Tuesday, November 5, 2002
Rucker's transrealist 16th-Cen painter novel -- w00t!
Rudy Rucker, the father of transrealism, the gonzo physicist/cyberpunk who gave us Spaceland (Flatland with an extra dimension), the Wetware books (artificial life, drugs and rock-and-roll), and The Hacker and the Ants (emergence fictionalized), has written a non-sf novel about Peter Bruegel called "As Above, So Below."
Bruegel was a sixteenth-century painter whose works have fascinated Rucker for years. As he writes in the 65,000 words' worth of mind-blowing book-notes on his site:
This is Rucker's first (?) non-sf novel, and it looks like a killer. I've just ordered my copy. Link Discuss (Thanks, Marc!)Encyclopedia Pictures: These are also called Wimmelbilder, for "teeming figure picture". The perspective trick is that [Foote, p. 147] "he appears to move his vantage point progressively higher as the picture recedes...In addition, he usually painted these background figures larger than they would appear under normal rules of perspective." I think another way of thinking of this is that he paints it as if he were inside a Hollow Earth, with the distant landscape bending up to rise high, so that you are effectively looking down at it. Maybe B. did go into the Hollow Earth!
posted by Cory Doctorow at 12:29:16 PM permalink | Other blogs' comments
