Complete Short Fiction by Rudy Rucker (.ePUB)
File Size: 6.4 MB
Complete Short Fiction 1978-2023 (Jerry eBooks, 2024) by Rudy Rucker
Requirements: ePUB reader, 6.4mb
Overview: Rudolf von Bitter Rucker was born on March 22, 1946 in Louisville, Kentucky. The Rucker family were of Huguenot descent.
Rucker attended St. Xavier High School before earning a BA in mathematics from Swarthmore College (1967) and MS (1969) and PhD (1973) degrees in mathematics from Rutgers University.
Thanks to a grant from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Rucker taught at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg from 1978 to 1980. He then taught at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia from 1980 to 1982, before trying his hand as a full-time author for four years.
Inspired by an interview with Stephen Wolfram, Rucker became a computer science professor at San Jose State University in 1986, from which he retired as professor emeritus in 2004.
From 1988 to 1992 he was hired by John Walker of Autodesk as a programmer of cellular automata, which inspired his book The Hacker and the Ants.
As his “own alternative to cyberpunk,” Rucker developed a writing style he terms transrealism. Transrealism, as outlined in his 1983 essay The Transrealist Manifesto, is science fiction based on the author’s own life and immediate perceptions, mixed with fantastic elements that symbolize psychological change. Many of Rucker’s novels and short stories apply these ideas.
Rucker often uses his novels to explore scientific or mathematical ideas; White Light examines the concept of infinity, while the Ware Tetralogy (written from 1982 through 2000) is in part an explanation of the use of natural selection to develop software (a subject also developed in his The Hacker and the Ants, written in 1994). His novels also put forward a mystical philosophy that Rucker has summarized in an essay titled, with only a bit of irony, “The Central Teachings of Mysticism” (included in Seek!, 1999).
The author of both fiction and non-fiction, Rucker is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. Until its closure in 2014 he edited the science fiction webzine Flurb.
Genre: Fiction > Sci-Fi/Fantasy
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