Rudy woke up earlier than I did this morning, so he started blogging before I had a chance to introduce him!
I met Rudy Rucker around 1987 when he gave a reading at a High Frontiers Monthly Forum meeting in Berkeley, California. Rudy read from his novel Wetware and brought along an unfolded tesseract that he’d made from cardboard and tape. I told him that his 1984 novel, Master of Space and Time, reminded me a little of Fredric Brown’s The Mind Thing, he said that was an interesting observation.
We’ve stayed in touch over the years, and he has contributed to a number of projects I’ve been involved with, including Wired, HardWired, bOING bOING, and Boing Boing. (His daughter Georgia designed The Happy Mutant Handbook, too!)
As always, it’s a thrill to again have Rudy contribute to Boing Boing. Here’s his intro post:
For me, Mark Frauenfelder has always been like a Good Elf, the kind that helps the needy woodcutter in the fairy tales. He’s reliably into whatever I’m up to, which is a rare joy.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s Mark and Carla Sinclair published some of my essays and columns in their printzine bOING bOING. In 2000, when Mark told me he was starting a blog, and that he planned to make a living from it, I thought he was–shall we say overly optimistic?
I had no concept of how big blogging would get. And before long the Good Elf had converted me. He lured me in for a month’s stint as a BoingBoing guest blogger in August, 2004. (Bitrot seems to have corrupted and partially eaten my archive on BoingBoing, but I providently saved a version of it online here .)
I’d just retired from teaching and programming in 2004, and I liked having a new way to kill time. When I was done blogging for Boing, I didn’t want to stop, so a month later, I started my Rudy’s Blog, which has now accumulated about six hundred posts and three hundred thousand words by me–which is the length of three or four of my novels.
Not that I would have written more novels if I hadn’t been blogging. Blogging actually promotes my novel writing, rather than hindering it. I can try out new ideas in public on the blog, and sometimes my readers give my useful comments.
Okay, a few bio facts. I’m a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. I’m best known as a science-fiction novelist, and I received the Philip K. Dick award twice. My thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. My most recent pair of SF novels, Postsingular and Hylozoic, describe a near-future Earth in which every object becomes conscious.
For more info about me, you can go here.
I’m looking forward to blogging on BoingBoing for the next two weeks!