From archive (archive) Subject: MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME by Rudy Rucker From: ecl@mtgzy.UUCP Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ Date: 16 Jun 86 03:14:08 GMT MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME by Rudy Rucker Baen, 1985, $2.95. A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper In some ways this book is not unlike Philip K. Dick's EYE IN THE SKY. That is, it is the story of what happens when someone can control reality. (I suppose it's also reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin's LATHE OF HEAVEN in that regard.) Rucker, a mathematician by profession, uses quantum physics to explain how Harry Gerber can become the "master of space and time," molding reality to suit his fancy. (Let's face it, if you lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey, like Harry Gerber does, you'd want to change reality too!) For very complicated reasons, Gerber can only effect three changes (the three wishes of old). The book is interesting enough while you're reading it, but I found it quite forgettable as soon as I finished it. I've read a lot of great reviews of Rucker's work, so maybe this is one of his weaker works. Evelyn C. Leeper ...ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl (or ihnp4!mtgzz!ecl) From archive (archive) Subject: MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME by Rudy Rucker From: ecl@mtgzy.UUCP Organization: AT&T Information Systems Labs, Holmdel NJ Date: 16 Jun 86 06:14:08 SDT MASTER OF SPACE AND TIME by Rudy Rucker Baen, 1985, $2.95. A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper In some ways this book is not unlike Philip K. Dick's EYE IN THE SKY. That is, it is the story of what happens when someone can control reality. (I suppose it's also reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin's LATHE OF HEAVEN in that regard.) Rucker, a mathematician by profession, uses quantum physics to explain how Harry Gerber can become the "master of space and time," molding reality to suit his fancy. (Let's face it, if you lived in New Brunswick, New Jersey, like Harry Gerber does, you'd want to change reality too!) For very complicated reasons, Gerber can only effect three changes (the three wishes of old). The book is interesting enough while you're reading it, but I found it quite forgettable as soon as I finished it. I've read a lot of great reviews of Rucker's work, so maybe this is one of his weaker works. Evelyn C. Leeper ...ihnp4!mtgzy!ecl (or ihnp4!mtgzz!ecl) From archive (archive) Subject: MATHENAUTS From: obnoxio@BRAHMS.BERKELEY.EDU (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) Organization: Brahms Gang Posting Central Date: 30 Jul 87 15:59:08 GMT Here's another attempt at a review on my part. But be warned, I don't know beans about how-to-review. Spoilers, if any, will be utterly minimal. Also be warned that my views are strongly colored by the fact that I am a mathematician, and am not impressed by stories that merely translate a mathematical notion into words somehow. As a final caveat, I had read the book when it first came out a month or two ago, and only just recently got my copy back. MATHENAUTS: Tales of Mathematical Wonder edited by Rudy Rucker Published in the US by Arbor House $9.95 trade paperback I suppose I'd rate it [***-] on Chuq's scale. The cover is lovely. I'd have preferred something by Fomenko or Varo my- self, but it's no big deal. This book claims to be the first anthology of mathematical fiction since Clifton Fadiman's two famous florilegia. That's probably correct, and in particular the book can't help be compared to them. First off, Rucker's introduction is pathetic. No wonderful descriptions of mathematics or mathematicians like Fadiman had. Sentences like "The great thing about mathematical science fiction is that it gives the reader the weirdness of math without the work." or "I'd like to sit those scof- fers down and make them read [...,] not so much because they would love the story, but rather because it would *confirm their worst suspicions*." make me want to throw up. Not even Asimov in the best of 19xx anthologies' introductions causes me to think "ghetto". Part of what contributes to this feeling, beyond the quoted efforts on Rucker's part, was his inability to find >anything< outside of the mainstream of industrial strength science fiction, in losing contrast to Fadiman's "here's a bunch of stories that I liked, and so will you!". Not even one stupid limerick! Fadiman found fantastic mathematical items from Plato, Houseman, Leacock, Beckett, Que- neau, etc. Has Rucker read--or known anyone who has read--a scrap even of Kafka, Borges, Calvino, Stoppard, T S Eliot, etc? It's a rhetorical question, yes, but a loud and enthusiastic "HECK NO" answer wouldn't sur- prise me. He ends his introduction verbally pullulating over possibili- ties yet to come--if Rucker's so bloody impatient, he could