Saucer Wisdom [Paperback]

Rudy Rucker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 13, 2001

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A potpourri of futuristic predictions presented in the form of an imaginary UFO abductee's confessional, Rucker's light-spirited cosmic romp promises more than it delivers. A mathematician, computer scientist, novelist and pop science writer (The Fourth Dimension), Rucker uses a purely fictive conceit: his friend Frank Shook, a tinkerer for a toy company in California, is abducted by friendly aliens who time-travel into the past and future. Through this device, in a dizzying narrative that reads like a science fiction novel, Rucker conjures a future where "soft machines" made of programmable plastic include video clothes, gizmos for telepathic communication andAin place of TV setsAUV (universal viewer) sets capable of tuning into millions of channels, creating an endless interplanetary party with everyone hooked in. People live in giant gourds, clone themselves and use Biobots (DNA-based robots) as daily helpers (e.g., giving massages). The aliens, who shape-shift into big starfish or gnomelike flesh-globs, take Frank aboard their UFO to demonstrate femtotechnology, a method of manipulating atoms to manufacture almost anything out of thin air. Frank experiences two years of missing time and winds up in South Dakota near Devil's Tower, the butte featured in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind. He gets a preview of the year 4004, when humans can teleport, travel on the astral plane and meld into the divine ground of reality. Illustrated with 57 of the fictional abductee's cartoonish or conceptualist drawings, this speculative space odyssey will try the patience of some readers, while others may groove to a mind-expanding leap into the future. (July)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; 1st edition (July 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312868839
• ISBN-13: 978-0312868833
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,886,243 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Ideas are a quantum leap better than the literary value, September 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Saucer Wisdom (Hardcover)

As Bruce Sterling says in the forward of this book, the saucer/alien plot and motifs are merely a literary device to help serve up some wildly fascinating conjectures about the future of human technology and development.

As a lover of good science fiction and futurology I usually keep up on the current subjects but this book really put forward some exotic ideas on what it is to be human and whether technology is a friend or foe to our spiritual development. I was pleasantly surprised at one of the theses in this book that, properly used and properly seen, technology is not our foe but is merely one of the means to bring humankind to a higher plane of awareness. There are so many people who spend all their lives accumulating things as if those things are ends in and of themselves. But these people miss the point. If they put their hearts to gaining the right kinds of material things they would see the higher transformative power of those things. In other words, let's say, a car can either be just another toy to help you be a chick magnet or that car can actually be a material thing to convey you on a spiritual journey. These are the ideas that Frank Shook brings back to Rudy (at least some of the underlying messages that were important to me).

Also the musings on our anthropomorphic desires versus the vast possibility of other alien desires in the universe was amusing.

I'm sure people will have many, many other thoughts.

Unfortunately, for me, I have this pretentious need for a book to have a literary execution that's equal to the ideas being presented and "Saucer Wisdom" was a little too lightweight. It felt more like a "snack" book than a main course. It felt too much like easy feel-good physics on the same level as "The Dancing Wu-Li Masters." Real physics is weighted down by those pesky little calculations that indicate some physical process is doable in the universe we live in.

So, in short, some interesting mental gymnastics but the plot felt too cobbled together.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Saucer Wisdom = Spectacular Vista, September 7, 1999

By 

Mitchel A. Haegel "spudboy100" (Dayton, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saucer Wisdom (Hardcover)

Professor Rucker does it again with his Fantasy-Reality, Saucer Wisdom. Using the UFO cultural phenomina as a foot stool, Dr. Rucker uses his immagination and the fantastic speculations that are now a part of modern science anmd math to illuminate a way forward. Rudy Rucker's character's leads us into the deep future, as well as understanding what aliens might be, what is identity, how human civilization may progress, and, perhaps how to view the Big Bang as an something that has personal meaning to all thinking beings. Not bad for a work of fiction. Or is it fiction?

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars The World According to Rudy, September 30, 2001

By 

Robert Carlberg (Seattle) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Saucer Wisdom (Paperback)

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.

He wishes.