"Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens."

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More quotes from: Rudy Rucker

• "A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules. "
• "Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's ..."
• "All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more ..."
• "Also, the government wanted me to die in Vietnam and when I weaseled out of ..."
• "At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, ..."
• "At San Jose State I got very interested in the work of Stephen Wolfram, who ..."
• "Broadly speaking, transrealism is writing about your immediate perceptions in a fantastic way. "
• "But a more computationally realistic explanation is simply that my emotional state is the result ..."
• "But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times ..."
• "But in Spaceland I invented the characters from whole cloth. "
• "Clouds, fire, and water are gnarly in the sense of being beautifully intricate, with purposeful-looking ..."
• "Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way. "
• "Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't ..."
• "Gnarliness lies between predictability and randomness. "
• "Gnarly processes often display patterns at several scales. We find them fun to watch because ..."
• "I have a feeling that copying a mind from one host to the next will ..."
• "I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen. "
• "I like to do things that are surprising and different. "
• "I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end. "
• "I think you do a lot better if your book is sitting on the shelf ..."
• "I write a lot in my local coffee shop, the Los Gatos Coffee Roasting, which ..."

• "I'd much rather rot in the ground. What's the big problem with dying anyway? I ..."
• "I'm eternally about one editor away from being unpublishable. "
• "If all else fails, there's always print or web zines. "
• "If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer ..."
• "If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear ..."
• "In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still ..."
• "In my unhumble opinion, you can never really reach any serenity till you fully accept ..."
• "In some of my transreal SF novels I do in fact model the characters on ..."
• "It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable. "
• "It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not ..."
• "Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation. "
• "Many naturally occurring processes are not only gnarly, they're capable of behaving like any other ..."
• "My current strategy for making my books available is just to try and convince publishers ..."
• "Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if ..."
• "One final jab at cryonics. We already have too many people, so why would any ..."
• "One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out ..."
• "People rarely write books that are that far out, so it might be interesting to ..."
• "Personally, I find serenity in accepting that the flow of my thoughts and moods is ..."
• "Physical laws provide, at best, a recipe for how the world might be computed in ..."
• "Physics 101 teaches students to use Newton's laws to predict how far a cannonball will ..."

• "Science fiction is a powerful futurological tool because, in practice, there are no quick shortcuts ..."
• "Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me. "
• "So I've always been somewhat antiauthoritarian. "
• "Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with ..."
• "That's the idea of taking a realistic description of your life, with a character similar ..."
• "The hard fact is that not everyone does get published. "
• "The newer idea in the book that I find truly fascinating is Wolfram's Principle of ..."
• "The weather, plants and animals, your personal thoughts and shifts of mood, society's history and ..."
• "These days I've been working on a fictional thought experiment about using natural systems to ..."
• "Think of a field of daisies: they bloom, they wither, and in the spring they ..."
• "Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts. "
• "Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons. "
• "Well, you know, I've been writing for twenty-five years, and I still have this dream ..."
• "When you're the youngest, you're the baby and you get pushed around, so you grow ..."