Recent paintings by Rudy Rucker. Inspired by my sojourns in the lands of math and literature. Images are Copyright (C) Rudy Rucker, 2026. For more info on Rudy's art, go to his Paintings Page. I'll be talking about this stuff, and selling prints, at a Dorkbot event on February 25 at the Monkeybrains building at […]

The post Mind, Writing, and Painting first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

———— This is part 2 of a long blog post. The first part is called "Wandering" and this part is "Wondering." No real reason for those names, just playing with words. But mostly these posts are about images. Kawaii. Acrylic on canvas, 24″ x 24″. December, 2025 At one point, I had a nice square […]

The post Wondering first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

I've been hanging around with Barb Ash a lot. I published Sqinks. I painted quite a bit. I'll break my doings into two posts: "Wandering" and "Wondering." Barb is a photographer, as am I, and we enjoy working on pictures together, each using their own camera, but helping each other see. Barb is better at […]

The post Wandering first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

My new novel, and a journal about writing it. Published via my very own indie press,  which is Transreal Books. I raised funds for it on a Kickstarter page…and I have a Sqinks book page.. Towards the end of Novembler, I'll be publishing Sqinks and Sqinks Journal in hardback, paperback, and ebook on all the usual […]

The post Sqinks Novel & Sqinks Journal first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Time to catch up on my photos. Here’s May and June, 2025. A lot happened. Here I am in North Beach with Barb, I guess this was back in May. Love the display sign of a big fish! I always like messy things on walls. Like painted-over plywood. Fab four-color fan. Usually I line myself […]

The post Summer in SF and NYC first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

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The post Spring Eases In first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

In January, 2025, my girlfriend Barb Ash and I took a two-week trip to Quintana Roo and the Yucatan in Mexico. The hand of the woman sitting in front of me on the plane looked like an alien flesh-crab. Those nails! What if it hopped loose and scuttled around? The spacetime of air travel is […]

The post Quintana Roo & the Yucatan first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

And now came bad news from Louisville. My big brother Embry was suddenly dying of cancer. It came on very quickly. I flew back to Louisville, with my son Rudy Jr. along, and we had a chance to say our goodbyes to Embry. He was very weak. It was good to be together. I held […]

The post Embry's Death. Christmas 2024. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Barb and I went to Mexico for a couple of weeks in January, 2025, on the Yucatan peninsula. I’ll blog some photos from there later, but today I want to write about this trip we just took to visit with my daughter Isabel in Fort Bragg, up in northern California, on the coast near Mendocino. […]

The post Isabel's "Time Ecosystem" first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

March 7, 2025. My daughter  Isabel Rucker had an art show on the theme of Time at the one-of-a-kind Larry Spring Museum in Fort Bragg, California. Larry Spring was what you might call a folk scientist and an outsider artist. For Isabel’s show, she formed fresh ideas about our  notions of time.  She and I […]

The post Podcast #116. "Kinds of Time, with Isabel Rucker" first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

In late September, 2024, Barb and I went to Lowlands for two and half weeks. This means Amsterdam, Brussels, and Antwerp. All are places I know fairly well. While we where there, my camera got stolen, so I don’t have all that many images—the ones I have are from my phone. To round out the […]

The post Lowlands & Home first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

For this image, I pasted a sample from from one of my paintings onto an AI image of a writer and a robot. It’s me writing my novel Software in 1980, right? And my muse is Ralph Numbers, or Cobb Anderson, or my father, Embry Rucker, Sr. As I compose today’s post, it’s March, 2025. […]

The post California Gnarl first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Early in 2024 I started spending time with Barb Ash, who I met in the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting. Being with Barb makes me a lot happier than I’ve been for the last year and a half. I’m glad I met her. In May, we went ahead and did a trip to England together, spending […]

The post England with Barb first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

June 23, 2024. Reading my anti-gun "Big Germs" story at the SF in SF meeting. In memory of Terry Bisson. And huge thanks to sound wizsard Rusty Hodge. Press the arrow below to play "Big Germs.” We’re using the new and improved .m4a sound file format instead of the old .mp3. If you have a […]

