amazon.com/Transreal-Cyberpunk-Rudy-Rucker/dp/1940948150 …

Reading this now. New and unusual literature + visions of tech. The marginal meets cutting edge?

“Storming the Cosmos” is a catalog of Russian catastrophes and takes off on Sterling’s deep interest in all things Soviet and “fantastyka,” Soviet science fiction writing in particularCollaborations are not “half the work”, but “twice the work” although it probably depends on what is it that you want to learn or unlearn“Big Jelly”Effective start-up team, with ambitious goals and complementary talents. In transreal writing, elements are jammed into a narrative, not because they’re appropriate to the story-line, but because real-life incidents become surreal and provocative and Moebius likeAlthough about giant jellyfishes it could apply to the elasticity of the hedonistic trip. Tech jargon can be verbally stretched to cover almost any form of excess.”Junk DNA”Funny tale of genetic engineering run amok. This time the two chracters are women; Rudy is Janna and Bruce is Veruschka. Veruschka Zipkinova is the grand-daughter of Vlad Zipkin, the hero of Storming the Cosmos. Also back Tug and Revel characters from “Big Jelly.“Hormiga Canyon”Rucker is Stefan Oertel, and Sterling is the bluff, can-do, savvy Jayson Rubio. LA pop-surrealism + B-movie epic about giant ants, motorcycles and mastodons.Burroughs like“Colliding Branes”“Writers are mortal. But bloggers, who are pitifully dependent on theirRube Goldberg tangle of obsolescent software and hardware, are evenmore mortal”The main characters be bloggers, and the space between branes is in some sense a living thing—like a Lovecraftian Great Old One.”Good Night Moon”“They say the moon’s gone missing”Cyberpunk version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. Metafiction about two writers collaborating. Mix of the visionary and the mundane—with snappy sitcom dialogue”Loco””once you got used to the concept of interfacing with leeches, it didn’t hurt all that much to stick them on”?it comes with a bit from @doctorow“Loco,’ is the weirdest fucking thing I’ve ever read that managed to still make sense. I’ve read pretty much every word both of them ever published and together, they are infinitely weirder and more interesting than they are on their own””Totem Poles”Cryptic aliens arrive and give us radically powerful creative tools with catastrophic consequences in a teenage garage band rehearsal kind of way.”Kraken”Californian “Vaclav Havel” stan who has retreated from the unseemly hurly-burly of wealth and power, and become a kind of Taoist. Then his own creations rise from their slumbers in some new catastrophe and he arrives on-scene to restore the world’s calm.Burroughs-inspired cut-up of drafts of what look like email threads with chunks removed and then shuffled and put in something like a chronological order. ? (Source: https://threader.app/thread/1378900182184566784)