Rudy Rucker's classics are now free.

Decius:

I love Rudy Rucker.

Dr. Nanochick:

I dig Rudy Rucker.

Bucy:

Rudy Rucker rules!

Rudy Rucker:

It starts with Software, where rebel robots bring immortality to their human creator by eating his brain. Software won the first Philip K. Dick Award.

In Wetware, the robots decide to start building people -- and people get strung out on an insane new drug called merge. This cyberpunk classic garnered a second Philip K. Dick award.

By Freeware, the robots have evolved into soft plastic slugs called moldies -- and some human "cheeseballs" want to have sex with them. The action redoubles when aliens begin arriving in the form of cosmic rays.

And with Realware, the humans and robots reach a higher plateau.

On the internet:

I just hope the public won't ever be bullied or bamboozled into letting the bosses bottle up the genie. That's something we need to keep an eye on.

On "Infinity and the Mind":

It is in the realm of infinity that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations.

On "Mathematicians in Love":

Rucker cleverly pulls off a romantic comedy about mathematicians in love.

On "Frek":

Like every great science fiction novel, "Frek and the Elixir" is really about the present -- about the power of corporations, about media and entertainment, about bioengineering, about quantum mechanics, about your wife or girlfriend, your next-door neighbor, and your boss, and about you, at age twelve, and now.

On "Spaceland":

Spaceland challenges readers to imagine what life might be like in a world with four spatial dimensions.

The Ware Tetralogy

Tristan Perich:

1-Bit Symphony is an electronic composition in five movements on a single microchip. Though housed in a CD jewel case like his first circuit album (1-Bit Music 2004-05), 1-Bit Symphony is not a recording in the traditional sense; it literally "performs" its music live when turned on. A complete electronic circuit -- programmed by the artist and assembled by hand -- plays the music through a headphone jack mounted into the case itself. The project is set to be released on Cantaloupe Music on August 24, 2010.

David Hajdu:

Guitar Hero and Rock Band involve musicianship in the same sense that chess involves military service. Rocking, like rooking, is the thematic action; but the content is the form, the rules.

Brian Eno:

It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate -- history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber.

1-Bit Symphony

William Gibson has a new book on the way.

When she sang for The Curfew, Hollis Henry's face was known worldwide. She still runs into people who remember the poster. Unfortunately, in the post-crash economy, cult memorabilia doesn't pay the rent, and right now she's a journalist in need of a job. The last person she wants to work for is Hubertus Bigend, twisted genius of global marketing; but there's no way to tell an entity like Bigend that you want nothing more to do with him. That simply brings you more firmly to his attention.

Milgrim is clean, drug-free for the first time in a decade. It took eight months in a clinic in Basel. Fifteen complete changes of his blood. Bigend paid for all that. Milgrim's idiomatic Russian is superb, and he notices things. Meanwhile no one notices Milgrim. That makes him worth every penny, though it cost Bigend more than his cartel-grade custom-armored truck.

The culture of the military has trickled down to the street -- Bigend knows that, and he'll find a way to take a cut. What surprises him though is that someone else seems to be on top of that situation in a way that Bigend associates only with himself. Bigend loves staring into the abyss of the global market; he's just not used to it staring back.

Stanley McChrystal:

You have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. You have to be able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.

Bruce Sterling:

I say, follow your bliss. Follow your bliss into the abyss.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don't notice that noticing is important! Or that they're already doing it. It's much easier to recognize more "outbound" activities like brainstorming, testing, designing, refining. But noticing is just as important -- it's really where everything begins.

"Don't just do something, sit there."

It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

Zero History

Neal Stephenson has a new post-book.

The Mongoliad is a sort of serialized story, created by Neal Stephenson, and written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other great authors. It will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.

Neal Stephenson:

Hey, wait a minute, the hacker tourist says to himself, I thought AT&T was the enemy.

From The Diamond Age:

Hackworth was a forger, Dr. X was a honer. The distinction was at least as old as the digital computer. Forgers created a new technology and then forged on to the next project, having explored only the outlines of its potential. Honers got less respect because they appeared to sit still technologically, playing around with systems that were no longer start, hacking them for all they were worth, getting them to do things the forgers had never envisioned.

David Foster Wallace:

After the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank.

Neal Stephenson:

There's a gap emerging between the kind of thinking that requires long, uninterrupted, serious concentration on something and superficial surfing behaviour.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

The Mongoliad

Cory Doctorow has a new book.

