Rudy Rucker : Biography
I was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 22, 1946. At that time my father
had a small business making inexpensive furniture and my mother was a
housewife. I have one sibling, my brother Embry, who is five years older than
me, and still lives in Louisville. I went to private schools in Louisville,
graduating from St. Xavier High School --- I was one of the few non-Catholics to
attend that school; my parents had the idea it was very good for science. "St.
X". While I was in high-school, my father became ordained as an Episcopal
priest, and worked as parish priest for the rest of his life. My mother, who was
born in Germany, was an enthusiastic gardener, amateur artist and potter.
I went to Swarthmore College from 1963 - 1967, majoring in Mathematics and
getting a Bachelor's degree. I had a lot of fun there, and was sorry to
graduate. At this point, my choices were the draft or grad school, so I had no
hesitation in going to Rutgers University: from 1967 - 1972. I got my Master's
and my Ph.D. in Mathematics. My area of specialization was Mathematical Logic,
with my thesis on Transfinite Set Theory. In 1967, I married my college
sweetheart Sylvia, and not too long after that we had our three children:
Georgia, Rudy, Jr., and Isabel.
After grad school, I got my first job in the Math. Dept. at the State University
College at Geneseo, New York, a job which lasted from 1972 - 1978. I started
teaching the "Higher Geometry" course there, and turned it into a series of
lectures on the fourth dimension. Eventually I wrote the lectures up as
Geometry, Relativity and The Fourth Dimension, and managed to get them published
by Dover Publications, a house which primarily publishes public-domain books by
dead authors. They didn't pay me much, but it was enough to throw myself a good
thirtieth birthday party --- and my writing career was on its way.
The next thing I wrote was a science fiction novel called Spacetime Donuts. This
was in the summer of 1976. I wasn't sure I could write a novel, but I just kept
going and after awhile it was done. Nobody wanted to publish it, but then I came
across a new magazine called Unearth which was willing to serialize it in three
parts. As it happened, Unearth went out of business before publishing Part
Three.
We were interested in finding a way to move out of cold, rainy upstate New York,
and in 1978-1980 I luckily got a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt
Foundation, which is funded by the German government. The five of us lived in
Heidelberg for two years, the kids making their way through German schools, and
Sylvia struggling to keep everything together. (Bad news: in Germany, all the
kids come home for lunch. Every day!) I had a peaceful office in the Mathematics
Institute of the University of Heidelberg, and ended up writing most of Infinity
And The Mind as well as two novels there: White Light and Software. White Light
was picked up by Ace Books in the U.S., and by Virgin Books in the U.K. And then
Ace bought Spacetime Donuts and Software as a package, and I was really a
writer.
The only Math professor job I could find back in the states was at a tiny
college called Randolph-Macon Woman's College, in, of places, Lynchburg,
Virginia, the home of then-prominent Jerry Falwell. After two years at Randolph
-Macon (1980 - 1982), I decided to give full-time writing a try. Sylvia and the
kids and I stayed in Lynchburg; we had a nice big old house and it wasn't a bad
place for the children to grow up. In the years 1982 -1986, I wrote six books.
This period marked the birth of cyberpunk science-fiction, and I became
recognized as a founding father of the movement. My cyberpunk novels Software
and Wetware each won a Philip K. Dick Award for best paperback SF novel of the
year.
As my own alternative to cyberpunk, I also developed a style of writing which I
call transrealism. The essence of transrealism is to write about one’s real life
in fantastic terms. The Secret of Life, White Light, and The Sex Sphere are
examples of my transreal novels. The first recasts a traditional coming of age
memoir as a UFO novel, the second is about my time as a mystical mathematician
in Geneseo, while the third turns my two years in Germany into a tale of higher
dimensions and nuclear terrorism.
Being a full-time writer in Lynchburg got to be too hard and thankless a way to
make too meager a living. I wrote Mind Tools, a nonfiction book about
mathematics and information, which got me to wanting to teach Math again. When
an old friend told me about a job opening at SJSU, I applied for it, and to my
delight I was hired in 1986 and am still there in 1997.
