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Spacetime Donuts
by Rudy Rucker
Science Fiction
The birth of cyberpunk! A seaweed-smoking rebel becomes an incredible shrinking man. Under the bottom is the top--and the power to smash the Machine. After humanity becomes inextricably linked to the computers, a heroic couple makes a scale-ship journey beneath the smallest particles and through the largest cosmic structures, seeking a perfect world.
Rudy Rucker was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 22, 1946. He graduated from Swarthmore College, and went to grad school at Rutgers University, where he got a Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1972. His area of specialization was the theory of infinite sets.
In 1967, he married his college sweetheart Sylvia, and not too long after that they had their three children: Georgia, Rudy, Jr., and Isabel.
Rucker’s first job was as a math professor at the State University College at Geneseo, New York, from 1972-1978. He was teaching a "Higher Geometry" course there, and turned it into a series of lectures on the fourth dimension. Eventually he wrote the lectures up as the non-fiction work, Geometry, Relativity and The Fourth Dimension, his first book. He also started writing science fiction, publishing his first novel Spacetime Donuts in the magazine Unearth, and eventually selling it to Ace Books.
In 1978-1980 Rucker had a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which is funded by the German government. He and his family lived in Heidelberg for two years and in his quiet office in the Mathematics Institute of the University of Heidelberg, Rucker worked Infinity and the Mind, a popular science book about infinity. At the same time he continued his work in science fiction, writing two novels: White Light and the early cyberpunk work Software.
Next Rucker was a math professor and then a freelance writer in Lynchburg, Virginia, for six years, writing his radical SF novel The Sex Sphere, as well as his best-selling popular science book, The Fourth Dimension. This period marked the birth of cyberpunk science-fiction, and he became recognized as a founding father of the movement. His novels Software and Wetware each won a Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback SF novel of the year.
While freelancing in Lynchburg, Rucker also developed a style of writing which he calls transrealism. The essence of transrealism is to write about one’s real life in fantastic terms. The Secret of Life, White Light, and The Sex Sphere are examples of his transreal novels. The first recasts a traditional coming of age memoir as a UFO novel, the second is about his time as a mystical mathematician in Geneseo, while the third turns his two years in Germany into a tale of higher dimensions and nuclear terrorism.
In 1986, Rucker got a job as a professor at San Jose State University (SJSU), near San Francisco, and in the heart of Silicon Valley. As a farewell to Lynchburg, Rucker wrote a historical science fiction novel called The Hollow Earth, which is now described as an early steampunk book. In California, he got involved with the magazine MONDO 2000, edited by a collection of Berkeley characters interested in cyberculture. Thanks to MONDO’s influence, "cyberpunk" became something of a household word, taking on a broader meaning and even appearing on the cover of Time. Rucker co-edited the MONDO 2000 User’s Guide with R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu.
When Rucker started teaching at SJSU, the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science were one and the same, and he took the opportunity to begin teaching computer science courses. He became fascinated by cellular automata, which are parallel programs that produce rapid-fire self-generating computer graphics animations. His interest in cellular automata led to a part-time job at Autodesk, Inc., of Sausalito, California, makers of the popular AutoCAD program. While at Autodesk, Rucker worked on three shipped software products, packages for exploring chaos, fractals, cellular automata, and artificial life. His transreal novel The Hacker and The Ants was heavily influenced by having worked inside a Silicon Valley software company.
Meanwhile at San Jose State, Rucker began teaching software engineering courses about programming videogames. He published a textbook on this topic, and then, in the summer of 2004, he retired from his job as professor. As a farewell to computer science, he published a thick popular book about the meaning of computers with the lengthy title, The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy.
In 1999, Tor Books published Rucker’s text and drawings for a novel called Saucer Wisdom. The book recounts his (alleged) experiences with a UFO contactee named Frank Shook. The saucers purportedly showed Frank Shook many bits of Earth’s future----right up through the year 4004! Saucer Wisdom gives detailed and illustrated accounts of Frank Shook’s experiences, and was in this respect a Millennial work of future extrapolation.
His SF novel, Realware, the fourth book in the *Ware series was published as an Avon Eos book, in June, 2000. This is the last (for the foreseeable future) of the *Ware books.
In 1999, the Four Walls Eight Windows press issued a collection of Rucker’s selected nonfiction called Seek!. And they published a complete anthology of his stories called Gnarl! in May, 2000. The names come from one of his favorite slogans: "Seek ye the gnarl!"
In more recent years, Rucker wrote a science-fiction novel called Spaceland, inspired by Edwin Abbott Abbott's classic Flatland. It’s about a Silicon Valley middle manager named Joe Cube who encounters some beings from the fourth dimension. Spaceland appeared from Tor Books in June, 2002.
For a change of pace, Rucker wrote a historical novel (not science fiction!) about the life of the Flemish painter Peter Bruegel the Elder (1527-1569). The book, called As Above So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, was published by Tor Books in 2002.
In 2004 Tor published Rucker’s intergalactic far future epic quest SF novel, called Frek and the Elixir. The story starts out when the hero, a boy named Frek, finds a UFO under his messy bed. Inside the UFO is an alien helper who resembles a cuttlefish. And then it’s off for the center of the galaxy. The book was designed to fit the Cambellian pattern of the monomyth.
In 2007, Rucker’s contemporary SF novel, Mathematicians in Love, appeared from Tor. It’s about a pair of mathematicians in love with the same woman, with guest appearances by a couple of giant cone shell snails. The heroes explore several alternate worlds, discover that God is a jellyfish, and manage to bring down an evil, repressive government.
Rucker’s most recent pair of novels depict a near-future Earth in which every object becomes conscious. The first, Postsingular, appeared from Tor Books in 2007, and the second, Hylozoic, will appear from Tor in June, 2009.
Rucker continues to write and had taken up painting. He blogs at rudyrucker.com/blog and he has a website, rudyrucker.com, where you can find links to his writings, paintings, and his other works.
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