"All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected." -- Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (born March 22, 1946 in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. At present he edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.
"A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.""Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.""At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.""But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.""Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.""Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.""I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.""I like to do things that are surprising and different.""I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.""If all else fails, there's always print or web zines.""If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.""If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!""In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.""It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.""It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.""Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.""Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.""One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.""Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.""Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.""Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.""The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.""Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.""Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons."
Rucker is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher Georg Hegel.
Rucker attended St. Xavier High School before earning a B.A. in mathematics from Swarthmore College, and a Master's and Ph.D. in mathematics from Rutgers University.
He taught at the State University of New York at Geneseo from 1972—1978. Thanks to a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Rucker taught math at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg from 1978—1980. He then taught at Randolph-Macon Women's College in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1980—1982, before trying his hand as a full-time author for four years. Inspired by an interview with Stephen Wolfram, Rucker became a computer science professor at San José State University in 1986, from which he retired in 2004. A mathematician with philosophical interests, he has written The Fourth Dimension; Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension; and Infinity and the Mind. Princeton University Press published new editions of Infinity and the Mind in 1995 and in 2005, both with new prefaces; the first edition is cited with fair frequency in academic literature.
As his "own alternative to cyberpunk," Rucker developed a writing style he terms Transrealism. Transrealism, as outlined in his 1983 essay "The Transrealist Manifesto," is science fiction based on the author's own life and immediate perceptions, mixed with fantastic elements that symbolize psychological change. Many of Rucker's novels and short stories apply these ideas. One example of Rucker's Transrealist works is Saucer Wisdom, a novel in which the main character is abducted by aliens. Rucker and his publisher marketed the book, tongue in cheek, as non-fiction.
His earliest Transrealist novel, White Light, was written during his time at Heidelberg. This Transrealist novel is based on his experiences at SUNY Geneseo.
Rucker often uses his novels to explore scientific or mathematical ideas; White Light examines the concept of infinity, while the Ware Tetralogy (written from 1982 through 2000) is in part an explanation of the use of natural selection to develop computer software (a subject also developed in his The Hacker and the Ants, written in 1994). His novels also put forward a mystical philosophy that Rucker has summarized in an essay titled, with only a bit of irony, "The Central Teachings of Mysticism" (included in Seek!, 1999).
His recent non-fiction book, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life , and How To Be Happy summarizes the various philosophies he's believed over the years and ends with the tentative conclusion that we might profitably view the world as made of computations, with the final remark, "perhaps this universe is perfect."
