It’s good to be an alien

Rudy Rucker has a blog!


Yep.. Rucker, mathematician and the greatest living Sci-Fi (science fiction/speculative fiction/cyber-punk) author (and 2nd greatest all-time behind Philip K Dick) has his own blog. It's a super-fun read.

Rucker is probably best-known for his -Ware tetralogy:

Cobb Anderson created the "boppers," sentient robots that overthrew their human overlords. But now Cobb is just an aging alcoholic waiting to die, and the big boppers are threatening to absorb all of the little boppers--and eventually every human--into a giant, melded consciousness. Some of the little boppers aren't too keen on the idea, and a full-scale robot revolt is underway on the moon (where the boppers live). Meanwhile, bopper Ralph Numbers wants to give Cobb immortality by letting a big bopper slice up his brain and tape his "software." It seems like a good idea to Cobb.

"Delightfully irreverant. . . This is science fiction as it should be." (reviews via Amazon.com)

Humans created the sentient robot "boppers," but now it's the boppers who have started creating humans. Clones and DNA-splicing have spawned the meatbop, a human body infused with the software (the mind and personality) of a bopper. The meatbops are interested in propagating down on Earth, but that might not be so good for humanity (the boppers have a nasty habit of enslaving humans, actually). When a couple of (reasonably) innocent humans get tangled up in the bopper's machinations on the moon, it's time to drag out the stored mind of bopper-creator Cobb Anderson and see if he can help.

"A genius. . .A cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers" (reviews via Amazon.com)

In Wetware the chip mold virus destroyed the sentient robots called boppers. But the virus itself has spawned a new life form called moldies. The moldies are beings made out of a sort of malleable plastic called imoplex. Humans and moldies live in an almost-amicable truce, but radicals (and not-so-radicals) on each side wouldn't hesitate to use--or destroy--those on the other. When a moldie called Monique becomes ensnared in a grand plot that seems to be either the work of anti-moldie humans or anti-human moldies, everyone becomes involved in an effort to either save or destroy the Earth.

In hip, staccato language, the master of cyberpunk (e.g., The Hacker and the Ants, Avon, 1994) merges California surfer culture with a tale of 21st-century artificial plastic and mold lifeforms. The intertwined lives of Heritagist fanatic anti-Moldies, the Moldies' inventors, human "cheeseballs" who have sex with Moldies, and isolationist Moldies on the Moon enliven this fast-paced tale of kidnapping and alien takeover. (reviews via Amazon.com)

Philip K. Dick Award-winner Rucker concludes his satirical SF "Ware" tetralogy with Phil Gottner's discovery that his father has apparently been swallowed whole by a "wowo," a multidimensional holographic toy. This is the first event in a series that will change his life, and Earth, forever. Phil breaks up with his girlfriend to follow exotic Moon-born Yoke Star-Mydol to Tonga, where she meets a group of aliensDMetamartians from MetamarsDliving deep underwater in the Tonga Trench. It turns out that Yoke's mother, Darla, and a woman named Tempest Plenty were also swallowed by a multidimensional creature on the Moon several months ago. The Metamartians explain that the hungry entity is really their god, Om, who reaches into three-dimensional space to capture humans for study. The gift of an "alla" from Om and the aliens allows Yoke to create anything she can visualize using "realware," based on the advanced science of direct matter control. Soon enough, the secret of the alla spreads to others on Earth and predictable problems ensue. Meanwhile, Phil is captured by Om and reunited with his father, as well as with Darla and Tempest Plenty, somewhere in the fourth dimension. Rucker's cheerful ingenuity with biotech gadgetry and applied mathematics is in direct contrast to the book's [endearingly] simplistic plot and resolution. (reviews via Amazon.com)

I love these books so much; I'll recommend them to anyone.

Also: Rudy Rucker's home page.

Above us is a dirty sky full of youths and liquors

I spotted another pair of Love Field Deviations; these ones are notable because they appear to have been infected by an alien virus:

This raises the issue of whether or not the infected vexed local Love Field Deviations should've been administered with inoculations and vaccinations against said virus -- or an alien so viral... living spaceapes creatures covered smothered in writhing tentacles stimulate your audio nerve directly... no-one conflicts with me... hallucinating senses individually insiduously or in any combination rhythmically shifting gears focusing intensity... no-one conflicts with me... mind starts slipping from familiar tracks bending warping interfering with the facts sensory language leaves us with no habit for lying... we are hostile aliens immune from dying...

Kode9 - Victims (feat. The Spaceape) (2.63 MB mp3: right-click and Save As to download; play using the handy little embedded player below)

Victims is another track from Kode9 and the Spaceape's amazing Memories of the Future album.

Marked by our memories of a future past

Last night I was at a bar and I found myself trying to explain what it would be like to experience reality in four dimensions, instead of only three. At the time I felt utterly sober and lucid, but in retrospect I believe I may have been a little bit drunk. Either way, I had them eating out of my hands and marveling at the wonders of the universe.

I didn't actually mention Tralfamadore, but my explanation was cribbed heavily from Kurt Vonnegut's classic descriptions of four-dimensional reality in various novels of his (but in particular Slaughterhouse 5). To paraphrase (thanks wikipedia):

Tralfamadorians have the ability to experience reality in four dimensions; meaning, roughly, that they have total access to past, present, and future; they are able to perceive any point in time at will. Because they believe that when a being dies, it continues to live in other times and places, their response to death is, "So it goes."

Of course, there was never the remotest possibility that I would be able to do as good a job of it as Carl Sagan:

It's important to recognise that while Vonnegut's (and indeed the common) fourth dimension is identified with time -- for example, in Einsteinian relativity physics -- the dimension described by Sagan is a fourth spatial dimension. So in effect, he and I (and indeed Vonnegut) are describing two different things. And have described. And will describe. (Sorry, that was gratuitious.)

If that wasn't enough, Cliff Pickover asks us to consider how it would be to encounter four-dimensional beings in our three-dimensional spacetime. I gave it a shot. I think that is was for exactly this exercise that the phrase "my mind boggles" was coined.

And, The Commonsense Nihilist (whose blog has been going bloody great guns in general lately) recently posted on how to create four-dimensional paintings.

Champagne and misery where are you?

On and off, over the years, a good number of people have asked me why I don't have any work from my Spaceships Of The Mind series available in my online-portfolio.

Are ''Friends'' Electric?, 2002
Oil on canvas, 64x99 cm
(private collection)

So over the weekend I pulled finger, and uploaded some.

My new favourite blog: Corporate-Alien Blog

George Lunt's Corporate-Alien Blog:

Favourite two recent posts:

• Conflict of Interest between Drug Companies and Doctors

Malevolent extra-terrestrials and alien corporations are trying to poison us through substandard pharmeceuticals.

• The "Click It Or Ticket" Road to Fascism

Emotional propaganda used to encourage people to observe seatbelt laws is analogous to campaigns used by Hitler to "get his people to let him make important decisions for them".

The blog actually just seems to be a wrapper/index for the Corporate/Aliens site.

Blog author George Lunt also writes Lunt's World.