go to a lib- rary instead of being such a narrow-minded whinger. Feh. To top it off, the introduction contains, would you believe, a fatal spoiler for Larry Niven's famous story "Convergent Series". If you are the type who has to read the introduction early and somehow have never ever read this Niven story--read the introduction *second*. Gack. On to the stories. Isaac Asimov "1 to 999": a Griswold story--see his _The Union Club Mys- teries_ for more. For this anthology, it's a complete throwaway. Norman Kagan "Four Brands of Impossible": the weirdness can't hide the conventional plot. I don't know if I like the story or not. Greg Bear "Tangents": an '80s reworking of "The Captured Cross-Section", mixed in with somebody's well-known personal tragedy. It won the Nebula award, yes, but with competition like the first Asimov Susan Calvin story in XXX years, what's the point? The story was perfect on its own--it just suffered from being too familiar. Rudy Rucker "A New Golden Age": what a surprise! I liked this story. Af- ter his hatchet job of an introduction, and my worthless attempts to read _White Light_, I did not expect much from RR. Then again, his popular- izations are actually quite good. (I wish authors would make up their minds as to whether to be good or bad once and for all!) Ruth Berman "Professor and Colonel": a throwaway of a sketch. Anatoly Dnieprov "The Maxwell Equations": an excellent, "different" story; it's Russian science fiction mixed with horror from the early '60s. Martin Gardner "Left or Right?": this is the "Esquire" story mentioned in _The Ambidextrous Universe_. It's a shame that MG is embarrassed by the fact that it's "out of date" scientifically, and, like _The Island of Five Colors_, deliberately left it out of his own recent fiction anthology. Sigh. It's one classic of a '50s story. Ian Watson "Immune Dreams": it's in the anthology because the author phrased his pseudoscience in terms of catastrophe theory. Whooptie-doo. Not a bad story, actually, but I couldn't help comparing it, to its disadvantage, with Norman Spinrad's "Carcinoma Angels". Kathryn Cramer "Forbidden Knowledge": experimental weirdness. It's whole point, I believe, centers on a famous (to a mathematician, natch) passage from Irving Kaplansky's classic _Fields and Rings_ that probably sounds multiply bizarre if you don't know any mathematics. (KC got the quotation ever so slightly incorrect!) The word games were rather obvious from the beginning to me, as was the Kaplansky connection, and overall, I thought the story was a waste. I know of exactly one fellow math grad student who liked it. George Zebrowski "Goedel's Doom": standard science fictional nonsense about Goedel's theorem. Delightful popcorn. Douglas Hofstadter "The Tale of Happiton": reprinted from _Metamagical Themas_. This is a prime example of how not to write social/political satire: it's fictional content is too thin. It probably was appropriate within its original context as a parable. Separated off, it's a loser of a story. Don Sakers "The Finagle Fiasco": a good, silly story about Murphy's law. Larry Niven "Convergent Series": one of the few stories where the math- ematics is a relevant a part of the story. Not only is it perhaps the greatest pact-with-the-devil story ever written, it is one of the best short shorts period. But you all know that, right? Martin Gardner "No-Sided Professor": another MG classic with relevant usage of mathematics. And another bad reflection on the anthology--too many of the few good stories are already familiar from Fadiman. William F Orr "Euclid Alone": an OK story. In my copy, the picture of an Alexander horned sphere came out unimpressively. I recommend tracking one down in Hocking&Young _Topology_, the source mentioned in the story, or better yet, the frontpiece in Rolfsen _Knots&Links_. The intellectual debates are on level with the net. (If you don't recognize the title allusion, you'll find it in the table of contents of one of the Fadiman books.) Marc Laidlaw "Love Comes to the Middleman": both a delightful conceit and story: a universe with a doubly infinite scaling. (ML also wrote "Nutri- mancer", by the by.) Robert Sheckley "Miss Mouse and the Fourth Dimension": oh wow wow what a delightful story! A genuinely successful cross between the fourth dimen- sion and the occult. Any other story I've read along those lines made me wince. So why didn't anyone think of this idea before? Amazing. Isaac Asimov "The Feeling of Power": the famous story about the rediscov- ery of arithmetic. You probably read it in Fadiman and a billyun other places. Sigh. Henry H Gross "Cubeworld": an utterly preposterous bit of zaniness. A defi- nite not-to-be-miss of a story. Frederik Pohl "Schematic Man": a throwaway plot and story--take it or leave it. Gregory Benford "Time's Rub": what a sad waste of fiction. The whole point was to work Newcomb's paradox into a story. There was nothing else, really. If