Writing and Painting

By at 10:30 am Tuesday, May 19

(Rudy Rucker is a guestblogger. His latest novel, Hylozoic, describes a postsingular world in which everything is alive.)

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I finished a new painting this week, seemingly just a still life of a geranium---often I paint more surreal kinds of things, as you can see on my paintings site.

With this geranium I did, however, have something extra in mind, that is, I'm working on a kind of urban fantasy/sf novel called Jim and the Flims, and my characters are about to make their way to the castle of the King of Flimsy.

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[Somewhat irrelevant picture of a beautiful neon sign.]

I should mention that Flimsy is an alternate world that is, I think, our afterworld, kind of medieval and bucolic---and I had the idea that the castle could look like a giant geranium. Those leaves are thick, you see, with rooms in them, and the flims (that is, the denizens of flimsy) are buzzing around them like gnats, only too small to see in the painting---that's the part I need the word-processor for!

You can hear me reading a draft of the first chapter of Jim and the Flims at my Feedburner podcast station, which you can access by clicking the button below.

As for painting and writing, Charlie Jane Anders has a nice article, "SF Writers Make Art," in the io9 SF site, featuring interviews with SF writers who paint, including me, Audrey Niffenegger, and Mary Robinette Kowal.

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Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician, and a computer scientist--with thirty-two published books. In the 1980s he received two Philip K. Dick awards, for his cyberpunk novels Software and Wetware, which are available as part of the Wares tetralogy. Rucker has a Ph.D. in mathematics, and he worked as a computer science professor at San Jose State in Silicon Valley for twenty years. He took up painting in 1999, and he's had three shows of his pop-surreal works in San Francisco. Rucker's latest publication is his autobiography, Nested Scrolls. Nested Scrolls received the Emperor Norton Award for "extraordinary invention and creativity unhindered by the constraints of paltry reason."

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