Saucer Wisdom - Hardcover

Rucker, Rudy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312868847 ISBN 13: 9780312868840

Publisher: Forge Books, 1999

Synopsis

Brace yourself when you open this book, for it purports to be the about the visions of neat biotechnologies one Frank Shook brings back from future times where he has been taken to by flying saucers, and gives to the writer, Rudy Rucker, who's telling the story. That's an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing.

Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional 'Frank Shook') has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a narrative device.

"I'm going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant anemones.

"Pop-science writers didn't used to treat 'science' in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which 'science' is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant."

Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same.

About this title

About the Author

Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, computer scientist, professor and writer who has twice won the Philip K. Dick Award for best SF paperback original, and has published a number of successful popular books on mathematical subjects, including The Fourth Dimension and Infinity and the Mind. He lives in Los Gatos, California.

Reviews

A potpourri of futuristic predictions presented in the form of an imaginary UFO abductee's confessional, Rucker's light-spirited cosmic romp promises more than it delivers. A mathematician, computer scientist, novelist and pop science writer (The Fourth Dimension), Rucker uses a purely fictive conceit: his friend Frank Shook, a tinkerer for a toy company in California, is abducted by friendly aliens who time-travel into the past and future. Through this device, in a dizzying narrative that reads like a science fiction novel, Rucker conjures a future where "soft machines" made of programmable plastic include video clothes, gizmos for telepathic communication andAin place of TV setsAUV (universal viewer) sets capable of tuning into millions of channels, creating an endless interplanetary party with everyone hooked in. People live in giant gourds, clone themselves and use Biobots (DNA-based robots) as daily helpers (e.g., giving massages). The aliens, who shape-shift into big starfish or gnomelike flesh-globs, take Frank aboard their UFO to demonstrate femtotechnology, a method of manipulating atoms to manufacture almost anything out of thin air. Frank experiences two years of missing time and winds up in South Dakota near Devil's Tower, the butte featured in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He gets a preview of the year 4004, when humans can teleport, travel on the astral plane and meld into the divine ground of reality. Illustrated with 57 of the fictional abductee's cartoonish or conceptualist drawings, this speculative space odyssey will try the patience of some readers, while others may groove to a mind-expanding leap into the future. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Saucer Wisdom

ONE

Another Nut?

INTRODUCTION

I've always liked the idea of flying saucers. To me, UFOs mean fun. I think of them as a cheerful icon of instant strangeness and enjoyably cheesy science fiction.

Although there have been some excellent UFO movies and TV shows, the books on the subject tend to be emotional downers with very little intellectual content. One of my goals in publishing Saucer Wisdom is to make available a UFO story that is amusing and filled with new ideas.

The story is about my encounters with a man I call "Frank Shook"--and about Frank's alleged encounters with aliens. Do I believe everything that Frank told me? It doesn't matter. What counts is that Frank's visions make up a remarkably detailed and coherent set of speculations about humanity's future. Far more than being a work of ufology, Saucer Wisdom is a futuristic vision of the coming millennia. Not to mention the fact that it's a hoot.

A difficulty in presenting Saucer Wisdom to the public is that many people have very strong fixed ideas about UFOs.

On the one hand, serious scientists and intellectuals have little patience for ufology. The fact that I am not at all interested in debunking Frank Shook's claims could well undermine my academic respectability, such as it is. But I feel Frank's ideas are important enough for me to take this risk.

On the other hand, there are many people for whom UFOs are something much too serious to be used in light-spirited intellectual romp such as Saucer Wisdom. For a believer, UFOs can be dark and personal and all too real. And believers are everywhere. The most diverse kinds of people have found themselves drawn into the ongoing worldwide obsession.

There is a level at which UFOs are indeed more than a cultural joke. If nothing else, they represent something important about the human psyche. So before I begin the adventures of Frank Shook, I'd like to insert a brief section containing my opinions about the meaning of UFOs and about the deplorable state of contemporary ufology in general. But if you're eager to get on with the action, you can skip this section.

UFOLOGY

In the 1950s there was a widespread feeling that the saucers were here to bring some kind of solution, perhaps to the then-paramount problem of the cold war. As the great thinker Carl Jung wrote in 1958, "The UFOs ... have become a living myth. We have here a golden opportunity of seeing how a legend is formed, and how in a difficult and dark time for humanity a miraculous tale grows up of an attempted intervention by extraterrestrial 'heavenly' powers ... ."1

For Jung, the circular UFO is a mandala symbol, representing an integration of the individual psyche with the forces of the cosmos. The flying saucer is thus a projection of the human desire for wholeness and unity. This insight of Jung's is simple and deep. The fact is that it makes people feel good to look at images of flying saucers. There is a feeling of safety and completion in these round, hovering entities.

These positive feelings are undoubtedly connected to our very earliest life experiences. Look back to the dawn of your life, back when you were part of--or very nearly part of--your mother. Your mother'sbreast is the very first "round, hovering entity" that you encounter. Your mother is the original whole of which you were a part. The common use of the phrase "mother ship" for large UFOs is no accident.