you haven't seen the paradox before, the story might seem profound. To me, it's a nothing story with a loud look-at-me! gimmick. Rudy Rucker "Message Found in a Copy of *Flatland*": again RR surprised me. A delightful story. Norman Kagan "The Mathenauts": his famous story. Just silliness, really, with a million in-jokes that only a mathematician could get. NK took tea jokes seriously and wrote them all down. I suppose if one didn't know any better one might find the story profound--I honestly can't tell at all--but really, having a character shout "Holy Halmos" is on par with Robin from the TV Batman. I first read it in a Judith Merril(sp?) anthology for best of 1965, where it contained a special glossary for the funny gibber--and again NK was joshing away. (And if you don't know what pataphysics is-- sigh, what's the point of saying the obvious yet again.) Coincidentally let me mention that the August '87 issue of IASFM (the one with "Nutrimancer"!) contained *two* excellent stories about mathematicians, as if to mock RR's weak anthologizing efforts: Lisa Goldstein "Cassandra's Photographs": a fine story about you-know-who and hence you-know-what. My only complaint with the story *is* the casting of the main character as a mathematician. It was done, as far as I can see, because of some retarded stereotype that mathematicians, by their very nature, lead rigid, patterned, controlled lives. If I were Tim Maroney, I'd start drooling pathetically contra this point at this point, but I'll skip it. (Actually, the main character is a statistician. Whatever.) Kim Stanley Robinson "The Blind Geometer": hardly science fiction actually, just a near future mystery/thriller. It's plot is routine and disposable, but that hardly matters. The perspective gained from the first person blind protagonist is intense. In particular, the working out of his geometrical cum haptic perspective of the world, and how it carries the narrator along through the plot, is remarkable, and remarkably well handled. ucbvax!brahms!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 A man does not walk down the street giving a haughty twirl to his moustaches at the thought of his superiority to some variety of deep-sea fishes. --G K Chesterton From rec.arts.sf.reviews Tue Jul 26 13:11:07 1994 Xref: liuida rec.arts.sf.reviews:623 rec.arts.books:93693 alt.books.reviews:4161 Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.books,alt.books.reviews Path: liuida!sunic!pipex!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!magnus.acs.ohio-state.edu!csn!csus.edu!netcom.com!postmodern.com!not-for-mail From: ecl@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com (Evelyn C Leeper) Subject: THE HACKER AND THE ANTS by Rudy Rucker Message-ID: <9407181326.ZM6720@mtgpfs1.mt.att.com> Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Sender: mcb@postmodern.com (Michael C. Berch) Organization: The Internet Date: Mon, 25 Jul 1994 23:29:21 GMT Approved: mcb@postmodern.com (rec.arts.sf.reviews moderator) Lines: 52 THE HACKER AND THE ANTS by Rudy Rucker AvoNova, ISBN 0-688-13116-5, May 1994, 320pp, US$20. A book review by Evelyn C. Leeper Copyright 1994 Evelyn C. Leeper A few years ago (well, quite a few, actually), Theodore Roszak wrote a novel called BUGS, about how "bugs" in computers became real bugs. Roszak has gone on to better things (FLICKER, for example), but the idea refuses to die and now Rudy Rucker has written a novel about ants created within cyberspace which achieve an existence in the real world. It's true that Rucker comes up with a better explanation as to how this all happens. But I had two problems with THE HACKER AND THE ANTS, which were in some sense the same problem: Rucker explains too much.I work with computers in my job (no, reviewing books is NOT my paying job) and reading things like "they've established an Ethernet pseudonode with your address" and "his idea was to compile a virtual ant server, tar the binary with a bunch of self-reproducing ant programs, and compress the whole viral mess into a self-extracting program that fits inside a user's boot script" is too much like work. (Not to mention that pinning it down to present-day concepts such as "Ethernet" and "tar" make it all sound anachronistic for the future, like having a character fifty years in the future driving a Honda Civic). The other problem connected with explaining too much is that the reader (this reader, anyway) is not immersed in the world of the novel. One of the strengths of cyberpunk would appear to be in its acceptance of technology as simply "being," without the need for what is called "technobabble" when STAR TREK does it. The constant explanations here kept jerking me out of the world of the novel into the world of the writer of the novel. I admit that Rucker is an author who may be an acquired taste. I have liked some of his work, but THE HACKER AND THE ANTS just didn't do anything for me. %A Rucker, Rudy %T