yin/yang

[mmcirvin]

Reading more of his notes, I note that Rudy Rucker can't stand Greg Egan. Naturally they'd be two of my favorite writers. Dionysius and Apollo, both of them trained in mathematics. Only Egan's rigorously constructed schemata of super-reality are always tearing themselves apart like broken machines, and Rucker's work these days is tinged with regret for his youthful irresponsibility.

It's almost time for bed, I think.

Comments

[swinehund.livejournal.com]

Somehow that seems to be the way, when someone else is so close to being someone you'd have the upmost respect for, but some fatal disappointment that makes you think less of them than if they had just passed under your radar. Or it's some other reason like why you get more bitter rivalries between neighboring nations who are nearly indistinguishable to the rest of the world. I'm not sure why that is. Probably something to do with the frame of reference and how it magnifies differences?

It's definitely time for bed.

[bram.livejournal.com]

Though I've enjoyed Rucker's nonfiction, I haven't read his fiction. I love Egan's stuff. I gave a plug for Egan in front of Wolfram, though Egan gave a mixed review to Wolfram's book. (Rucker is one of Wolfram's biggest boosters.) I wasn't aware of Rucker's attitude toward Egan.

[ex-askesis860.livejournal.com]

Do you have Rucker recommendations? I've only read The Hacker and the Ants, which was a decentish book despite the title. I tried a big dose of Egan last year at your urging, but found him to be very much not to my taste (though I did enjoy some of the debates in Diaspora).

About the only new sci-fi I've enjoyed in the last couple of years would be Ken MacLeod, but I'm sure you're already aware of him.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The Hacker and the Ants is probably about the hardest and most mundane SF that Rucker ever wrote; the rest of his novels are written in a similarly breezy style, but are also more conceptually wild and loose, incorporating scientific ideas but generally completely unconcerned with how scientifically plausible they are being. Nitpickers about the Nature of Science Fiction would doubtless banish them to the outer darkness along with Kurt Vonnegut. Many of them also verge on pornography in spots, though in Frek and the Elixir he was behaving (it's very good, and also appropriate for older kids).

He's unapologetic about basing characters on himself and giving them wish-fulfillment adventures; the thing that keeps all his novels from being Mary Sues is that the self-portraits are usually unflattering. The author-stand-in characters behave irresponsibly and unwisely, seem to generally have problems predicting the consequences of their actions, and are often consumed with guilt. Sometimes they learn lessons and sometimes they don't. In Frek he held back on this a little to make his protagonist more sympathetic; the author-stand-in character there is a godlike alien called the Magic Pig who is manipulating the hero's life for selfish reasons.

He's probably best known for the "'ware" cycle, Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware, which gets progressively more bizarre as it goes on. Of those, Software and Realware are the best and Freeware is the weakest. (I get the impression that he was going through some crises of remorse around the time he wrote Freeware; that time around the character named "Randy Karl Tucker" is an out-and-out villain, a sociopathic bigot and robot-raping perv. That book put Sam off reading Rucker entirely.)

My personal favorite is still his early novel White Light, which is about a depressed mathematician (again, an obvious Rucker stand-in) who astrally travels to a kind of Infinity Land and has wild adventures there, sort of a junkie Phantom Tollbooth with musings about advanced mathematics mixed in with crazy shit about drugs, sex, Satan, and Franz Kafka. The thing that initially grabbed me about it is the achingly accurate evocation of the guilt-ridden life of a dead-end academic in the opening chapters.

The most recent one I'd read before Frek was Saucer Wisdom, which I'd really only recommend to big Rucker fans; it's sort of his version of Summa Technologiae or Profiles of the Future, a collection of rambling musings about nifty future technology loosely disguised as a novel about his conversations with a daft UFO abductee. That's probably not the one to start with, though it does provide insights into the raw material for Realware and Frek.

[jwgh]

There's a collection of his short stories called, I think, Gnarl!, which I think is pretty good. I should note that I gave it to manfire and he hated it, though.

[plorkwort.livejournal.com]

I picked up one of the Ware books (Software, I think) in a used bookstore somewhere in Colorado Springs this summer because it mentioned robots and meat in the utterly inaccurate cover summary. I was bothered by the cape or robot implant or whatever it was that made the protagonist talk/think in 1940s detective novel stereotype broken Japanese English.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was kind of questionable.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, to tell the truth, some of the differences between the two of them are pretty stark. Egan's a ferocious rationalist who has nothing but contempt for religion and mysticism of any sort, and likes to tell you this in long hectoring passages. Most of his stories are grim and humorless (at least on the surface-- the situations he describes are often quite funny if you think about them). When he does write overt humor, it's angry, bitter satire. And he likes to work out the mechanics of things as rigorously as he can within the parameters of the story-- a typical Egan scenario is to introduce some exotic physical gimmick (sometimes surreptitiously, by a kind of sleight of hand that I greatly admire) and push it forward logically until the entire world of the story starts to break from the strain.

Rucker, for his part, dislikes authoritarian varieties of organized religion, but is actually quite religious in his own way (particularly in recent years), has a sort of pantheistic view of the world, and seems to approach math and science mostly from an aesthetic and mystical direction. This sometimes leads him to swallow stuff that I think is pretty daft, but for the purpose of writing fantasies it's great source material. His writing is logically loosey-goosey, and he works in a fundamentally comic mode most of the time.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

By the way, one of the things I've always admired most about Stanislaw Lem is that he could write both ways.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Gnarl! is good. I had forgotten the title and wasn't willing to hunt all over the house to find it. I'd read most of the stories in an earlier omnibus collection called Transreal! but I think Gnarl! is a superset of it.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Correction, I think Gnarl! plus the nonfiction essay collection Seek! are collectively a superset of Transreal! The latter had some of his nonfiction in it, including the Transrealist Manifesto that he wrote while he was trying to formulate a Movement.