Rudy Rucker Quotations

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

Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.

If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.

All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.

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.

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

Lately Ive been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

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

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

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!

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

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

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

Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.

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

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 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.

I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.

In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.

Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.

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

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

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

Gnarly processes often display patterns at several scales. We find them fun to watch because they tend to appear as if they're alive.

Physical laws provide, at best, a recipe for how the world might be computed in parallel particle by particle and region by region.

People rarely write books that are that far out, so it might be interesting to try to write one, but no one will want to read it.

At San Jose State I got very interested in the work of Stephen Wolfram, who wrote a pretty famous book called A New Kind of Science.

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

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?

When I see an old movie, like from the ’40s or ’50s or ’60s, the people look so calm. They don’t have smartphones, they’re not looking at computer screens, they’re taking their time. They’ll sit in a chair and just stare off into space. I think some day we’ll find our way back to that garden of Eden.

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?

Intellectually, perspective [drawing] is a breakthrough, because here, for the first time, the physical space we live in is being depicted as ifit were an abstract, mathematical space. A less obvious innovation due to perspective is that here, for the first time, people are actually drawing pictures of infinities.

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.

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

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.

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

The simple process of eating and breathing weave all of us together into a vast four-dimensional array. No matter how isolated you may sometimes feel, no matter how lonely, you are never really cut off from the whole.

Our bodies are the time machine.

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

We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves

It's a waste to chase the pipe dream of a magical tiny theory that allows us to make quick and detailed calculations about the future. We can't predict and we can't control. To accept this can be a source of liberation and inner peace. We're part of the unfolding world, surfing the chaotic waves.

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.