The post Podcast #115. "Big Germs" first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

This is the text of "Big Germs," a revised and abridged story that I am reading at the SF in SF gathering in San Francisco at 6 pm on Sunday, June 23, 2024. This post appears on Medium as well. A longer and unrivised version of "Big Germs" appeared in BoingBoing on May 22, 2024. […]

The post Reading "Big Germs" at SF in SF. Print Sale. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Alien invasions and interspecies war are played-out tropes. In my Sqinks novel, sqink aliens are arriving. And I was going to have it be an alien invasion. But then I thought to ask Stephen Wolfram for a better idea. Me: What do the invading aliens want from us? Stephen Anthropology? Understand an alien mind to […]

The post Invading Aliens? No, They're Exchange Students. (With Input from Stephen Wolfram) first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

On March 30, 2024, I spoke at an event sponsored by City Lights books, in honor of Terry Bisson.  Here’s my three-frame pan of the crowd in front of me. And here’s a version of what I said. Terry Bisson 1942-2024 Memorial event at the Lost Church in SF I met Terry in 1984.  We […]

The post In Memory of Terry Bisson first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Over the years I’ve written two non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, edited a book of C. H. Hinton’s writings on the fourth dimension, published a novel set in the fourth dimension, and worked the concept into a number of my other novels and short stories. Shortly before Christmas, 2023, Jeff Carreira interviewed me about […]

The post The Reality of the Fourth Dimension first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

This describes an experiment with with ChatGPT that I made on Jan 17, 2024. I mention "skinks" a lot, so just below, you'll see a painting of with a bunch of skinks; they're the guys in the center. I'm writing about a couple named Oliver and Carol, and about their adventures with two skinks named […]

The post ChatGPT Writing. "Skinks in Rubber Flight." first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

We keep getting closer to simulating a human being by running a process in a computer. On the street, the dream is that we might get software immortality. And I predicted it forty years ago. [Photo credit: Bart Nagel] How does it work? You start with a large data base on what a given person […]

The post Rudy Predicted Software Immortality first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

As I've mentioned, my wife Sylvia died eleven months ago, and I have to find ways to fill the empty time at home. Somehow I still haven't gotten back to writing stories and novels. I paint in the daytime, and I watch a fair amount of TV in the evening, but I get sick of […]

The post Notes on Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Rudy. I met John Walker in 1987, shortly after I moved to Silicon Valley, at an outsider get-together called Hackers. John is known as one of the founders of the behemoth company Autodesk. I had a job teaching computer science at San Jose State, although at this point I was totally faking it. Even so, […]

The post "The Roaring Twenties" Rudy & John Walker on LLM, ChatGPT, & AI first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Journey to the East! I'm gonna spend a four nights with Mike Gambone in Nashville. Mike and I taught at Randolph Macon Woman's College, sharing careers as low-grade malcontent academics. After Mike, I'll visit Greg Gibson in Gloucester, my college roommate at Swarthmore, and a fellow writer and eternal Zen mind-assassin. Then on to Providence […]

The post Journey to the East first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

As you may know, my wife Sylvia died of cancer in January 6, 2023. I'm still grieving, and I miss her very much. Over the last eight months, I've returned many times to the question of what it might mean to say Sylvia's soul is still with me. In this post, I'll outline some of […]

The post Talking to Sylvia first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

I got an emailed question about my novel Spacetime Donuts from a fan of mine, who prefers to be known as Skinner Darkly. I said, hell, let’s make it an online interview, haven’t done one of those for a couple of months.  So here you are.  I’m publishing it here, and on Medium. This time […]

The post How to Write, Interview with Skinner Darkly first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

May 19, 2023. This story relates to the death of my wife Sylvia. I read it an SF in SF event in January, 2023, and it was recorded by Rusty Hodge for SomaFM. The story appeared as online text in Nature Futures on Feb 15, 2023. Press the arrow below to play Rusty’s recording of  […]

