The Hacker and the Ants: Version 2.0 Book

Review of
Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 14, 2015

For the complete review go here:

Woah. I'm glad I read this back-to-back w/ Rucker's Master of Space and Time from 10 yrs before. Rucker's come a long way since then. Master of Space and Time was fun but in a somewhat 'light-weight' kind of way. The Hacker and the Ants is far more immersed in computers & much more detail oriented AND it's still completely entertaining. & The Hacker and the Ants references Master of Space and Time: "He could even speed up and slow down time, or run time backward'he was the master of space and time." (p 238)

I started studying computers way back when in the days of flow-charts & the like in 1973 but back then I certainly didn't have access to a computer at home - computers were most likely to be found in big businesses & at universities. Thru my neoist connection Boris Wanowich I at least got to see home computers in the mid-80s (see his early computer animations here: computers on an almost daily basis.

& then, in late 1994 or early 1995, my friend "Sarmad" Brody sent me a Mac SE to use so I finally had my own. In 1997, my friend John Berndt sent me an even more recent Mac & I was set. Since then computers have become much more familiar household items for me but in some respects I still don't know shit. One might say that the amt of exercise I've gotten since 1997 has diminished considerably as I've sat more & more in front of one. I'm sitting at one now in order to write this review.

The point of this blather being that anyone whose life has interfaced w/ computers to the extent that mine has is likely to read The Hacker and the Ants in the context of that timeline - if only by 'comparing notes'. The Hacker and the Ants was copyrighted in 1994 & 1st published by AvoNova in 1995 - nicely overlapping my 1st ownership of the primitive Mac SE. If I'd read it then I might've found it very futuristic. Reading it now, it just seems prescient of things that've come to pass - Rucker was aware of what was happening w/ computers, of what might happen w/ them in the near future - he was teaching computer science.

In the novel it's the age of digital tv. As I recall, the switchover to digital tv in the US began on Saturday, June 13, 2009 - 25 yrs after the novel's copyright date. As a part of Ian Page's End of Television project, my group HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) was broadcasting on analog tv right around the time of the changeover (there's a short movie from the night here: ).

Rucker's character hates tv, something that I can always identify w/ - even tho I've been on tv a few times I don't watch it. "Everything on TV enraged me, because everything on TV was the same: the ads, the news, the shows. In my opinion, all TV was all part of the huge lying Spectacle that the government kept running to oppress us all. Data compression had brought us a thousand channels, but they all sucked same as ever." (p 12) Have you ever sat in a motel rm flipping thru the channels just for the sheer novelty of accessing what you don't usually have access to or care to have access to? The main thing amazing about it for me is the sheer quantity of same-old, same-old. It's like having the ability to get a dump truck of junk mail empty itself into yr living rm every day instead of just the usual handful of paper-waste.

"Thinking of Hungary and the police made me wonder if our own USA would ever be free. Would we ever get rid of the earth-raping, drug-warring social oppressors who'd made the public treasury their own latrine and hog wallow? Well, the Hungarians had gotten rid of the Communists, hadn't they? Some day the Revolution was going to come to America, too. One of the secondary reasons why I worked on ants and robots was that I hoped they could help bring down the Pig.

"Tonight the ants had ruined television. There could be no more important step in crippling the Pig. I started grinning. the GoMotion ants had done a good thing. I was proud of them." - p 128

I was contacted by the SciFi channel way back in 1999 by someone who sd that they'd heard that I was the guy whose work they wanted. In other words, they wanted free samples. After I sent the guy a perfumed letter telling him how glad I was to be finally reunited w/ my separated-at-birth conjoined twin (or something like that) & sending him a DVD-R of some brief snippets of work of mine & telling him that I didn't really believe that I was the guy whose work they wanted I was, indeed, rejected. Did I say something wrong? Well, yes - & I did it deliberately - but I knew there was no way they were interested in work that wasn't about outer-space-monsters-threatening-Earth-w/-lots-of-CGI.