In a healthy adult, the striving for wholeness is quite different from a return to the womb. Rather than longing to regress to infancy, we try instead to become capable of being parents ourselves. By an outward expansion of knowledge and compassion we become well-rounded, we learn to encompass multitudes, and if we are lucky we become parents or teachers who nurture and foster the young. One might say that in attaining emotional maturity, we become a womb rather than trying to reenter it. But this biological formulation leaves something out.

At the deepest level, our ultimate parent is the universe, or the God that underlies it. In maturing, we strive to become more at one with this pervasive divinity, to grow closer to the great ground of all being. This is a quest that is inherently religious, although "religion" can mean a pure spirituality rather than the adherence to the teachings of any particular human sect. And, as with the womb, the drive is not to annihilate oneself back to zero, but rather to expand one's circle of compassion out towards the infinite. In the words of the philosopher Blaise Pascal, the cosmos is a "sphere whose boundary is nowhere and whose center is everywhere."

In this connection, there was an interesting bit in the very first episode of The X-Files. A poster in Mulder's office shows a picture of a flying saucer. And beneath the picture is the caption: I Want to Believe. If we have a deep need to believe in something whole and integrated, what better symbol than a disk in the sky?

Another aspect of the roundness of the flying saucer is that it corresponds, as Jung remarks, to the shape of a mandala. Mandalas are diagrams that people in every culture spontaneously use to represent the geography of the psyche. It is customary to organize a mandala by placing opposing forces at opposite sides of the circle. The very simplest mandala of all, the yin-yang, pairs up paisley-shaped teardrops that are variously colored black-white or red-blue. The points of the compass form a familiar four-sided or eight-sided mandala. The zodiac, or wheel of the months, makes up a twelve-sided mandala. Contained within the geometry of the mandala are three key principles: The first principle isthat any force has an opposing force. The second principle of the mandala is that any one axis between a force and its opposition can be transcended by looking at some other axis. For example you can move beyond an east-west conflict by thinking about a north-south synthesis. The third teaching of the mandala is that a state of complete balance involves an awareness of all the forces along all the axes. If the celestial saucers are harbingers of wholeness, it makes perfect sense for them to be shaped like mandalas.

Jung noted that the sexual instinct and the drive for power readily tend to obscure the reality of the quest for wholeness. As he puts it:

The most important of the fundamental instincts, the religious instinct for wholeness, plays the least conspicuous part in contemporary consciousness because ... it can free itself only with the greatest effort ... from contamination with the other two instincts. These can constantly appeal to common, everyday facts known to everyone, but the instinct for wholeness requires for its evidence a more highly differentiated consciousness, thoughtfulness, reflection, [and] responsibility ... . The most convenient explanations are invariably sex and the power instinct, and reduction to these two dominants gives rationalists and materialists an ill-concealed satisfaction: they have neatly disposed of an intellectually and morally uncomfortable difficulty ...2

During the 1980s and 1990s, this is exactly what happened to ufology. The notion of wholeness was supplanted by notions of sex and power, and the UFO stories became accordingly unwholesome and paranoid. On the one hand, the mythos was tainted by concepts relating to society's pervasive, icky concern with sexual molestation and the politics of reproduction. And on the other hand, much of the energy of ufologists has been diverted into infantile fears that an all-powerful governmenthas been hiding saucer contacts from us. Just as Jung warned, concepts of sexuality and power have utterly eclipsed the concepts of higher consciousness.

Let me give some quick examples of the role of sex in modern ufology. Although Whitley Strieber's Communion: A True Story is in some ways an interesting book, it prominently features an alien proctoscope. "The next thing I knew I was being shown an enormous and extremely ugly object ... at least a foot long, narrow, and triangular in structure. They inserted this thing into my rectum."3 Sadly enough, this repellent scene seems to have struck a deep cultural resonance. Many more examples of this nature are to be found in the hypnotically evoked case studies described in John Mack's Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994).

What are Mack's abduction scenarios like? Much of a dreary muchness. You're in bed or in a car, usually asleep. You see a light. You float up into the air and into a flying saucer. Inside the saucer a tall alien who reminds you of a doctor probes at your genitals and sticks things up your butt. If you are a man, the "doctor" masturbates you to joyless orgasm, and if you are a woman, the "doctor" extracts eggs from your ovaries. Then you wake up back in your car or in your bed. Is this pathetically infantile scenario really what one might expect superhuman aliens to do? Would godlike beings fly halfway across the galaxy simply to perform what Mack calls "urological-gynecological procedures"?

Modern ufology's obsession with political power is equally inane. Book after book appears about alleged government cover-ups. One of the reasons for the success of the 1996 film Independence Day is that it gave such a satisfyingly vivid depiction of what has become more and more of a core belief: the U.S. government has several intact flying saucers in its possession, as well as some alien corpses and even a few live-alien saucer crew members. Mesmerized at the thought of so vast a political conspiracy, today's ufologists engage in a never-ending discussionof amateurishly forged "top-secret government documents" that supposedly describe high-level contacts with aliens. How sad that in the 1990s a close encounter is likely to be with Xeroxed pseudo-bureaucratic gobbledygook--instead of with a fla...

Edition details

• Publisher: Forge Books
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312868847
• ISBN 13: 9780312868840
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304