bOING bOING was a zine that my wife Carla and I launched in 1988 to
cover comic books, cyberpunk science fiction, consciousness
technology, curious phenomena, and whatever else surprised and
delighted us. That zine, which ran for 15 issues until 1997, evolved
into the very website you’re reading right now.
We’ve made available a free anthology of some of our favorite
interviews from bOING bOING, the zine. You can access
it for free with Microsoft’s Office Web Apps on SkyDrive, whose
sponsorship has made this project possible.
The anthology, called bOING
bOING: History of the Future! is a collection of interviews with
and articles by some of our favorite writers and thinkers – Robert
Anton Wilson, Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, Kevin Kelly, Marc Laidlaw,
and Bruce Sterling.
In the coming weeks, we’ll be running posts about the articles
included in the bOING bOING: History of the Future anthology. Last
week, I wrote about bOING
bOING’s interview with Robert Anton Wilson. This week, I’d like
to introduce the interview I conducted with a wonderful science fiction author, math professor, painter, and software creator: Rudy Rucker. The interview appeared in bOING bOING #3. At the time Rudy was developing cool educational software about chaos and fractals for Autodesk. Rudy also wrote a regular column for the print edition of bOING bOING, called “Zip.”
I first met Rudy at a Mondo 2000 party in 1985 in Berkeley, California. He read from his book, Wetware, and brought with him a little cardboard device he made that folded and unfolded, and as I recall, was supposed to be a shadow of a 4-dimensional cube.
bOING bOING #3 was published in 1990, in Boulder, Colorado. It was 38 pages long. Contents included a two-page comic by Marc Laidlaw, an article about “Neuro Tarot” by Antero Alli, a review of fractal software, and an interview with the creator of a phosphene-inducing device called the Kaleido-Sky.
The document is in Microsoft Word format and you can view it for free
with Office Web Apps on SkyDrive whether you have Word on your
computer or not. And if you’d like to download it for local perusal or
printing and don’t have a recent version of Microsoft Word or one of
the many other applications that can open the document, you can use
the free Word
Viewer for Windows or Quick Look built into Mac OS X.
The
History of the Future! A free anthology of articles from the bOING
bOING print ‘zine 1989-1997 (SkyDrive)