Rudy Rucker

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Rudy Rucker, 2006

Rudy Rucker (actually Rudolf von Bitter Rucker ; born March 22, 1946 in Louisville , Kentucky ) is an American mathematician , computer scientist , science fiction author and philosopher. His fictional works are counted among the cyberpunk genre. He is considered a co-founder of this literary movement. The first two novels of his Ware-Romantic tale, Software (1980) and Wetware, made him famous and won Philip K. Dick Awards. Rucker is also the author of numerous popular non -fiction books on epistemological topics and co-editor of the science fiction magazine Flurb .

Life

He attended private school in Louisville, then St. Xavier High School, before earning a BA in mathematics from Swarthmore College and a Masters and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Rutgers University. He studied from 1963 to 1967 mathematics at Swarthmore College and from 1967 to 1972 at the Rutgers University and taught as a professor of philosophy of mathematics. He wrote non-fiction books about his field and made a name for himself in the years to come as a science fiction writer of the younger generation.

In 1972 Rucker got his first job at State University College in Geneseo , New York . He published his first non-fiction book Geometry, Relativity and The Fourth Dimension and his first novel Space Donuts . From 1978 to 1980 Rucker was a fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and lived with his family in Heidelberg . There he taught mathematics at the Ruprecht-Karls-University and wrote, among other things, the novel Software during this time .

In 1980 he moved back to the USA. After two years at the small Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Lynchburg , Virginia , he began working full-time as a writer. He wrote six books over the next four years. His best-known novels Software and Wetware won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1983 and 1989 . In 2011 he won the Emperor Norton Award for his autobiography Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker .

From 1986 Rucker started teaching again. Until 2004 he held a professorship in mathematics and computer science at San José State University . His focus was on programming, computer graphics and game programming. In the summer of 2004 he ended his activity and has been a full-time author again since then. In 1999 his literary preoccupation with the painter Pieter Bruegel brought him to painting himself. Since then, over 130 of his own paintings have been created (as of June 2016).

Rucker has been married to a fellow student since 1967 and has three children. He is a great-great-great-grandson of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel .

Works

Non-fiction

  • Geometry And Reality (1973)
  • Geometry, Relativity and the Fourth Dimension (1977)
  • Mystic Fuzz (1977)
  • Infinity and the Mind (1982) - (German The Shores of Infinity , 1989) - ISBN 3-8105-1606-6
  • The Fourth Dimension (1984) - (Eng. The wonder world of the fourth dimension , 1991) - ISBN 3-426-03978-8
  • Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality (1987) - (German: The Ocean of Truth , 1988) - ISBN 3-8105-1605-8
  • Artificial Life Lab (1993)
  • Seek! (1999)
  • As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel (2002)
  • Software Engineering and Computer Games (2003)
  • Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul (2005)
  • Nested Scrolls: The Autobiography of Rudolf von Bitter Rucker (2011) Autobiography

Science fiction

Novels
  • Would
  1. Software (1982) - (German software , Munich 1988) - ISBN 3-453-02759-0
  2. Wetware (1988) - (German Wetware , Munich 1991) - ISBN 3-453-04995-0
  3. Freeware (1997)
  4. Realware (2000)
  • White Light: Or, What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem (1980) - (German Weißes Licht , Basel 1981; reprint with an afterword by Michael Nagula , Munich 1985) - ISBN 3-453-31200-7
  • Spacetime Donuts (1981) - ( Ger.Gödel, Zappa, Rock'n'Roll , 1989) - ISBN 3-596-28713-8
  • The Sex Sphere (1983) - (German Lafcadio and the Sex Ball , Frankfurt 1989) - ISBN 3-596-28704-9
  • Master of Space and Time (1984) - (German Lord of Space and Time , 1989) - ISBN 3-596-10350-9
  • The Secret of Life (1985) - (German light catcher , Frankfurt 1986 and 1988) - ISBN 3-596-27596-2
  • The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia (1990) - (German Hohlwelt , 1997) - ISBN 3-453-12663-7
  • All the Visions: A Novel of the Sixties (1991)
  • The Hacker and the Ants (1994)
  • Saucer Wisdom (1998)
  • Spaceland (2002)
  • Hacker and the Ants, Version 2.0 (2003)
  • Frek and the Elixir (2004)
  • Mathematicians in Love (2006)
  • Postsingular (2007)
  • Hylozoic (2009)
  • Jim and the Flims (2011)
Story collections
  • The 57th Franz Kafka (1982) - (German Mixmischmasch , Frankfurt 1988) - ISBN 3-596-28705-7
  • Transreal! (1991)
  • Gnarl! (2000)
  • The Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker (2006)
as editor

literature

criticism

  • Florian F. Marzin on mastering space and time : "Rudy Rucker, no stranger to science fiction, has once again proven his satirical talent and delivered a freaky novel that is disrespectful to the genre and excesses of the American lifestyle Written loosely, Rucker's chaotic heroes abduct the reader into a fictional world in which everything is possible and the most probable is impossible. "

swell

  1. ↑ Catalog of the paintings on rudyrucker.com (PDF; 1.3 MB)
  2. ↑ Family tree of the von Bitter family on rudyrucker.com (PDF; 5.7 MB)
  3. ↑ Cf. Das Science Fiction Jahr 1992 , ed. by Wolfgang Jeschke , Wilhelm Heyne Verlag Munich, ISBN 3-453-05379-6 , p. 823.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Rucker, Rudy
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rucker, Rudolf von Bitter (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer and computer scientist
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1946
PLACE OF BIRTH Louisville (Kentucky)