Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
— Rudy Rucker
Traditional science is all about finding shortcuts.
If we suppose that many natural phenomena are in effect computations, the study of computer science can tell us about the kinds of natural phenomena that can occur.
Computations are everywhere, once you begin to look at things in a certain way.
Electronic distribution is more of a fall-back strategy for putting out a book that isn't deemed profitable enough to print. You hardly make any money publishing an electronic book.
I think dry nanotechnology is probably a dead-end.
Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it's done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
Some ideas you have to chew on, then roll them around a lot, play with them before you can turn them into funky science fiction.
It's tedious to watch something very obvious being worked out, like a movie that's not particularly good and after about half an hour you know how it's going to end.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
It's soothing to realize that my mind's processes are inherently uncontrollable.
If you think of your life as a kind of computation, it's quite abundantly clear that there's not going to be a final answer and there won't be anything particularly wonderful about having the computation halt!
Lately I've been working to convince myself that everything is a computation.
At present, however, I don't think the Net is a very good medium for books, books should really be inexpensive lightweight paperbacks you can bang around.
In any case, A New Kind of Science is a wonderful book, and I'm still absorbing its teachings.
The hard fact is that not everyone does get published.
I like a book better if I can't predict what's going to happen.
One of the nice things about science fiction is that it lets us carry out thought experiments.
All living things are gnarly, in that they inevitably do things that are much more complex than one might have expected.
A computation is a process that obeys finitely describable rules.
But how does it feel to plug into a system that's say, a million times as smart as a person.
Unfortunately our nation, nay, our world, is run by evil morons.
If all else fails, there's always print or web zines.
Selling a book or story has never become absolutely automatic for me.
I like to do things that are surprising and different.
