Vladimir Nabokov's "Pale Fire" seen through Rudy Rucker's* eyes
in 2005:
"By the way, in hopes of selling to a larger market, and with my blessing,
Tor Books marketed Saucer Wisdom as a non-fiction book of futurology. But I
think it’s more accurate to call the book a novel — in somewhat the same sense
that Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a novel and not a long poem with
annotations."
In R.Rucker's "Notes for Saucer Wisdom, 1996 - 1997" (website)
there's an exchange with Lee Graham (dated January 27,1997). purpotedly
about synchronicity, that carries a description of a dream that seems to be
related to Nabokov's LATH and VV's ordeals in space.
"Graham has dreamed he went
back in time and found an old photo that looks like him and he got it together
to make a positive transparency enlargement print of the photo to turn over and
compare with his own mug, a good match. So he writes me as author of The Fourth
Dimension to ask if you could turn into your mirror-image by turning over in
time. ...The passage he Xeroxed from The Fourth Dimension was this: "In these
dreams I would be walking down a street with someone on either side of me --- my
wife, Sylvia, let us say, on my left, and my friend Greg on my right. I would
move out of my body and watch the three of us from a distance, first from a
point in our space, then from a point entirely outside of space. What struck me
was that depending on which half of hyperspace I looked from, the order of the
three people would be Sylvia-Rudy-Greg, or Greg-Rudy-Sylvia." [p.
49] **
.............................................................................................................................................
*- An Amazon.com reviewer describes Rudy Rucker as "the William S.
Burroughs of cyberpunk." and another:: "Rudy Rucker made up the flying saucer
part. There is no actual flying saucer. The saucer is not an interplanetary
faster-than-light device. Its what we professional authors like to call a
narrative device [...] Saucer Wisdom is a work of popular science
speculation. Its a nonfiction book in which Prof. Rucker takes a few quirky
grains of modern scientific fact, drops them into the colorful tide pool of his
own imagination, and harvests a major swarm of abalones, jellyfish, and giant
anemones."
**- I didn't look up his answer to Graham,though. Besides, I heard
about RR for the first time today...