On Saturday at 3 pm, I read my recent story “Laser Shades” at Borderlands Books in San Francisco. I appeared with Robert Shults, who recently launched his fascinating photo book, The Superlative Light. See the account of his project in the New York Times.

I taped today’s event. The audience included Jude Feldman of Borderlands, plus my wife Sylvia, my son Rudy, and our granddaughters Jasper and Zimry. To make today’s podcast fun, I taped Jude talking about the history of Borderlands, followed by Robert’s rap about his book of photos of the Texas Petawatt Laster Lab, followed by my story, “Laser Shades,” and then a little more talk about the technology of lasers. With Jasper and Zimry pushing in whenever they could. Kind of a cinema verite podcast, you might say. (57MB, 47 min).

You can play it right here.

Here’s Robert and me at the Rosicrucian World Headquarters in fabulous San Jose, California.

My story was written to fit into Shults’s book. The book contains lovely and sinister photos of the Petawatt Laser Lab in Austin, Texas. And my story is about a guy who uses a superpowerful laser to try and raise his dead wife from the dead.

“Laser Shades,” oil on canvas, February, 2014, 24” x 20”. Click for a larger version of the painting.

While I was working on the story, I wasn’t quite sure about how to end it, and then I made my new painting as a way of previsualizing a big scene. The guy in the painting is wearing special laser-proof shades and he’s (rather unwisely) holding a fetal “egg” in the path of a yottawatt laser beam. A yottawatt is about the power of the Sun. That zapped egg is going to hatch out some kind of weird person, so look out!

I have an older recording of me reading “Laser Shades” online also. Recorded in my home studio.

You can play it right here.

Or go to Rudy Rucker Podcasts.


But don’t just listen at home, come on out and meet me and Robert Shults. Borderlands Books Cafe on 870 Valencia Street in the Mission district of San Francisco, 3 pm Saturday, November 8.

The saucer is waiting for you.

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.

Last week I did a reading at this cool café / laundromat near 7th and Folsom St. in San Francisco. The Brainwash. And here’s a podcast of my reading, which was about twenty minutes long, including some brief Q&A.

I read the ending of the new edition of my Kerouac-style scroll novel, All the Visions. In May I’ll be planning to run a Kickstarter for a Transreal Trilogy + All the Visions project. The trilogy will contain reprints of The Secret of Life, White Light, and Saucer Wisdom.

The event was organized by David Gill, who teaches at San Francisco State, and who runs a small SF magazine called Pravic. He’s shown here playing SF-style boop-whoop music on his computer. He doesn’t always look like this—I asked him to look like a sinister mad scientist, a request to which he responded with a perhaps disconcerting alacrity.

We had a decent crowd, including such luminaries as V. Vale, Marian Wallace, Ted Hand, and Dave Pescovitz.

So now let’s jump back to NYC. This is the foreshortened curtain at the new Woody Allen musical version of Bullets Over Broadway (seen from below). When the curtain came up some flapper-type dancers were in that same pose. Best musical show I’ve ever seen. Great to forget yourself in the laughter of a crowd.

Times Square is so freaking chaotic. Especially when, as I already mentioned, you don’t know which direction is which when you come up from the subway. Times like this, Google Maps on your cellphone isn’t all that helpful—the currents are too strong to let you figure it out, and maybe it’s not a great idea to be blindly waving around your phone in a crowd of a twenty thousand louche strangers. So you bumble along like an molecule in a rushing river.

Huge limos ply the streets.

People hurrying past. Such an anthill. And you’re one with the ants.

Buskers all over the place, good music. Classy Bethany (?) fountain area in Central Park, string quartet, kind of. The walls are, like, Renaissance.

The new World Trade Center tower is almost done. With the antenna it’s supposed to be 1776 fee tall. A fairly simple design, but strong, iconic. Takes awhile to get onto the grounds, like with airport-style searches and all that, although eventually I guess it’ll have to be wide open so people can actually be using the place.

Those big memorial holes are still there, they give me a lump in my throat, unexpectedly. Such a graphic image of death…you flow down in the sparkling waterfall, your life’s course runs in maturity along that calm plat area, and then it’s down into the deep dark hole of death.

We hit Washington Square Park just for old time’s sake. Like this tree. You do get hungry for plants in Manhattan.

Busker with a grand piano at Washington square. Playing good stuff.

I always like looking at Wall Street and Lower Manhattan too. No idea what this structure is, but it looks nice with the people. Kind of a Federico Fellini vibe.

All the way down at Battery Park where you can get the ferries, I saw an easy photo, wharf pilings and a number.

And then back uptown.

I like the buildings reflected in each other. It’s the One World Trade Center again here.

A slanted bottom façade on the building on the left.

And the makeup mirror in our bathroom…

Added March 28, 2014:

So I did my reading and Q&A session at Scribd yesterday. A good, responsive crowd.

I made a podcast of the event. You can click on the icon below to access the podcast via Rudy Rucker Podcasts.

Here’s a zoom of that group shot.

Original post below:

A talk, reading, and Q&A about writing and about The Big Aha , a cyberdelic novel which Rudy funded with a Kickstarter campaign.

“Rudy Rucker’s latest novel, The Big Aha, is pure transreal Ruckeriana featuring extreme biological and quantum technologies, steamy techno-sex, nasty aliens from higher dimensions — and all soaked in the unique atmosphere of the magical 1960s. … This is a great example of how science fiction publishing is being redefined.” — Giulio Prisco, io9

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When? Date: Thursday, March 27. Doors open at 5:30 PM. Event begins at 6. Runs till about 7.

Goodies: Free coffee, tea, wine, non-alcoholic beverages and snacks
Plus free copies of The Big Aha in paperback for the first 30 guests or so. And maybe some other titles as well. Get more info and register to attend via Eventbrite.

“The Big Aha gloriously and objectively exists on an absolute level with all of Rucker’s classic work, chockfull of crazy yet scientifically rigorous ideas embodied in gonzo characters and plots. Like a jazzman, Rucker takes his intellectual obsessions as chords and juggles them into fascinating new patterns each time out…a rollercoaster ride that is never predictable and always entertaining…straight out of some Kerouac or Kesey novel, yet with a twenty-first century affect. Rucker is remarkably attuned to a new generation. Ultimately, all the craziness and whimsy and otherworldly menaces of Zad’s mad odyssey induces true pathos and catharsis in the reader.” — Paul Di Filippo, Locus Online.

Where? At the Scribd space, 539 Bryant St. , Suite 200, near Bryant & Second, near South Park.

What is Scribd? As I understand it, Scribd has always been an ebook-sharing site where pretty much anyone can upload any non-pirated text. Recently they’ve been putting more focus on selling commercial ebooks and, even more than that, they’re starting a subscription service that’s something like the Netflix model. For $8.99 a month you can read any ebook that’s distributed via Scribd.

I’m not sure whether or not Scribd’s business model will take wings and fly, but it’s worth a look. They’re offering passwords for free two-month trials, and they have a bunch of my books on their site right now. And, as I mentioned, Scribd is paying for some of my paperbacks to give out at this event, which is pretty great.

Hope to see you there.

And by the way, I’ll be taking down the fourteen paintings in my Big Aha art show at Borderlands Books on Thursday, Mar 27…the show was extended from March 15. SoI’ll be taking the pictures off the walls a couple of hours before the Scribd talk. Come by Borderlands in person about 3 or 4 PM, and I might make you a deal…with no mailing costs. I’ll have some quality prints with me too.