"Over my walls and in the far background I would see whatever landscape I was currently hottest for'in those days it was a swamp with simmies that looked like dinosaurs and pterodactyls. It was called Roarworld; I'd gotten it off the Net." - p 9

I'm reminded of Second Life, a user-created online world, something in wide use today (except by people like myself whose computers are too old to support the software or, again, people like me, who aren't computer savvy enuf to work around their computer's limitations).

"When I toggled on the mighty Roarworld sound module, it was more than awesome, GAH-ROOOOONT!" - p 9

Ha ha! Over a decade ago, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History was seeking someone to design a dinosaur sound to "scare the kids" who wd do campovers there. I submitted an 'outrageously' long resumé of my 'sound art' experience & claimed that I cd make a sound to "scare the kids" but that, of course, I didn't think that was what they really wanted.

There's GPS, not so-named, too:

"While I was driving 280 across town to East San Jose, I fished out the scrap of paper that Nga's cousin had given me'5778 White Road. I flicked on the electronic map attached to my dash and told it Nga's address.

"Intense green lines appeared, showing a diagram of San Jose, with a highlighted path indicating the best route from satellite-calculated current location to Nga Vo's." - p 104

People take GPS for granted now but that was hardly the case in 1994. The 1st time I ever used it was when I was a passenger in Lizard's RV driving cross-country to my 1st & last Burning man in 1999.

"Even though I typed in thin air, it felt as though I was touching something, for my gloves had tactile feedback. Woven in with the Spandex were special piezoplastic touchpads that could swell up and press against my hand. The touchpads on my fingertips pulsed each time I pushed down on a virtual key." - pp 9-10

When I read about Virtual Reality & think about the technical limitations of my own home set-up I have to be honest & realize that if I were a little more ambitious in this direction I cd have something like this going to for very little money. I remember when video artist Alan Price made a VR headset in a very clever & efficient way in the early 1990s for something like less than $150 out of commonly available parts. That's the way to go.

Is this a pioneering Cyberpunkspace novel? Weeelllllll.. not as much so as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) or G. C. Edmondson & C. M, Kotlan's The Cunningham Equations (1986) or Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (1988) (to name a few I've read) but I found its technical explications more accessible - maybe just b/c the lingo is actual in-use lingo.

Since Rucker won the Philip K. Dick prize twice & since he's based in California (as Dick was) & since the writing's very 'readable' as was Dick's fluid pulp, it's 'inevitable' that Rucker be compared to him. What I find comparable is the dysfunctionality of Rucker's characters love lives. Dick was married 5 times & Rucker's primary character is going thru a divorce & gets involved in 2 other problematic relationships.

Rucker's description of women, like those of writers like Raymond Chandler before him, is of the variety of women-can-fuck-you-up:

"The phone rang.

""Hello, Mr. Rugby?" A woman's brisk, aggressive voice.

""Yes."

""This is Louise Calder from Welsh & Tayke realty. Do you mind if I bring a client by in half an hour? They're quite interested in the property."

""I'm very busy today. I don't want to show the house."

"The voice was instantly, unforgivingly venomous. "I'll pass that along to the owner, Mr. Rugby. Good-bye."" - p 6

There's much more to the Dick connection than just that: "we liked to test it in a full-size simmie-house that we called Our American Home. We had simmies of a family who supposedly lived there: clumsy Walt and Perky Pat Christensen, with son Dexter and daughter Baby Scooter." (p 17) While Rucker doesn't explicitly mention Dick this is clearly an homage to people who've read Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) (a personal favorite):

"Perky Pat Layouts were the biggest thing going in the extra-Terran colonies. Entire artificial worlds for a miniature golden-tressed doll and her muscular, artificial boyfriend'beginning with landscapes, and complete to every detail down to topless bathing suits." - inside front cover blurb of the Book Club edition of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

"He was Walt. He owned a Jaguar XXB sports ship with a flatboat velocity of 15,000 miles an hour. His shirts came from Italy and his shoes were made in England...