In the virtual future, you must organize to survive.

Mala is a brilliant 15-year-old from rural India whose leadership skills in virtual combat have earned her the title of "General Robotwalla." In Shenzen, heart of China's industrial boom, Matthew is defying his former bosses to build his own successful gold-farming team. Leonard, who calls himself Wei-Dong, lives in Southern California, but spends his nights fighting virtual battles alongside his buddies in Asia, a world away. All of these young people, and more, will become entangled with the mysterious young woman called Big Sister Nor, who will use her experience, her knowledge of history, and her connections with real-world organizers to build them into a movement that can challenge the status quo.

The ruthless forces arrayed against them are willing to use any means to protect their power -- including blackmail, extortion, infiltration, violence, and even murder. To survive, Big Sister's people must out-think the system. This will lead them to devise a plan to crash the economy of every virtual world at once -- a Ponzi scheme combined with a brilliant hack that ends up being the biggest, funnest game of all.

John Seely Brown:

Gaming tends to be regarded as a harmless diversion at best, a vile corruptor of youth at worst. But the usual critiques fail to recognize its potential for experiential learning.

It's learning to be -- a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture -- as opposed to learning about.

For The Win

Financial Times:

Natalie Merchant's seven-year sleep has blossomed into this double album of poems set to music that traverses the whole range of American vernacular, from Bluegrass to Cajun to miniature chamber music, and beyond.

See also Carla Bruni's No Promises, from 2008.

From the deep archive, circa 2003, long before OK Go:

Natalie Merchant has stepped off the pop treadmill.

Natalie Merchant | Leave Your Sleep

David Lynch and Marion Cotillard in Shanghai a la Wong Kar Wai.

From the archive, Lynch:

Ideas are like fish. Originality is just the ideas you caught.

Louis Menand:

Ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. Ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- ideas are social.

Chapter 3 of the Lady Dior saga : Lady Blue Shanghai

Trent Reznor:

Rebecca Brock:

She tells me she's ready. She may be small, she says, but she's mean. She outlines her plans for fending off terrorists. She says, "I kind of hope something happens, you know?"

She wears an American flag pin on the lapel of her blazer. She sits on the jump seat, waiting for her life to change.

How To Destroy Angels

Participants may draw their own portrait of Johnny Cash to be integrated into the collective whole.

As people all over the world contribute, the project will continue to evolve and grow, one frame at a time.

See also:

You and 472 other people have the chance to recreate Star Wars: A New Hope.

Always remember:

There are 260 million people in America, and you are one of them.

The Johnny Cash Project

Aditya Dev Sood:

The lights go brighter for a moment before dimming, the music starts thumping, a thrill ripples through us all, and four models appear on the far end of the catwalk. Your correspondent has never been so aware of the dramatic tension between camera, focal length, object and field. The contemporary, globalizing fashion show, of course, is a media practice, which requires the collaboration and participation of so many players to create this sense of the new, the now, the it, which one can either be with, or else clueless about.

All is expectation while the model is still walking towards you, but nothing prepares you for the odd way in which she walks right on past, going on vogue the cameras, which crackle like crickets in the darkness. Notwithstanding a couple of thousand years since the natyashastra defined abhinaya, the art of communicating emotion through facial expressions, the model is a blank slate and cipher. Perhaps it all makes sense, for the point is the clothes she is wearing, not the character she is playing. If her expression means anything at all it means I have something very important to tell you, but it's slung from my hips.

The lights come on, and just like that, we're done.

Noteworthy:

I have long held the view that when alien space explorers assess Earth (or any planet) to determine its relative level of civilization, they will study fashion.

David Luhnow:

Unlike their rough-hewn parents and uncles, today's young traffickers wear Armani suits, carry BlackBerrys and hit the gym for exercise.

Virginia Postrel:

Political figures as glamorous as Obama are rare. But glamorous policy proposals are not.

The pleasure and inspiration may be real, but glamour always contains an illusion. The image is not entirely false, but it is misleading.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Michelle Gillmartin:

The world is full of things in need of embellishment.

Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy. That there is some way to navigate our political system such that you enact wise legislation solving pressing problems. But that's an increasingly uncertain assumption, I think.

Ellis:

All the time you spend tryin to get back what's been took from you there's more goin out the door. After a while you just try and get a tourniquet on it.

Fashion As A Metaphor