Saucer Wisdom : Book

Search ISBN:0312868839 offer from Abebooks or used books from Alibris. Saucer Wisdom Reference Book. Classifications : Futurology Technology Science Subjects Books Social Aspects Technology Science Subjects Books General Science Subjects Books General AAS Science Subjects Books Paperback Mass Market Trade Binding (bin . Click the following link to view the cover of Saucer Wisdom.

1) Paperback Book Saucer Wisdom by Tor Books. Saucer Wisdom is Rudy Rucker´s "nonfiction" book describing the travels of a man he meets after one of his lectures who has been in contact with aliens. Rucker asks the man, Frank Shook, to ask various questions of the aliens--about the future of communications, bioengineering, travel, the nature of time, and transhumanity. The book amounts to a future history of the world according to Rudy Rucker, the elements of which are familiar to anyone who has read Rucker´s other books (in particular the Software/Wetware/Freeware/Realware series, and especially the last two).

The "nonfiction" narrative structure makes for a more entertaining book than this would otherwise be--while the future developments Rucker envisions are interesting, without the story it would be more like a series of encyclopedia entries.

The conceit within the book of this book being popular thousands of years in the future is pretty ridiculous--this is not one of Rucker´s better works.¤

2) Paperback Book Saucer Wisdom by Tor Books. This book is not about flying saucers. The flying saucer plot is just the narrative device used by Rucker to allow him to dump from his brain a collection of very imaginative ideas about what technological advances we may make over the next few thousand years. Some of the ideas are actually really clever and interesting... and then, a bit too often, they get really silly and much less believable. But, that is where you have to realize that the book is not to be taken so seriously. If you can do that, you should enjoy the book all the way thru... it´s a quick read.

I wouldn´t recommend this for hard-core sci-fi folk, but rather for the casual sci-fi reader who is looking for something off the wall, and also maybe for someone looking to kick-start their imagination.¤

3) Paperback Book Saucer Wisdom by Tor Books. ____________________________________

Just finished this "speculative nonfiction" book by one of my
favorite SF writers. Eh. It´s structured "as told by" a UFO abductee
(nudge, wink), or as B. Sterling writes in the intro: "This book is not
the puerile ravings of a UFO-stricken madman, but a *firmly
controlled, intelligent* hallucination...."

Umm. The ideas are mostly recycled from Rucker´s fiction (where I
much preferrred them), and told in the kind of fake-future dialog
that I´ve always *loathed* in pop-sci books. Admittedly, RR´s
novelistic talent shines through at times, but it´s a pretty clunky
book overall.

The morning after finishing "Saucer Wisdom", the Nov 99 Analog
arrived, and Tom Easton notes, in a generally favorable review, that he prefers RR´s
pop-sci books to his fiction. Although I agree with Easton´s reviews
more often than not, I think just the opposite here; I tried another Rucker pop-sci AWB, and
put it down after a few chapters.

So who knows? Maybe you´ll like it, maybe you won´t. Eh.

YMMV -- Pete Tillman¤

4) Paperback Book Saucer Wisdom by Tor Books. Well, the flying saucer is not a real saucer, but a device used by Rudy Rucker to allow us to see the future through the eyes of a character, Frank Shook, who travels through time with the aliens. We learn about how things will change, or how Rudy THINKS things will change, in the future. He writes about transhumanity, alien races, faster-than-light space travel, time travel, cloning, future forms of communication, energy sources, farming, organic houses, hardware, software and even wetware. All of it becomes, like much of what we discover, a cause and effect series of events, as one idea brings about another. Not as serious as Wells´ ´A Story of The Days to Come´ or as detailed as Stapledon´s ´Last And First Men´ it IS funny, interesting and will make you think.¤

5) Paperback Book Saucer Wisdom by Tor Books. Rudy Rucker has been contructing a future in his Software-Wetware-Freeware-Realware series of novels, as well as the closely-related future of "The Hacker & The Ants," so it should come as little surprise that the future presented here is one-and-the same.

What IS surprising is how lamely it is all presented. The basic premise is that a saucer abductee named Frank Shook tells Rudy the future as it was revealed to him by aliens, but I guess Rudy wasn´t counting on any of his previous readers getting ahold of this book, because this future is all-too familiar to us. By presenting his various ideas for future biotech advances in short vignettes "as told to Frank Shook" Rudy saves himself the trouble of crafting a coherent plotline to contain them. In fact, one of the entries in Rudy´s "Seek!" collection of non-fiction was a "Tech Notes toward a Cyberpunk Novel," a sort-of shorthand collection of cool ideas he´d like to incorporate into some future novel.

"Saucer Wisdom" reads like an expansion of "Tech Notes" -- lots of jumbled ideas (some quite cool, others not) but nothing yet written to place them into the context of a story. This is not really a novel, not really a book of predictions (like Ray Kurzweil´s "The Spiritual Machine"), but more of a notepad of ideas which Rudy has toyed with over the past decade.

The book could have had fun with the self-referential aspect of it, but instead took a tone I found a little annoying -- saying several times that this exact book, "Saucer Wisdom," was to become so influential that it actually creates the future it describes and remains intensely popular into the 40th Century.

Brace yourself when you open this book, for it purports to be the about the visions of neat biotechnologies one Frank Shook brings back from future times where he has been taken to by flying saucers, and gives to the writer, Rudy Rucker, who´s telling the story. That´s an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing.

Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional ´Frank Shook´) has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a narrative device.

"I´m going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant anemones.

"Pop-science writers didn´t used to treat ´science´ in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which ´science´ is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant."

Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same.

7) Paperback Book Saucer Wisdom by Tor Books. Are there aliens watching you right now? After reading Rudy Rucker´s Saucer Wisdom, you´ll wonder. Rucker´s "nonfiction novel" follows the author as he works with a saucer contactee who has bales of information about the future and expects him to make a book out of it. Written straight, it presents the author´s vision of future technology as though benevolent aliens were filling him in, though some of the details seem suspiciously similar to his novels. It´s brilliantly funny, prescient, and as fully engaging as a coffee-fueled late-night conversation with a slightly manic genius. From the aloof-yet-naughty aliens (they refuse to show his contactee friend the future of artificial intelligence because it´s "boring") to the detailed, personalized visions of future people´s technology, Saucer Wisdom shines with a humanity firmly rooted right here on Earth.

Rucker´s style is perfect for this material, and his imagination soars. What if aliens travel through complex interstellar radio signals and are attracted to chaos? What if we develop telepathy transmitted over television? What if we perfect genetic engineering? It wouldn´t occur to other futurists to suggest a half-dozen pet compsognathii in the backyard of the future, but Rucker goes a step further and literally draws a picture. The 57 illustrations--attributed to Frank the contactee--highlight the text like James Thurber on acid. Saucer Wisdom could have been as boring as most other future histories, but it seems that "the William S. Burroughs of cyberpunk" can´t help but write good books. Lucky for us. --Rob Lightner¤

Page Updated: Robert N. Goolsby, 2-Dec-2008, 03128688399780312868833, 390-730-190-321-8X1-011-8

Saucer Wisdom

Author - Rudy Rucker ... [Goo?] [Posters]

Search: Tor Books, Book Posters, Book Art