Seek!

Rudy Rucker: Seek! (Rudy Rucker) (Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999)

2004's contribution to books read by Rudy Rucker was a non-fiction collection called Seek! (exclamation point included). It's a mixed bag, broken into articles on science, articles on life, articles on science fiction and articles on art. By mixed bag, I mean very uneven, widely varying in quality...

Some of this stuff is great. Rucker's articles on computers (in the science section) are especially interesting, exploring artificial life, fractals, cellular automata, etc. He worked on several programs for fractals and cellular automata that you can download from his website. The articles on art show a new maturity in his writing, and I'd like to see more from him in this area.

The stuff in between...well, that's where we get the mixed bag. In his articles on science fiction, we see somebody who seems pretty darned annoyed that he doesn't have the same recognition for creating/founding the cyberpunk movement that is accorded to folks like William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Sorry about that, Rudy. In the articles on life, for the most part, we see stuff that should have been tossed in the filing cabinet and forgotten. Do we really need to know about the time that Rudy was high on various substances and approached one of Jerry Falwell's associates and raved at him? Hunter S. Thompson he is not, and it wasn't very amusing in Thompson's works.

Counts as 32 essays in the 2004 Short Story Project.

Contents: Seek What?; 37 Questions; Welcome to Silicon Valley; A Brief History of Computers; Cellular Automata; Four Kinds of Cyberspace; Life and Artificial Life; Hacking Code; A New Golden Age of Calculations; Mr. Nanotechnology; Fab! Inside Chip Fabrication Plants; Goodbye Big Bang; Tech Notes Towards a Cyberpunk Novel; Drugs and Live Sex; Jerry's Neighbors; The Central Teachings of Mysticism; Haunted by Phil Dick; California New Edge; Vision in Yosemite; Cyberculture in Japan; The Manual of Evasion; Memories of Arf; Island Notes; In Search of Brugel; A Transrealist Manifesto; What SF Writers Want; What is Cyberpunk?; Cyberpunk Lives!; Interview iwth Ivan Stang; Special Effects: Kit-Bashing the Cosmic Matte; Art in Amsterdam; Pieter Brugel's Peasant Dance.