Customer Reviews

Saucer Wisdom

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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?

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.

In trying to treat this as a serious but disguised scientific or mystical text, some people seem, in my view, to have completely missed the point.*

This book is a blast. It's hilarious. Even Buce Sterling's introduction is taking the mickey. From the 'Frank Shook' charcacter and all his bizarre friends and enemies through the eccentric aliens to the whacked-out DMT-fantasy drawings, Saucer Wisdom is one big riff on the insanity of Californian culture with all its weirdness and UFO fixations, its spaced-out hippies and way-too-serious hackers and crackers. It's also a nostalgic but knowingly humorous retrospective on past visions of how the future would be, saturated with that Golden Age of sci-fi nutty predictiveness, the less paranoid days when UFOs came to bring us cosmic messages of love and peace, and when everyone knew that in the future they would have intelligent machines and telepathy and a robot dog for the kids. The humour of Saucer Wisdom is moderated by a humane and tolerant vision of humanity: while Rucker is laughing, he's not patronising. This is not vicious satire, it is a gently self-mocking and whimsical journey.

So forget any 'messages', forget serious sci-fi, just knock-back, drift away, and smile to yourself for a few hours. Lovely.

*At least that's what I thought. If Rudy Rucker really is being serious (which I doubt somehow), then Saucer Wisdom is still funny but for very different reasons!

This has to be one of the most original science fiction books I have read in a long time. This book snagged me right from the start......and theres even some funny parts.

Rucker uses the narative of a fictional character(Frank Shook) as a "saucer" abductee to visit Earth's future in leaps; from the late 21st century to the beginnings of the "5th milenium" to see whither goest the human condition. He also includes interactions with aliens, and specifies the difference in viewpoints between "wetware" beings and those made of sterner stuff. Rucker uses these literary devices to explore what is mind and personality, and how in the distant, future humans and transhumans will view the soul. Which leads me to another feature of the book. It is also a spiritual one, in a "New Ager" kind of way; yet it is not preachy, nor would it be too upsetting for those of traditional religious bent, However, there is a couple of sexual encounters in Saucer Wisdom, so if your morals are not comfortable with this, be fore-warned. The altering of what is determined as homo-sapien is tinkered with. From a late 20th century perspective, it all seems implausible and half-baked! But well it should be, as it is deliberately, a work of technological speculation, that Rucker has given himself 20 additional centuries to fully gestate. Saucer Wisdom is a work in progress that spans large time-frames. A very decent work, by a renoun mathematician/computer nut.

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.

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.

Why do all alien abductees suffer from Cartman-esque anal probes? The answer to this question lies within . . . Seriously, this is a *very* funny fictional novel which does manage to make one think about the future of technology and mankind. A must read.

This book is full of brilliant and original sci-fi ideas.
Most authors get by with one good idea per book.
With this book your getting close to a idea every new page.
Some pages have 2 or 3 ideas.

The idea for contacting the Aliens via the 3 TVs
is especially good.

A masterpiece.