When I started my job in the SJSU Department of Mathematics and Computer
Science, I was urged to consider teaching computer science as well as Math. I
did not know a great deal about computer science at the time (understatement!),
although my doctoral work in Mathematical Logic had certainly familiarized me
with theoretical computing. The first computer science course I was assigned was
anything but theoretical: it was Intel chip Assembly Language! Fortunately,
another professor was teaching the same course, and I was able to attend his
lectures to help myself figure out what was going on. And soon I found something
I was really interested in programming: Cellular Automata, which are parallel
programs that produce rapid-fire self-generating computer graphics animations.
During this time period, and perhaps in reaction to my high-tech surroundings, I
wrote a historical science fiction novel called The Hollow Earth. I also got
involved with the magazine MONDO 2000, edited by a collection of Berkeley
characters interested in cyberculture. Thanks to MONDO’s influence, "cyberpunk"
became something of a household word, taking on a broader meaning and even
appearing on the cover of Time. I co-edited the MONDO 2000 User’s Guide with R.
U. Sirius and Queen Mu. As R. U. put it, "We need a mathematical logician, or
we’ll never put this thing together."
As well as teaching me a lot about computer science, my interest in Cellular
Automata led to a very interesting part-time job during the years 1988-1992.
This was with Autodesk, Inc., of Sausalito, California, makers of the popular
AutoCAD program. It seemed that John Walker the co-founder and then-chairman of
Autodesk, was fascinated by Cellular Automata. After I met Walker at the Hackers
2.0 conference in 1987, he hired me to work on some Cellular Automata software
with him. I worked on three shipped software products at Autodesk: CA Lab: Rudy
Rucker's Cellular Automata Laboratory, James Gleick's CHAOS: The Software, and
BOPPERS: Artificial Life Laboratory. My transreal novel The Hacker And The Ants
was heavily influenced by having worked inside a Silicon Valley software
company.
A drawback of working at Autodesk and SJSU at the same time was that I had very
little time to write. These days I'm back to my main interests: teaching and
writing. And I seem to use up an awful lot of time hacking Java and C++ graphics
programs for the Object Oriented Programming and Software Engineering classes
that I teach. Almost everything has to be done over again every semester.
Computer science is a Stairmaster.
In recent years I’ve focused a lot of my programming efforts on designing and
coding a "software framework" that makes it easy to write Windows videogames. I
call this shareware code package the "Pop Framework". At the same time I've been
writing a textbook which teaches something about software engineering, also
documenting the Pop Framework, and explaining how to use it. The title for the
book is Software Engineering and Computer Games. The book teaches Object
Oriented design and Software Engineering in a context of the reader creating an
MFC C++ Windows videogame such as Asteroids, Pong, Pac-Man, Mario, Donkey-Kong,
etc. It's taken me years to organize the material, as programming knowledge has
a kind of fractal structure: the details have details with yet more details.
Also the platforms and the languages keep changing. I spent the last four
months hacking my brains out porting the Pop Framework code from the 2D Windows
API to 3D OpenGL. When will this Great White Whale finally spout printed
copies? It is slated to appear from Pearson Educational's company Addison Wesley
in Falll, 2002. I'll be using the text in my CS 134:Computer Game Design and
Implementation course in Spring of 2003. In 1999, Tor Books published my text
and drawings for a novel called Saucer Wisdom. The book recounts my (alleged)
experiences with a UFO contactee named Frank Shook. The saucers purportedly
showed Frank Shook many bits of Earth’s future ---- right up through the year
4004! Saucer Wisdom gives detailed and illustrated accounts of Frank Shook’s
experiences, and was in this respect a Millennial work of future extrapolation.
My SF novel, Realware, the fourth book in the *Ware series was published as an
Avon Eos book, in June, 2000. This is the fourth and the last (for the
foreseeable future) of the *Ware books.
In 1999, the Four Walls Eight Windows press issued a collection of my selected
nonfiction called Seek!. And they published a complete anthology of my stories
called Gnarl! in May, 2000. The names come from one of my favorite slogans:
"Seek ye the gnarl!"
"Say, have you ever thought of selling one of your books to Hollywood?"
