I organized a reading as part of Lit Crawl in San Francisco on Saturday, October 18, 2014, from 8:30 to 9:30 at Haus Coffee, on 24th Street near Folsom. Many thanks to Erica of Haus Coffee who helped us settle in.
Our session was called FLURB: Dark Lords of Cyberpunk, and was also listed as session #97: FLURB: Astonishing Misfits. Here’s the official Lit Crawl schedule and map.
The readers were me, Richard Kadrey, and John Shirley. We’re all cyberpunks, and we all published stories in the Flurb webzine that I edited and published through 14 issues a few years back. Samples of our work in Flurb are my “Tangier Routines,”, Kadrey’s “Trembling Blue Stars,” and Shirley’s “Bitters.”
[Photo by Wongoon Cha, whose story “Procrastination” was in Flurb as well.]
I read a San Francisco B-movie-type story called “The Attack of the Giant Ants.”
Richard read “Surfing the Khumbu,” about a cyberpunk woman who brings down satellites with her mind…and gets high off this. You can find this story online in Infinite Matrix.
John read the Flurb story “Bitters” mentioned above—it’s about a guy who eats brains to get high.
Here is a podcast of my reading, about fifteen minutes long. And here’s the Rudy Rucker Podcasts station:
“The Attack of the Giant Ants” is scheduled to appear in print on the webzine Motherboard this month. It was inspired the Blondie song of the same name, and by the vintage movie, Them. Thanks, by the way, to editor Claire Evans for help in bringing the story to a level of full gloss.
Richard Kadrey read a second story as well, a horror tale about a serial killer who’s propitiating an Egyptian god.
John Shirley’s bravura reading / performance was ill, sick, and wondrous.
Many thanks to the enthusiastic listeners who turned out and tuned in. After the readings, they could only formulate one question: “What were you guys like as kids?”
And a closing thanks to the cute and very California-girl Laurie from Lit Crawl who helped coordinate the event.
October 24th, 2014 at 8:25 am
Rudy, great article on Transrealism as a movement in the Guardian. You are prominently mentioned: “It is also, in the thinking of writer, critic and mathematician Rudy Rucker, the first work of a literary movement he would name “transrealism” in his 1983 essay A Transrealist Manifesto. Three decades later, Rucker’s essay has as much relevance to contemporary literature as ever. But while Rucker was writing at a time when science fiction and mainstream literature appeared starkly divided, today the two are increasingly hard to separate. It seems that here in the early 21st century, the literary movement Rucker called for is finally reaching its fruition.”
Damn straight it is. And Rucker is its prophet.
Link in next comment.
October 24th, 2014 at 8:25 am
Here’s the link for the Guardian article about Rudy Rucker and Transrealism.
October 24th, 2014 at 8:50 am
Thanks for flagging the article on transrealism, Steve. As I said in a comment on that piece, it’s very gratifying when, once in a great while, someone understands what I’m talking about.
Re. Transrealism, for anyone new to this discussion, I’d recommend checking out my three novels in “Transreal Trilogy: Secret of Life, White Light, and Saucer Wisdom.“