Sci Fi Story Club: "Six Thought Experiments Concerning Computation"

Join us Wednesday January 28th at 6:00 PST on Zoom for the next gathering of the Sci Fi Story Club!  We’ll be discussing Rudy Rucker’s “Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation” from his collection Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories. 

A shy Berkeley chemical engineer invents sentient paint that becomes a hit with East Bay hot rodders, a videogame designer accidentally unlocks the code to the cosmos while landscaping a virtual golf course, a yoga teacher discovers infinite chakras that become helpful extra selves. Vivid and uncanny in their own right, these six mini-stories were originally written as chapter intros for Rudy Rucker’s book on computation to illustrate different aspects of the topic. Rucker is a widely published computer scientist and mathematician who has taught at several universities, and along with William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, was one of the originators of cyberpunk – a sci-fi subgenre with an aesthetic of “high-tech/low-life”. He is best known for the novels in his Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) won the Philip K. Dick Award for best science fiction novel in 1983 and 1988.

Email us at eden@lapl.org for the reading selection, the Zoom link to attend, and to get on our mailing list for this monthly gathering.