Rudy Rucker Quotes (29 Quotes)

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.

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

The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.

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

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

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

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.

I like to do things that are surprising and different.

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.

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

A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.

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

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.

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

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.

I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.

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

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

Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.

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

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

Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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!