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 "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 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.At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.
Are there aliens watching you right now? After reading Rudy Rucker's
Saucer Wisdom, you'll wonder. Rucker's "nonfiction novel" follows the author as he works with a saucer contactee who has bales of information about the future and expects him to make a book out of it. Written straight, it presents the author's vision of future technology as though benevolent aliens were filling him in, though some of the details seem suspiciously similar to his novels. It's brilliantly funny, prescient, and as fully engaging as a coffee-fueled late-night conversation with a slightly manic genius. From the aloof-yet-naughty aliens (they refuse to show his contactee friend the future of artificial intelligence because it's "boring") to the detailed, personalized visions of future people's technology,
Saucer Wisdom shines with a humanity firmly rooted right here on Earth.
Rucker's style is perfect for this material, and his imagination soars. What if aliens travel through complex interstellar radio signals and are attracted to chaos? What if we develop telepathy transmitted over television? What if we perfect genetic engineering? It wouldn't occur to other futurists to suggest a half-dozen pet compsognathii in the backyard of the future, but Rucker goes a step further and literally draws a picture. The 57 illustrations--attributed to Frank the contactee--highlight the text like James Thurber on acid. Saucer Wisdom could have been as boring as most other future histories, but it seems that "the William S. Burroughs of cyberpunk" can't help but write good books. Lucky for us. --Rob Lightner
