Rudy Rucker

From Wikinfo

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (born March 22, 1946 in Louisville, Kentucky) is an American computer scientist and science fiction author, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. He is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. He is also known for non-fiction books such as Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension and Infinity and the Mind. Rucker is the great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher Georg Hegel.

Rucker attended Swarthmore College as an undergraduate student (Bachelor's in mathematics) and Rutgers University as a graduate student (Master's and Ph.D. in mathematics). He was a professor at various universities before settling at San Jose State University until his retirement in 2004.

As his "own alternative to cyberpunk," Rucker developed a writing style he terms Transrealism. Transrealism is science fiction based on the author's own life and immediate perceptions, mixed with fantastic elements that symbolize psychological change. Rucker outlined these ideas in "The Transrealist Manifesto," an essay he wrote in 1983. Many of Rucker's novels and short stories apply these ideas. One example of Rucker's Transrealist works is Saucer Wisdom, a novel in which the main character is abducted by aliens. Rucker and his publisher marketed the book, tongue in cheek, as non-fiction.

In 1978-1980, Rucker received a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and taught math at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg. His earliest Transrealist novel, White Light, was written while living in Heidelberg. This Transrealist novel is based on his experiences at the State University of New York at Geneseo, where he taught from 1972 to 1978.

Rudy Rucker currently maintains a blog at http://www.rudyrucker.com/blog/.

Works

• The Ware Tetralogy
  • Software (1982)
    
  • Wetware (1988)
    
  • Freeware (1997)
    
  • Realware (2000)
    
• Transrealist novels
  • White Light (1980)
    
  • Spacetime Donuts (1981)
    
  • The Sex Sphere (1983)
    
  • The Secret of Life (1985)
    
  • The Hacker and the Ants (1994)
    
  • Saucer Wisdom (1999)
    
  • Hacker and the Ants, Version 2.0 (2003)
    
• Other Novels
  • Master of Space and Time (1984)
    
  • The Hollow Earth (1990)
    
  • Spaceland (2002)
    
  • As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (2002)
    
  • Frek and the Elixir (2004)
    
• Story collections
  • The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka (1983)
    
  • Transreal!, also includes some non-fiction essays (1991)
    
  • Gnarl! (2000), complete short stories
    
• Non-fiction
  • Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension (1977)
    
  • Infinity and the Mind (1982)
    
  • The Fourth Dimension (1984)
    
  • Mind Tools (1987)
    
  • All the Visions (1991), memoir
    
  • Seek! (1999), collected essays
    
  • Software Engineering and Computer Games (2002), textbook
    
  • The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2005)
    

External links

• Rudy Rucker's blog
• Rudy Rucker's biography on his home page
• The Rudy Rucker Portal
• Rudy Rucker's SJSU Home Page
• The Transrealist Manifesto
• Rudy Rucker at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

References

• Adapted from the Wikipedia article, "Rudy_Rucker" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Rucker, used under the GNU Free Documentation License