Read Online Collected Essays by Rudy Rucker - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Rudy Rucker
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statistics of eye-tracked men looking at women “…what we got here is basically a pretty good replica of something that a Paleolithic guy might have whittled out of mammoth tusk. You start messing with archetypal forms and this sort of thing turns up just like clockwork.” This pleasing suggestion of cosmic order contains a subtle nod to the notion of a chaotic attractor.
Science fiction sometimes gets humorous effects by extrapolating present-day things into heady overkill. Here’s what espresso machines might evolve into:
The bartender was studying an instruction screen and repairing a minor valve on an enormously ramified tincture set. The tincture set stretched the length of the mahogany bar, weighed four or five tons, and looked as if its refinery products could demolish a city block.
The obverse of this technique is to have future people look back on our current ways of doing things. “That’s antique analog music. There wasn’t much vertical color to the sound back in those days. The instruments were made of wood and animal organs.” Or here’s a 21C person deploring the obsolete habit of reading.
“It’s awful, a terrible habit! In virtuality at least you get to interact! Even with television you at least have to use visual processing centers and parse real dialogue with your ears! Really, reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat.”
Like all the cyberpunks, Sterling loves to write. He can become contagiously intoxicated with the sheer joy of fabulous description, as in this limning of a cyberspace landscape:
“Rising in the horizon-warped virtual distance was a mist-shrouded Chinese crag, a towering digital stalagmite with the subtle monochromatics of sumi-e ink painting. Some spaceless and frankly noneuclidean distance from it, an enormous bubbled structure like a thunderhead, gleaming like veined black marble but conveying a weird impression of glassy gassiness, or maybe it was gassy glassiness…”
Wouldn’t you like to go there? You can, thanks to this lo-res VR device you’re holding, it’s called a printed page…
Sterling is an energetic tinkerer, and he drops in nice little touches everywhere. What looks like a ring on a man’s finger is “a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of [the man’s] flesh.” Two people riding on a train ring for a waiter from the dining-car and here’s the response:
A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace…It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam’s. “Oui monsieur?”
This crab is a purely surreal and Dadaist assemblage, quite worthy of Kurt Schwitters or Max Ernst. The wonder of science fiction is that, with a bit of care, you can paste together just about anything and it will walk and talk and make you smile.
Near the end of the book, the heroine encounters the ultimate art medium.
It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm…indescribably active, like a poem becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.
Such is the stuff that science fiction is made of.
So, okay, those were the three new cyberpunk novels of 1996. Let’s compare and contrast. What are some of the things they have in common other than the use of cyberspace?
One of the main cyberpunk themes is the fusion of humans and machines, and you can certainly find that here. In Idoru a man wants to marry a computer program, in Holy Fire machine-medicine essentially gives people new bodies. There is less of the
Science fiction sometimes gets humorous effects by extrapolating present-day things into heady overkill. Here’s what espresso machines might evolve into:
The bartender was studying an instruction screen and repairing a minor valve on an enormously ramified tincture set. The tincture set stretched the length of the mahogany bar, weighed four or five tons, and looked as if its refinery products could demolish a city block.
The obverse of this technique is to have future people look back on our current ways of doing things. “That’s antique analog music. There wasn’t much vertical color to the sound back in those days. The instruments were made of wood and animal organs.” Or here’s a 21C person deploring the obsolete habit of reading.
“It’s awful, a terrible habit! In virtuality at least you get to interact! Even with television you at least have to use visual processing centers and parse real dialogue with your ears! Really, reading is so bad for you, it destroys your eyes and hurts your posture and makes you fat.”
Like all the cyberpunks, Sterling loves to write. He can become contagiously intoxicated with the sheer joy of fabulous description, as in this limning of a cyberspace landscape:
“Rising in the horizon-warped virtual distance was a mist-shrouded Chinese crag, a towering digital stalagmite with the subtle monochromatics of sumi-e ink painting. Some spaceless and frankly noneuclidean distance from it, an enormous bubbled structure like a thunderhead, gleaming like veined black marble but conveying a weird impression of glassy gassiness, or maybe it was gassy glassiness…”
Wouldn’t you like to go there? You can, thanks to this lo-res VR device you’re holding, it’s called a printed page…
Sterling is an energetic tinkerer, and he drops in nice little touches everywhere. What looks like a ring on a man’s finger is “a little strip of dark fur. Thick-clustered brown fur rooted in a ring-shaped circlet of [the man’s] flesh.” Two people riding on a train ring for a waiter from the dining-car and here’s the response:
A giant crab came picking its way along the ceiling of the train car. It was made of bone and chitin and peacock feathers and gut and piano wire. It had ten very long multijointed legs and little rubber-ball feet on hooked steel ankles. A serving platter was attached with suckers to the top of its flat freckled carapace…It surveyed them with a circlet of baby blue eyes like a giant clam’s. “Oui monsieur?”
This crab is a purely surreal and Dadaist assemblage, quite worthy of Kurt Schwitters or Max Ernst. The wonder of science fiction is that, with a bit of care, you can paste together just about anything and it will walk and talk and make you smile.
Near the end of the book, the heroine encounters the ultimate art medium.
It was like smart clay. It reacted to her touch with unmistakable enthusiasm…indescribably active, like a poem becoming a jigsaw. The stuff was boiling over with machine intelligence. Somehow more alive than flesh; it grew beneath her questing fingers like a Bach sonata. Matter made virtual. Real dreams.
Such is the stuff that science fiction is made of.
So, okay, those were the three new cyberpunk novels of 1996. Let’s compare and contrast. What are some of the things they have in common other than the use of cyberspace?
One of the main cyberpunk themes is the fusion of humans and machines, and you can certainly find that here. In Idoru a man wants to marry a computer program, in Holy Fire machine-medicine essentially gives people new bodies. There is less of the
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