- Paperback: 288 pages
- ISBN-10: 0671028618
- ISBN-13: 978-0671028619
- Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon.com
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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
From Publishers Weekly
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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
I've always liked the idea of flying saucers. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
I've always liked the idea of flying saucers. Read the first page
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Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't?,
By
This review is from: Saucer Wisdom (Paperback)
____________________________________Just finished this "speculative nonfiction" book by one of my Umm. The ideas are mostly recycled from Rucker's fiction (where I The morning after finishing "Saucer Wisdom", the Nov 99 Analog So who knows? Maybe you'll like it, maybe you won't. Eh.
4.0 out of 5 stars
The future through the eyes of a flying saucer...,
By Michael Valdivielso (Alexandria, VA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Saucer Wisdom (Paperback)
Well, the flying saucer is not a real saucer, but a device used by Rudy Rucker to allow us to see the future through the eyes of a character, Frank Shook, who travels through time with the aliens. We learn about how things will change, or how Rudy THINKS things will change, in the future. He writes about transhumanity, alien races, faster-than-light space travel, time travel, cloning, future forms of communication, energy sources, farming, organic houses, hardware, software and even wetware. All of it becomes, like much of what we discover, a cause and effect series of events, as one idea brings about another. Not as serious as Wells' 'A Story of The Days to Come' or as detailed as Stapledon's 'Last And First Men' it IS funny, interesting and will make you think.
2.0 out of 5 stars
The World According to Rudy,
By
This review is from: Saucer Wisdom (Paperback)
Rudy Rucker has been contructing a future in his Software-Wetware-Freeware-Realware series of novels, as well as the closely-related future of "The Hacker & The Ants," so it should come as little surprise that the future presented here is one-and-the same.What IS surprising is how lamely it is all presented. The basic premise is that a saucer abductee named Frank Shook tells Rudy the future as it was revealed to him by aliens, but I guess Rudy wasn't counting on any of his previous readers getting ahold of this book, because this future is all-too familiar to us. By presenting his various ideas for future biotech advances in short vignettes "as told to Frank Shook" Rudy saves himself the trouble of crafting a coherent plotline to contain them. In fact, one of the entries in Rudy's "Seek!" collection of non-fiction was a "Tech Notes toward a Cyberpunk Novel," a sort-of shorthand collection of cool ideas he'd like to incorporate into some future novel. "Saucer Wisdom" reads like an expansion of "Tech Notes" -- lots of jumbled ideas (some quite cool, others not) but nothing yet written to place them into the context of a story. This is not really a novel, not really a book of predictions (like Ray Kurzweil's "The Spiritual Machine"), but more of a notepad of ideas which Rudy has toyed with over the past decade. The book could have had fun with the self-referential aspect of it, but instead took a tone I found a little annoying -- saying several times that this exact book, "Saucer Wisdom," was to become so influential that it actually creates the future it describes and remains intensely popular into the 40th Century. He wishes.
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