The post Podcast #114. "Who Do You Love" first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Most of the material in this blog post is drawn from an email interview of me by my old pal John Shirley, for the terrific new ezine Instant Future , run by Brock Hinzmann and John. As is my usual fashion, for my blog-post version I added some images that may seem to have no […]

The post Shirley Interview: AI, ChatGPT, and Consciousness first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

The grief is still quite harsh; it comes and goes. But it’s getting better. A couple of weeks ago, alone in the supermarket I was still lost in a haze of regret. All the things I didn’t do, or did wrong. Even though, in her last months, Sylvia told me, "I forgive you for anything […]

The post Roadtrip To Encinitas first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

This post is based on an email interview that my long-time corrspondent Giulio Prisco made with me for his own website, Turing Church. Born in Italy, Giulio now lives in Budapest with his Hungarian wife. GP1: Let's start with Juicy Ghosts. Your concept of lifebox immortality proposes a deep database on a person, coupled to […]

The post Free Will, Immortality, and Sylvia first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

My wife Sylvia died on January 6, 2023. We had a memorial service for her at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Los Gatos on February 4. It was a beautiful service. At Sylvia's request we draped her quilts over the pews. We had a  big crowd, over 130 people in the little church, everyone brimming […]

The post Sylvia Bogsch Rucker, 1943-2023 first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

I'm done with space paitnings for now. I sold my now-finished New Glasses to my nephew Hans von Sichart. It's a very nice painting; I put in a whole extra day on it, sharpening it up. Hans came to our house to pick it up; it was nice to see him, had been nearly ten […]

The post Painting A Lot. Family. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

"Ahna bogbog du smeepy flan," as the prehistoric Egyptian potter says in my ultrapunk 1983 story "Buzz." I finished a big new painting, Space Jellies. I started out with the dark blak/purple background, then put on small stars by flicking my thumb across paint-laden brushes. The yellow-orange pattern is a kind of shape I like […]

The post Notes From The Underground first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Still flipping out on clouds after Sweden.  One of those full-on “glory” sunrises here in Los Gatos, with those rays…odd looking split in the middle.  Uncool to paint such scenes, I suppose, but might be fun to try. Can always throw in some UFOs. Once a painting teacher decreed or pleaded with me: “Don’t do […]

The post Cosmic Cliff first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

After I gave my talk in Helsinki, Sylvia and I went and spent five days in Stockholm. I had no idea what Stockholm would be like, but it was wonderful. The city itself is on a number of islands crowded together, and the sky—at least in the summer—is a lovely parade of clouds, very crisp. […]

The post Stockholm Joy first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Early in August, 2022, Sylvia and I took a trip to Scandinavia. I’d been invited by the Bridges Organization to give a talk at their 2o22 conference at Aalto University in Helsinki, Finland. Their annual meetings feature talks and demonstrations and exhibits relating to connections between math, art, music, architecture, and culture. Perfect for me. […]

The post Helsinki Math & Art first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

August 1, 2022. I was invited to give a plenary lecture at the Bridges group’s “Mathematics & Art” conference in Helsinki, Finland. Over my long career, I’ve used math, computer graphics, writing, and painting as ways to express myself, and to get clearer images of certain things that interest me.  Four channels, all looking at […]

The post Podcast #113. "Logic, Gnarl, Writing, Painting." first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Talk by Rudy Rucker for the Bridges conference on Art and Mathematics at Aalto University, Helsinki, 11am, August 1, 2022. Many thanks to the organizers for inviting me, particularly George Hart, Kirsi Peltonen, and Eve Torrence. For more on my art see my Paintings page. For more of my thoughts, see my books, including my […]

The post Logic, Gnarl, Writing, Painting first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

I recenlty read Jennifer Egan’s great novels A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Candy House. She uses an interesting style.  These novels are what writers call “fix-ups,” that is they are sequences of collaged-together stories with overlapping casts of characters. After the fact, the writer might pretend they did this on purpose, but that’s […]