"It was always Saturday.

"In the bathroom he splashed his face with water... staring into the mirror at his familiar features, he saw a note tacked up, in his own hand.

"THIS IS AN ILLUSION. YOU ARE SAM REGAN, A COLONIST ON MARS. MAKE USE OF YOUR TIME OF TRANSLATION, BUDDY BOY. CALL UP PAT PRONTO!" - back cover blurb of the Book Club edition of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

It seems that many or most or ALL of the fictional bks I read & like & identify w/ have underdogs for protagonists. I suppose that's a pretty cliché trope but I still much prefer it to 'Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous'. The Hacker and the Ants starts off w/ the beleaguered hero being harassed by real estate agents. This is banal, sure, but these things pick away at a person's spirit:

"Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets. They came swarming in and scattered to every corner of my great dry-rotted California manse. Several of them had video cameras. What a thing to wake up to." - p1

Now this guy's hardly the underdog that he cd be, he's a middle-class guy w/ a well-paying job that he gets to do from home - something certainly more common now, thanks to computers, than it was when this was written. Nonetheless, his life proceeds to go down the drain BIG TIME & the resultant struggle is quite the engaging tale.

One of the most fun things about reading this for me was the didactic introducing of computer jargon & slang. I either knew most of it already or cd easily figure out its meaning b/c the etymology is so transparent but to have it laid out in such a brisk entertaining fashion helped reinforce it all for me:

"An exceedingly hostile or schizophrenic e-mail message is called a flame. Even though Russ and I were still exchanging scientific information, we were at the same time in the throes of a flame war." - p 172

"The simulated objects of cyberspace were known as simmies. My hand images were simmies, as was the virtual phone in my cyberspace office." - p 7

"But what was cyberspace? Where did it come from? Cyberspace had oozed out of the world's computers like stage-magic fog. Cyberspace was an alternate reality, it was the huge interconnected computation that was being collectively run by planet Earth's computers around the clock. Cyberspace was the information Net, but more than the Net, cyberspace was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space." - p 8

"How did I look? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body simmies tuxedos." - p 14

"The funny thing about the "cyber" prefix was that it had always meant bullshit.

"Back in the 1940s, the story went, MIT doubledome Norbert Weiner had wanted a title for a book he'd written about the electronic control of machines. Claude Shannon, also known as The Father of Information Theory, told Weiner to call his book Cybernetics. The academic justification for the word was that the "cyber" root came from the Greek word for "rudder." A "kybernetes" was a steersman or, by extension, a mechanical governor such as a weight-and-pulley feedback device you might hook to your tiller to keep your sailboat aimed at some fixed angle into the wind. The practical justification for the word was contained in Shannon's advice to Weiner: "Use the word 'cybernetics,' Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will put you at an advantage in arguments."" - p 19

This is obviously a pet peeve for Rucker b/c he also referred to it in Master of Space and Time 10 yrs before. In my review of that I wrote:

""Cybernetics. That was a word Harry and I had always laughed about. Nobody had any idea what it means, it's just some crazy term that Norbert Wiener made up." - p 13

"Really? Paul Pangaro has this to say:

""What does the word "cybernetics" mean?

"""Cybernetics" comes from a Greek word meaning "the art of steering".

""Cybernetics is about having a goal and taking action to achieve that goal.

""Knowing whether you have reached your goal (or at least are getting closer to it) requires "feedback", a concept that comes from cybernetics.

""From the Greek, "cybernetics" evolved into Latin as "governor". Draw your own conclusions.

""When did cybernetics begin?

""Cybernetics as a process operating in nature has been around for a long time.

""Cybernetics as a concept in society has been around at least since Plato used it to refer to government.

""In modern times, the term became widespread because Norbert Wiener wrote a book called "Cybernetics" in 1948. His sub-title was "control and communication in the animal and machine". This was important because it connects control (a.k.a., actions taken in hope of achieving goals) with communication (a.k.a., connection and information flow between the actor and the environment). So, Wiener is pointing out that effective action requires communication.