My novel Software was under option from 1990 - 2000 at Phoenix Pictures. A lot
of preproduction work was done, but the option died. What made this especially
galling was that right after Phoenix dropped my option, they released the
Schwarzenegger movie The Sixth Day, which seems to have drawn some inspiration
from my work. The central Sixth Day idea of taping someone's brain software and
then loading that personality onto a tank-grown clone of the person is straight
from my book Wetware. And in Software, it is a flash of light that puts a man's
mind onto his new body, just as in Sixth Day. These are not at all "obvious"
ideas that were "in the air," in fact it took me a lot thought and effort to
come up with them back in 1980. The fact that the villain in Sixth Day was
called "Drucker" seems almost like someone was driven by a Raskolnikov-like
obsession to confess his crime! "Yes, I killed the old woman with an axe! Yes, I
stole Dr. Rucker's ideas!" Oh well. Recently I heard from the digital effects
maven Scott Billups that he's trying to get some action started around Software
again. He made a little Software-inspired digital trailer for it called Mid
-Century.
During 1999-2001, I was involved with another film project, a script for an IMAX
movie with working title, The Search for Infinity, and to be directed by Ron
Fricke of Baraka fame. The movie was to be a science-fiction tale featuring some
prolonged zooms into a famous mathematical fractal object called the Mandelbrot
Set, and possibly starring Arthur C. Clarke. The deal hinged on getting a big
grant from the National Science Foundation. The grant didn't go through, so it
looks like another movie project dead in the water. Just for kicks, here's the
last version of the Seach for Infinity treatment that I wrote. Let us know if
you want to fund it!
I recently sold a film option for Freeware to a Seattle-based group called
Directed Evolution Networks. In addition I sold an option for Master of Space
and Time to a Brooklyn-based film-maker named Mark Mitchell.
Collaborations: In 2000, I wrote a story with John Shirley called “Pockets,”
which appeared in an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio, Redshift, (Penguin,
Fall 2001). I also wrote an essay on "Infinity" for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
A new story written with Bruce Sterling, "Junk DNA," was the cover story for
Isaac Asimov's SF magazine in December, 2002. I wrote an SF story about Jenna
Bush called "Jenna and Me" with my son Rudy Rucker, Jr, but we're having trouble
getting it published!
In 2000-2001, I wrote a new science-fiction novel called Spaceland, inspired by
Edwin Abbott Abbott's classic Flatland. It’s about a Silicon Valley middle
manager named Joe Cube who encounters some beings from the fourth dimension.
Spaceland appeared from Tor Books in June, 2002, and has been getting good
reviews. An excerpt appeared in the online SF magazine Infinite Matrix.
In Fall, 2001 and Spring 2002, I was mostly finishing off my Software
Engineering and Computer Games text and the accompanying Pop Framework code. The
book came out in December, 2002, with a cover by my daughter Georgia.
During 1998-2000, I wrote a historical novel (not science fiction!) about the
life of the Flemish painter Peter Bruegel the Elder(1527-1569). And then, in
spring of 2002, I rewrote it. The book, called As Above So Below: A Novel of
Peter Bruegel, was published by Tor Books, in Fall 2002. By the way, Rucker is
probably a Flemish name, so just call me Rudy the Elder.
I'm currently working on an intergalactic far future epic quest SF novel, with
working title Frek and the Elixir. The story starts out when the hero, a boy
named Frek, finds a UFO under his messy bed. Inside the UFO is an alien helper
who resembles a cuttlefish. To help myself visualize the book, I did a painting
of the alien cuttlefish, and of a future city that Frek passes through.
I recently did a painting of The Hacker and the Ants as well. Four Walls Eight
Windows is going to reissue the book (Hacker and the Ants, Release 2.0) for
Winter 02/03, with a cover by my daughter Georgia (not based on my painting.)
I was on leave from teaching in Fall, 2002, and spent some time in Brussels as a
guest of the Royal Flemish Academy of Arts and Sciences. I taught a graduate
seminar on Computers and Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Leuven . I also did some research on Heironymous Bosch, another
favorite Flemish master, as well as on Rene Magritte. In addition, I gave some
lectures and worked on chaos-based electronic music with Gerard Pape at CCMIX in
Paris, providing the video for a Christmas concert.
Now in Spring, 2003, I'm back at SJSU, teaching and working to finish Frek and
the Elixir.
--- Biographical note last updated January 20, 2003.