Recently I started using some tools to see which pages on my site are most popular “landing pages,” that is, the pages that the most people visit first. So today, for lack of a better topic to blog about, I thought I’d list my top fifteen landing pages and, as usual, stick in some photos—some taken from the pages, and some just random recent images I have.
#1. Complete Stories is my top landing page. It’s a simple site, one big webpage, containing all of my stories from 1974 through 2016, a trove of gnarl and wonder. Every year or so I add the latest ones.
#2. Free Books by Rudy Rucker is always one of my most visited pages. It’s where you can get a range of my pop science, science fiction, and nonfiction books—some as free ebooks, and some as freely readable online webpages. My goals in putting more and more of my work online are…what? Why does there have to be a goal? I just like doing it. I like the idea of being read more widely. And, okay, it gives me a type of informational immortality to have my rants and ruminations be popping up in web search results forever. And, at the more futuristic end, having a buttload of my writing online will make it more feasible for future generations to create convincing software simulacra of me. One of those lifeboxes I’m always talking about. I’m not sure why I should actually care about having a lifebox of me—but I do.
#3. How to make an ebook! People want to know how. I try to make as simple as possible, and it’s getting easier all the time. I revised this page quite a bit in December, 2016, updating it, and adding a link to a section on using InDesign in your ebook workflow.
#4. The Transreal Cyberpunkpage, is for a nine-story antho of my stories I wrote with the august and sinister Bruce Sterling. A popular link off this page is the complete set of audio files for the nine stories, about half read by my and half by Chairman Bruce.
#5. Memories of Kurt Gödel. My account of my 1970s meetings with the king of logicians, one of the most intellectually powerful humans who ever lived. Includes a link to my handwritten notes on the meetings.
#6. Comparing Writing and Painting. It’s hard to write and it’s hard to paint. Or maybe it’s easy. Or maybe one is hard and the other easy. Comparing them is useful when you’re trying to start doing either one of them. Or to keep on doing.
#7. Four Dimensional Portals to Other Worlds. Everyone wants a magic door to a different world. It’s a classic image in both fantasy and SF. And it’s a very useful plot device for a writer.
#8. Excerpts of William Burroughs The Western Lands. The great Master. I was studying him a lot when I was writing my curiously neglected novel Turing & Burroughs. I mean why don’t people want to read about Alan Turing and William Burroughs turning into giant slugs and dangling from Bill’s boyhood bedroom ceiling, twining around each other to have sex? But I digress. I can but follow the Master at a respectful distance.
#9. What is Wetware? Listen to me on this topic, I oughtta know, author of Wetware and ex computer science prof that I am. Features covers of most of the editions of my novel Wetware.
#10. Gary Winogrand, and Shooting with a Wideangle Lens. No idea why this page is so popular. The St. Petersburg bots like it? “Da, Vinogrand.” Well, no, I guess it’s popular because it has some good links relating to street photography. And I got some good shots by putting a Leica wideangle lens onto my Canon SRL. I should do that again. The Leica glass gives the images such a lovely, creamy-smooth quality.
#11. Rule 34 and The Nature of Mind Rule 34 says that no matter what something is, someone has posted porn involving it online. Starting from this factoid from the writings of his serene majesty Charles Stross, I work my way to a full theory of the nature of consciousness.
#12. Micronesia #11: Kayaking Rock Islands of Palau. Universal Automatism. One of a series of posts about an epic dive trip I took to Micronesia with my brother in 2005. Certainly one of the greatest journeys of my life. You can flip forward or back from this particular post for more Micronesia and Palau.
#13. New Zealand Part 3. Ta Moko. Another post from trip journals…this trip to New Zealand, where I got interested in the Maori “ta moko” facial tattoos-and-scarring. We visited a museum with some amazing paintings of ta moko by a guy called Goldie. I got a lot of feedback about this post.
#14. Against Recurrence #3. You are Infinite. Endless Worlds. I got into this issue of whether or not an infinite universe needs to contain every possible variation of Earth. And I did three posts about it. Some good SF ideas in here that I still haven’t exploited.
#15.What Is A Chaldron? A diffuse but rewarding post that discusses a hole in the plot of Jonathan Lethem’s novel Chronic City , and drifts into thoughts on virtual reality. Plus info on various downloadable gnarly graphics programs of mine. Includes great photos of our non-gone world.