""Wiener's sub-title also states that both animals (biological systems) and machines (non-biological or "artificial" systems) can operate according to cybernetic principles. This was an explicit recognition that both living and non-living systems can have purpose. A scary idea in 1948." - ;

Note that in the The Hacker and the Ants incarnation of this pet peeve Rucker 'quotes' a conversation between Shannon & Weiner. Really? Was that somewhat incriminating conversation recorded in the 1940s? I think not. Rucker is putting forth someone's imagined version of a hypothetical conversation. It may be very accurate - but it's probably not an actual quote. Naughty, naughty, Rudy.

Rucker seems to have other pet peeves. In The Hacker and the Ants an annoying character is described thusly: "He was a lawn dwarf, five-foot-two with full beard, bald pate, and long greasy locks, he was (I would soon learn) a vegetarian, a pagan, a libertarian, and
a deep thinker with a dozen crackpot opinions, all furiously held." (p 97) Now cf that to his description of "Professor Baumgard" (I take "Baumgard" to be a parody of "tree-hugger" since a German-to-English translation of this name might be "Tree Guard"): "The guy was a real square. He had long, greasy gray hair and a beard. A microcomputer in the pouch of his sweatshirt. And'ughBeatles music playing softly on his radio." (p 136 of Master of Space and Time)

"In the Valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who'd turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into someone's company machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle'the cryps' security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide." - p 90

When I see "phreaks" I think of "phone-phreaks" & I think of the magazine "2600" whose name references the frequency of the whistle used by phone phreak Captain Crunch to make free calls on pay phones. Anyone interested in my own feeble connection to phone phreakery might enjoy this TESTES-3 movie from 1979: .

As I've pointed out in at least one previous review, references that are of keen familiarity to the reader make sd reader identify w/ the bk more. If I read a reference to Jackson Mac Low or the music of Morton Feldman in an SF novel (wch I'm fairly sure I have before) I feel 'right at home'. In this case, the reference is to SRL:

"The man who actually built our physical robot models was called Ken Thumb. Ken was a slim blue-collar type; soft-spoken, brilliant, implacable. Before signing on as GoMotion's machinist he'd worked with the Survival Research Lab art/robotics group putting together his big crazy machines out of parts he would find in abandoned factories and warehouses." - pp 21-22

Then there's a reference to an entomologist known to & loved by all entomologists (well, so it seems from my superficial entomology POV): "fitting our shapes to official E.O. Wilson entomological data." (p 66) I 1st heard of Wilson from my friend Irene Moon, the entomologist/noise-performer. I've also read Wilson's novel Anthill (see my review here: ).

Probably somewhat thanks to Wilson there's some nice entomology in here as well as computer nerdiness: "Biological anthills usually contain a wide range of the myrmecophilous or ant-loving creatures who live in the colony as parasites, symbiotes, or as the ant pets collectively known as as myrmecoxenes or symphiles. There is a certain small beetle, for instance, which is kept and fed by the ants simply because the ants enjoy licking tasty waxy secretions from the beetle's antennae." (p 72) Myrmidon snacks, anyone?

& then there's the Church of the SubGenius:

""That's too gnarly, Dirk. Why can't you make the control be . . . " I looked over at the businessman figure with his pipe clenched between the teeth of his shit-eating salesman grin. I now recognized the figure as the old underground culture icon known as "Bob" Dobbs. "Give my clown a copy of the pipe of 'Bob' Dobbs."" - p 214-215

Now Rucker's not the 1st to reference SubGenii. John Shirley's 1988 SF novel Black Hole of Carcosa has this passage: ""Don't fuck with me, 'Bob,'" Stang snarled." (p 133) Of course, it all pales in comparison to 'real' life: . & then there's Robert Anton Wilson. What's w/ all the Wilsons? My mother's maiden name was Wilson.