The Hacker and the Ants %I AvoNova %C New York %D May 1994 %G ISBN 0-688-13116-5 %P 320pp %O hardback, US$20.00 -- Evelyn C. Leeper | +1 908 957 2070 | Evelyn.Leeper@att.com "Am I politically correct today? Do I do crystals and New Age? Obviously, women's music's for me--Edith Piaf, Bessie Smith, and Patti Page." --Lynn Lavner Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.kth.se!sunic!uunet!gatech!rutgers!mukluk.decus.ca!roberts From: roberts@mukluk.decus.ca ("Rob Slade, Social Convener to the Net") Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written Subject: "Live Robots" by Rucker Date: 19 Jan 1995 14:40:31 -0500 Lines: 46 Sender: daemon@rutgers.rutgers.edu Message-ID: <0098AB30.FBEFDB00.10147@mukluk.decus.ca> NNTP-Posting-Host: rutgers.edu BKLIVRBT.RVW 941223 "Live Robots", Rucker, 1994, 0-380-77543-3, U$5.99/C$6.99 %A Rudy Rucker %C 1350 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019 %D 1994 %G 0-380-77543-3 %I Avon Books/The Hearst Corporation %O U$5.99/C$6.99 %P 357 %T "Live Robots" This is a double volume, originally published as "Software" (1982) and "Wetware" (1988). The basic premise is the tension between "thinking" robots (called "boppers" or "bops") and humanity. Two items are of interest. The first is the development of machine intelligence, which we see only in retrospect. The growth of artificial cognition is promoted by a type of genetic programming. The original programmer builds "immutable" instructions into the robots to submit their software to some minor random variation every ten months. The robots are also to build replicas of themselves during the ten-month period, although these seem to be primarily for replacement purposes, rather than reproduction. The concept of "immutable" code is interesting here, since it would be subject to the same variation as all the other programming. As well, the ten-month "generations", and the few dozen initial robots, would result in a very slow evolution. The concepts, though, are quite sound, and very similar to "real" genetic programming. The other point of interest is raised in the last few pages of the latter book. A computer virus is let loose in order to foul up the network of the authorities for a few hours. (The virus is let loose from a graphic, but ...) The point is correctly made that once the existence of a network virus is known, effective defences take only hours to build. (In this case, that is all that is necessary.) A very good understanding of the concepts, for such an early (1988) work. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1994 BKLIVRBT.RVW 941223 ============= Vancouver p1@arkham.wimsey.bc.ca | "If a train station Institute for Robert_Slade@sfu.ca | is where a train Research into rslade@cue.bc.ca | stops, what happens User p1@CyberStore.ca | at a workstation?" Security Canada V7K 2G6 | Frederick Wheeler Path: news.ifm.liu.se!news.lth.se!feed2.news.luth.se!luth.se!news-peer-europe.sprintlink.net!news.sprintlink.net!howland.erols.net!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!usenet From: tillman@aztec.asu.edu (P.D. TILLMAN) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews,rec.arts.sf.science,sci.misc Subject: Review: Rudy Rucker's "Saucer Wisdom" Followup-To: rec.arts.sf.written Date: 11 Oct 1999 22:41:21 -0400 Organization: none Lines: 34 Sender: wex@deepspace.media.mit.edu Approved: wex@media.mit.edu Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: deepspace.media.mit.edu X-Newsreader: Gnus v5.5/Emacs 20.3 Xref: news.ifm.liu.se rec.arts.sf.reviews:2472 rec.arts.sf.science:98241 sci.misc:43422 Rudy Rucker's "Saucer Wisdom", or YMMV Review Copyright 1999 Pete Tillman Just finished this "speculative nonfiction" book by one of my favorite SF writers. Eh. It's structured "as told by" a UFO abductee (nudge, wink), or as B. Sterling writes in the intro: "This book is not the puerile ravings of a UFO-stricken madman, but a *firmly controlled, intelligent* hallucination...." Umm. The ideas are mostly recycled from Rucker's fiction (where I much preferrred them), and told in the kind of fake-future dialog that I've always *loathed* in pop-sci books. Admittedly, RR's novelistic talent shines through at times, but it's a pretty clunky book overall. The morning after finishing "Saucer Wisdom", the Nov 99 Analog arrived, and here's Tom Easton's review: < http://www.analogsf.com > -- should be up RSN (9/20/99) where he notes, in a generally favorable review, that he prefers RR's pop-sci books to his fiction. Although I agree with Easton's reviews more often than not, I think just the opposite here (see URL below for some Rucker reviews); I tried another Rucker pop-sci AWB, and put it down after a few chapters. So who knows? Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. Eh. %T Saucer Wisdom %A Rudy Rucker %D 7/99 %I Forge %O US$24 %P 287pp %O ISBN 0-312-86884-7 Pete Tillman 9/20/99 Book Reviews: http://www.silcom.com/~manatee/reviewer.html#tillman