Letters to the Editor

Finding God among the aliens
BY MARK DERY
(06/30/99)

I was happy to see the good review of my nonfiction collection "Seek!" But I was a little disturbed by Mark Dery's article and e-mail interview with me about my book of speculations, "Saucer Wisdom."

I feel that Mark Dery's interview gives a misleading impression about my current interests and about the kind of book that "Saucer Wisdom" is. "Saucer Wisdom" is meant to be an entertaining book of speculations about the coming millennia. To make it more fun, I set my ideas into the framework of a UFO hoax novel. The book is written as if I got my ideas about the future from a saucer abductee named Frank Shook.

In the course of the book I also show myself as occasionally praying for help --- both because I was a little frightened of the idea of writing about UFOs and because I was working to try and change my lifestyle. These details about myself are meant to add to the realism of the book, and are certainly not intended as a prescription to the reader. It's worth remembering that "Saucer Wisdom" is in some ways a novel, so one need not take as absolute truth everything that it depicts a character named "Rudy Rucker" as doing.

Dery's comments and questions unfortunately give the impression that my personal spirituality (or lack thereof) is the main theme of Saucer Wisdom. This is simply not the case. I have not turned into a button-holing street-corner evangelist and I haven't been zapped by a pink beam of light. I'm still the same kind of writer I've always been.

-- Rudy Rucker

Mark Dery's pseudo-scientific, buzzword dropping "cyberpunk" mysticism makes no real sense but gives the user a feeling of control and connection to ultimate power and knowledge. I've always loved science fiction, but will continue to prefer writers who conform to reality as much as possible, rather then employ shallow understandings of new physics and math to compose more gobbledygook that sounds meaningful, but isn't. Metaphors are good for creative thinking, but it's easy to get carried away, especially when you don't understand the science. This can have ridiculous results.

With every new real scientific or mathematical development, there is a vanguard of voodoo doctors ready to incorporate it into their shtick. The undeniable power and respect that science has earned over the past four or five centuries strongly attracts the snake oil salesmen, who steal the words and ideas of science to bolster their own questionable credibility.

-- Gerald Svenddal
Minneapolis

The murder that shocked Washington
BY PAUL HOFER
(07/02/99)

Why is anyone shocked? The liberals running Washington have been soft on crime for so long, it's no wonder that such horrible things happen. And get this right: It didn't happen because guns exist, it happened because we live in a country where people are punished more severely for cheating on income taxes than for murder.

Why does Salon not ask gun-control freaks the following question: "Are you willing to demonstrate the courage of your convictions by permanently installing a sign on your front lawn that says 'This Is A Gun-Free Home' ?"

-- Chris Palmer
Atlanta

The fear of death has been a part of living in some communities for decades. Only recently has death reached out to communities labeled safe. As a single mother of two teenagers -- one a 16-year-old male -- I constantly fear for his well-being in a society that is less then friendly to black male teenagers. I live in a community with a low crime rate and hardly any violence, where differences are celebrated, but I am not naive enough to think what has happen across the nation cannot happen here.

I have told him over and over that he must not put himself in situations of question or danger. Like most children, he has no sense of fear. He believes his size will protect him from the world. I believe his size could bring evil to him.

I pray that if evil finds my son, an angel such as Helen Foster-El is there for him.

-- Carole D. Pierce
Maplewood, N.J.

Sharps & flats: "Bleecker Street: Greenwich Village in the '60s"
BY ROBBIE WOLIVER
(07/02/99)

None of us who remember hearing some of those songs in the context of a civil rights march or anti-war protest demonstration will ever forget the transformational impact of being in a crowd of allied, disenfranchised young souls suddenly imbued with the power of "real" numbers joined in common cause. Those moments, frozen in time, created peak-experience holograms in our consciousness that the music engages and runs for us. Nostalgia isn't something we choose to indulge in, it's something that sweeps us away. The music is, of necessity, bittersweet because it was written by people who felt like outcasts; America was divided in the most uncivil of civil wars, the war between generations.

Artists with current fans and contemporary appeal will introduce some extraordinary and timeless expressions to a new generation, which needs a sense of community just as much as we boomers did in the '60s.

-- Alan Berman
Tilton, N.H.

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