Rudy Rucker Quotes

For me, the best thing about Cyberpunk is that it taught me how to enjoy shopping malls, which used to terrify me. Now I just imagine the whole thing is two miles below the moon's surface, and that half the people's right-brains have been eaten by roboticized steel rats. And suddenly it's interesting again.

I am, as it were, an eye that the cosmos uses to look at itself. The Mind is not mine alone; the Mind is everywhere.

The Pig Chef was - if you thought about it - one of the more sinister icons of American roadside art. Danny's personal totem. What kind of pig is a butcher? What kind of pig cooks barbeque? A traitor pig, a killer pig, a doomed preterite pig destined for eternal damnation. Danny's Pig Chefs showed the full weight of this knowledge in their mocking eyes and snaggled snouts.

Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons.

Our bodies are the time machine.

The world is magic. Science is but an insipid style of sorcery.

A little-known truth: Every aspect of the world is fundamentally unpredictable. Computer scientists have long since proved this.

I think you should kill him and eat his brain," Mr. Frostee said quickly.
That's not the answer to every problem in interpersonal relations," Cobb said, hopping out.

Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

Death is simple, but my evasions are complex.

But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.

The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart.

One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.

It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.

If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!

I am indeed a kind of alien," siad Momo. "Your legends do not entirely miss the mark. We do have ray guns and flying saucers. But my homeland is not one of your space's planets. I'm from the All, Joe Cube. A world of four dimensions. I climbed down through a tunnel to get to Spaceland- to your world. Spaceland lies in an endless cavern like a strange, subterranean sea. Spaceland very nearly lacks a fourth dimension; it extends less than a nanometer in the direction of your vinn and vout- which actually point in the direction of our up and down. Spaceland appears to us as something like a rug- but unlike a rug, Spsaceland is cunningly filled with motion and life. It seems the Creator put Spaceland in place to separate the All in two. My people the Kluppers, live up above it, and another fold called the Dronners live down below. They are our enemies, hidden below Spaceland." Momo paused, as if agitated by the thought of the Dronners. "You'll turn the tide against them Joe.

Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

The world is colors and motion, feelings and thoughts and what does math have to do with it? Not much, if 'math' means being bored in high school, but in truth mathematics is the one universal science. Mathematics is the study of pure pattern and everything in the cosmos is a kind of pattern.

Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.

There are no normal people - just look at your relatives,

What is the shape of space? Is it flat, or is it bent? Is it nicely laid out, or is it warped and shrunken? Is it finite, or is it infinite? Which of the following does space resemble more: (a) a sheet of paper, (b) an endless desert, (c) a soap bubble, (d) a doughnut, (e) an Escher drawing, (f) an ice cream cone, (g) the branches of a tree, or (h) a human body?

Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they grow again. Who wants to see the same stupid daisy year after year, especially with a bunch of crappy iron-lung-type equipment bolted to it?

This is like the joke where the guy climbs the mountain and asks the guru, 'What is the secret of life?,' and the guru says, 'All is One,' and the guys says, 'Are you kidding?,' and the guru says, 'You mean it isn't?

The study of infinity is much more than a dry academic game. The intellectual pursuit of the absolute infinity is, as Georg Cantor realized, a form of the soul's quest for God. Whether or not the goal is ever reached, an awareness of the process brings enlightenment.

Long live transfinite mountains, the hollow earth, time machines, fractal writing, aliens, dada, telepathy, flying saucers, warped space, teleportation, artificial reality, robots, pod people, hylozoism, endless shrinking, intelligent goo, antigravity, surrealism, software highs, two-dimensional time, gnarly computation, the art of photo composition, pleasure zappers, nanomachines, mind viruses, hyperspace, monsters from the deep and, of course, always and forever, the attack of the giant ants!

Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.

Once you're born, the worst has already happened.

At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.

It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.

If all else fails, there's always print or web zines.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

That was my big realization twenty years ago. It all passes. Here I am at the bathroom door, and how can I ever get to the sink? How can high school ever end, how can I ever finish college, how can I ever be married? But then I'm at the sink, I'm back out the door, I have a Ph.D., I'm married with three kids, and twenty years have passed. Here I am alive, and how can I ever die? But I will, I know I will, I know it in my soul.

We're presently in the midst of a third intellectual revolution. The first came with Newton: the planets obey physical laws. The second came with Darwin: biology obeys genetic laws. In today's third revolution, were coming to realize that even minds and societies emerge from interacting laws that can be regarded as computations. Everything is a computation.

In principle you could hypertunnel from a Zone B world, but in practice you
can't get the tech together. The evil rays revel in chaotic class-three
and class-four zones.
Rudy Rucker, story notes, Mathies in Love

Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.