The post Spacetime Fix-Up, or, Time's a Goon first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Ten or fifteen years back Bruce Sterling told me that the blog as a communications medium would die. And I felt he was wrong; I was like, "I'll never stop." But by now I do like tweeting a lot. The haiku-like comression of a tweet with a single image, yes. And most recently I've been […]

The post Jingle Jangle first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

The Best of Rudy Rucker Bundle from Jason Chen includes twelve volumes. I describe the bundle on Jason’s site, and I also describe the bundle on this blog post.  On this post, I descrbe them chronologiccally, then I excerpt some reviews. In 1972 I wrote my Ph. D. thesis on the mathematics of higher infinities—and […]

The post The Best of Rudy's Worlds first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

About three weeks ago, I went for a hike in Castle Rock Park, alone, going far, and I talked to a plant for a long time. A madrone with a duckbeak snag and a moss beard.  I haven’t used pot or alcohol for twenty-five years, but I still like to be high.  When I find […]

The post Be High first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Where do I get my ideas for science fiction? This continues my earlier post on the topic. The material is taken from interviews. That 3d plastic slug was 3d printed for me by Chuck Shotton. Interviewed by Heath Row for The National Fantasy Fan, July, 2009. New York. You asked how I between the value […]

The post How To Write: Getting Ideas, Part II first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

These poems were my way of beginning to be a writer. I wrote them in two batches. The first batch came during 1975-1978 while I was teaching math at the state college of Geneseo, in upstate New York—the five of us: Sylvia, me, and our three kids. I’d read my poems at English department readings. […]

The post Poems: "Light Fuse And Get Away" first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

You can have anything you want. But what do you want? Some of the appeal of SF comes from its association with the old idea of the Magic Wish. Any number of fairy tales deal with a hero (humble woodcutter, poor fisherman, disinherited princess) who gets into a situation where he or she is free […]

The post How To Write: What SF Writers Want first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Lately I’ve been writing some “How to Write” posts for my blog and for Medium. For this one, I’m using excerpts from my huge document All the Interviews, which you can read as a PDF online. Today’s topic is “Getting Ideas.”  And I have a Part II on my blog and on Medium as well. […]

The post How To Write. Getting Ideas, Part I first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

The Singularity was brought on by some nanomachines known as orphids. The orphids used quantum computing and propelled themselves with electrostatic fields. The self-reproducing orphids doubled their numbers every few minutes at first; fortunately, they'd been designed to level out at a sustainable population of some sextillion orphids upon Earth's surface. This meant there were […]

The post Visions of the Metanovel first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Selections from interviews asking about my painting and my writing. #217. Elephants. 2009. Interview by Charlie Jane Anders for io9. Q. Do you think your writing changed when you started painting a lot? A. All along, I’ve made little pen and paper drawings of my scenes before writing them, but now I enjoy the more […]

The post Writing and Painting. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Here’s the January, 2022, version of a story I’ve been revising off and on for a couple of years.  I think this version is pretty tight and funny.  I published an early version of it in the zine Big Echo back in October, 2020. And that would  make it hard to publish the new version […]

The post "Everything Is Everything." SF Story. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

A crazy new SF adventure…with entitled realtors from the infinite subdimensions. So  my last novel Juicy Ghosts is out there, and I've been idle for a few months, so now—what to do? Nescio. That's Latin for "I don't know, son." Don't know what I'll write next, don't know if I'll ever write again. But I'll start […]

The post Everything is Everything. Start. first appeared on Rudy's Blog.

Musings on whether a virtual reality or a computer generated reality could ever match our real reality. I wrote my first version of this essay in 2008, while in Pinedale, Wyoming, visiting my daughter Isabel and doing some cross-country skiing among the aspen trees. The trees have great patterns like eyes on them. Nice examples […]

The post Here's to the Real World first appeared on Rudy's Blog.