Eye-High

James Worrad, author of Eye-High

Is it possible to use the laws of optics for pleasure and profit and perhaps even to conquer the world? James Worrad answers "Yes" in his story Eye-High.

Is it possible to base a world currency on chastity instead of gold? "Why not?" answer Ian Watson and Roberto Quaglia in their story The Invention of Beloved Money.

Some science fiction is mere space opera and other SF--more properly called "speculative fiction"-- expands the boundaries of the human imagination into regions that are risky, risque' and unsettling. The stories collected in Rudy Rucker's latest Flurb webzine (Flurb #13 Spring 2012) fall in this category -- highly imaginative speculative fiction. All killer; no filler.

Approach Flurb #13 with caution. Don't be lulled by Rudy's nice photographs. Some of these authors have really twisted minds. Before you dig into Flurb be sure you know the keystroke that shuts down your browser (Command-W on my machine). You have been warned. Enjoy the trip.

Candy From Strangers

FLURB #12 is here!

Rudy Rucker's shameless "webzine without a net"

FLURB tests the edges--careful!--no guard rails.

After reading Rucker & DiFilippo's Fjaerland

in FLURB12

Nick was hooked.

Inspiring fables for quantum tantrikas.

FLURB #12 is here!

FLURB #8

Uncut SF, tentacle sucking SF, uncensored, unfit for human consumption SF, free dope SF, things that men should not know SF, quantum tantric ultimate pleasure SF, naked SF--the kind men like, big-breasted SF, terrorist SF, fully erect SF, in your face SF, universe disturbing SF, what you've been waiting for all your life SF.

Flourish of trumpets. A new issue of Rudy Rucker's FLURB has arrived.

This stuff is raw meat. Some of it will be quite disturbing even to jaded sophisticates. I was amused by Charlie Anders's nanoengineered masturbation cream (Henry's Penis). I was pleasurably spooked by Rudy Rucker's creepy self-help parasites (Bad Ideas). But nothing frightened me so much as Carter Scholz's Bad Pennies. Science fiction is fun because it's fiction-play, but Scholz's story's too close to Real to be laughed away. Read and enjoy Rudy's imaginative new webzine, but stay away from Bad Pennies.

Apocalypse Wow!

End-of-the World themes never seem to go out of style. In Umberto Eco's wonderful "Name of the Rose", a monastic mystery thriller, the Christian populace is terrified by the approach of the year 1000 AD, when the Devil and his demonic legions are expected to conquer the world, taking possession of human minds and bodies and inflicting unspeakable sufferings, only to be overthrown at the last moment by the Second Coming of Christ. Each age seems to be infected by its own form of inhuman devils that bubble up out of the deep subconscious, implacable enemies of mankind, the same existential nightmare operating under various names: anarchist, communist, muslim, protestant, holocaust denier, jew, terrorist and innumerable varieties of deadly heretics whose powers are so dangerous that extraordinary means must be taken by the authorities to insure their eradication. The usual liberties will be suspended, because we must protect you from Satan. So it goes.

The Second Coming of Christ. Global warming. Communist World Domination. The Great Depression. Asteroid Collision. Nuclear War. Accelerator-produced black holes. A new Black Plague. And on top of the upcoming catastrophes we're served on TV, our science fiction writers have invented hundreds more ways that human life can be destroyed or twisted beyond recognition.

I've come across so many depressing sci-fi end-of-the-world scenarios that reading sci-fi is no longer a way of escaping reality. Bummer.

Until I tried FLURB. FLURB is sci-fi author Rudy Rucker's collection of deviant inventions by his fellow toilers in the fertile field of speculative fiction. Alternative world are us. FLURB #7 is full of disturbing tales that are guaranteed to shake your mooring no matter how firmly you're anchored in ordinary reality. But Rudy's saved the best for last. The prize at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box is a tale by Rucker and John Shirley called "All Hangy".

Sure it's about the end of the world. But it's a kind of End Times I've been looking for all my life. One conceivable quantum tantric end game is what's depicted in "All Hangy". In "All Hangy" the world ends, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with...

Apocalypse Wow.

Fresh New FLURB!

Bizarre and prolific sci-fi author Rudy Rucker has once again released selections from his private collection of weird, barely legal and transgressive assaults on the status quo by himself and his Aegean stable of literary companions. Yes, Friends of the Real, even in today's New Dark Ages of Bush, Cheney and McCain, some fresh new Flurbish Flowers can push their way thru the mind-numbing concrete of Mass Media Hypnosis. FLURB. FLURB. FLURB. It's good for you. Especially noteworthy is Bruce Sterling's " Computer Entertainment Thirty Five Years From Today." Read FLURB or be tossed to the curb. It's that simple.

Flurbmeister Rudy

Some science fiction is just not suitable for public consumption--abnormal, diseased, disturbing, shamelessly flaunting the few taboos that still persist in these permissive times. Not fit for prime time. However there's always a few rabid fans who crave stronger stuff than mainstream SF provides. Waiter, where's my raw meat!

In the late 60s, Harlan Ellison solicited from his fellow SF writers manuscripts that their mainstream editors had rejected as too boundary-breaking, perverted or in bad taste, and collected these quirky works in a book called Dangerous Visions. To everyone's surprise appetite for weirdness had so increased in the 60s that DV became a runaway bestseller and was quickly followed by a sequel Again, Dangerous Visions.

Continuing in the Dangerous Visions tradition, SF bad boy Rudy Rucker along with Peter Lamborn Wilson (of TAZ fame) and Robert Anton Wilson (Illuminatus) collected bizarro manuscripts from their pals and put together a combination called Semiotext(e) SF which contains one of the earliest and most hilarious descriptions of sex in free fall that I've ever read. Later Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Review would publish a similar description of Zero-G sexual acrobatics and the ensuing controversy for a while split the magazine into two versions--one lite, one dark.

But all that flurry happened back in the dimly remembered Lithographic Era before the Internet. SF writers are still producing shocking, obscure and undefinable stories. That's their nature. But where to publish? One answer is Flurb.

Flurb represents Rudy Rucker's new role as a publisher for the too twisted works that he and his friends produce that can't find a comfortable outlet in the mainstream. You want high quality weird? Seek no further. Rudy's standards are so elastic that Flurb even published four of my quantum tantra rants.

Rudy is a multi-talented (I almost said multi-tentacled) writer who is learning to paint and has a splendid eye for photography. Reading his blog I realize that Rucker is also a splendid travel writer and this dude's been everywhere--from Tokyo to Amsterdam to the badlands of South Dakota. Oh yes, and during his wanton youth in Appalachia, Rudy sang in a rock and roll band that had something to do with pigs.

Rudy Rucker's a prolific and terrifically inventive SF writer. Most recent works: Postsingular and Mathematicians in Love. But I'm a real fan of his older stuff, notably his "Ware" trilogy Software, Wetware and Freeware. Rudy has a habit of writing his friends into his novels. Saucer Wisdom for instance features a couple suspiciously resembling me and my wife Betsy in which "I" am abducted by time-traveling saucer beings. No anal probes though. Thanks, Rudy.