, however, that love and beauty are the secret to happiness, not gnarly computation. Library Journal contributor Garrett Eastman described the volume as being an "immense and ambitious work."

Mathematicians in Love is set in two California university towns called Humelocke and Klownetown that are populated with a variety of life forms and ruled by a female jellyfish god. A love triangle turns this sci-fi madcap adventure into a romantic comedy.

In reviewing Postsingular in the Library Journal, Jackie Cassada commented that Rucker "excels in mind-bending premises and thought-stretching stories." The first book of a projected series, the story involves nano- technology, microscopic bots called nants, and the nanteating virus that is created to destroy them. Friendlier nanobots, called orphids, provide users who plug into them all the knowledge of the universe in three dimensions. Booklist reviewer Carl Hays concluded that newcomers to Rucker's work, as well as loyal fans, "will revel in his willingness to push technological extrapolation to its soaring limits."

Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker includes thirteen collaborations with writers who include John Shirley, Terry Bison, and Bruce Sterling. The collection is "a delight for both Rucker devotees and sf fans who prefer that their fiction be a little zany," according to Hays in Booklist. Paul Raven reviewed the collection for the SF Site, noting that Rucker's writing is not for everyone and that some readers might prefer the collaborations that temper Rucker's contribution to them. Raven added: "The reader who is willing to simply surrender to the gnarliness, however, can expect to enjoy a roller-coaster trip through the cartoon psychedelia of Rucker's imagination." Raven concluded: "Rucker stands alone in the science fiction pantheon as some kind of trickster god of the computer science lab; where others construct minutely plausible fictional realities, he simply grabs the corners of the one we already know and twists it in directions we don't have pronounceable names for." A Publishers Weekly critic deemed this the collection for readers "who can groove on something like a collaboration between Italo Calvino and Jimmy Buffett."

Rucker once told CA: "I view myself as a ‘transrealist,’ using science fiction tools to get at deep archetypal truths. The idea is that the tools of science fiction serve as concrete symbols for subtextual realities. My novels The Secret of Life, White Light, and The Sex Sphere form a kind of transreal autobiographical trilogy covering my life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four.

"I work back and forth between science fiction and science writing, sometimes using science fiction for thought experiments. My math research gives me ideas for stories, and my stories serve as laboratory tests for some of my ideas. Eventually I hope to get all my books, journals, letters, and so forth on a gigabyte laser disk, along with software that allows the reader to interrupt at any time and say, for example, ‘Can you give me the science on that, Rudy?’ or ‘What was going on in your life when you wrote that?’ or ‘Where else do you mention Donald Duck?’"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Rucker, Rudy, All the Visions: Space Baltic; The Science Fiction Poems, 1962-1987, Ocean View Books (Mountain View, CA), 1991.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

PERIODICALS

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, January, 1989, Tom Easton, review of Wetware, p. 178; January, 1991, Tom Easton, review of The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia, p. 304; November, 1994, Tom Easton, review of The Hacker and the Ants, p. 167; November, 1999, Tom Easton, review of Saucer Wisdom, p. 136.

Booklist, May 1, 1997, review of Freeware, p. 1483; July, 1999, David Pitt, review of Saucer Wisdom, p. 1925; June 1, 2002, Ray Olson, review of Spaceland, p. 1698; November 15, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, p. 569; April 1, 2004, Regina Schroeder, review of Frek and the Elixir, p. 1357; December 1, 2006, Carl Hays, review of Mathematicians in Love, p. 33; February 1, 2007, Carl Hays, review of Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker, p. 40; August 1, 2007, Carl Hays, review of Postsingular, p. 55.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2002, review of Spaceland, p. 778; November 1, 2002, review of As Above, So Below, p. 1563.

Library Journal, June 1, 2000, Edward B. St. John, review of Gnarl!, p. 206; August 15, 2005, review of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me about Ultimate Reality, the Meaning of Life, and How to Be Happy, p. 904; September 15, 2005, Garrett Eastman, review of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, p. 88; January 1, 2007, Jackie Cassada, review of Mad Professor, p. 101; August 1, 2007, Jackie Cassada, review of Postsingular, p. 77.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July, 1981, Thomas M. Disch, review of White Light: or, What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem?

New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1987, George Johnson, review of Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality; June 16, 2002, Gerald Jonas, review of Spaceland, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, June 7, 1999, review of Saucer Wisdom, p. 66; May 1, 2000, review of Gnarl!, p. 54; June 5, 2000, review of Realware, p. 78; April 29, 2002, review of Spaceland, p. 47, and Mitzi Brunsdale, "PW Talks with Rudy Rucker," interview, p. 48; November 25, 2002, review of As Above, So Below, p. 43; March 8, 2004, review of Frek and the Elixir, p. 56; July 18, 2005, review of The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul, p. 197; October 23, 2006, review of Mathematicians in Love, p. 36; November 27, 2006, review of Mad Professor, p. 35; August 13, 2007, review of Postsingular, p. 49.

Times Literary Supplement, November 28, 1980, Andrew Hislop, review of White Light.

Voice of Youth Advocates, October, 2004, Suzanne Elizabeth Reid, review of Frek and the Elixir, p. 97.

ONLINE

American Scientist Online,http://www.americanscientist.org/ (January 15, 2008), "The Bookshelf Talks with Rudy Rucker."

NNDB (database), http://www.nndb.com/ (January 15, 2008), profile.

Rudy Rucker Home Page,http://www.rudyrucker.com (January 15, 2008).

Science and Society,http://www.scienceandsociety.net/ (March 31, 2006), Rucker-provided profile.

SciFi.com,http://www.scifi.com/ January 8, 2007), Nick Gevers, "Rudy Rucker Uses the Highest Math of All to Solve the Complex Equations of Love, Divinity, and Science Fiction," interview; (October 15, 2007), Paul Di Filippo, review of Postsingular.

SFRevu,http://sfrevu.com/ (November 1, 2006), Ernest Lilley, "Interview: Rudy Rucker."

SF Site,http://www.sfsite.com/ (January 15, 2008), Paul Raven, review of Mad Professor.

Zone,http://www.zone-sf.com/ (January 15, 2008), Jim Steel, review of Mad Professor.