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
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.
