Some types of non-fiction writing does not age well for me, and a third of this book contains that type of writing. Seek! is divided into three sections: science, life, and art [although I may have forgotten what the title of the mid section was since I finished it, but you get the gist]. Because this is a collection of pieces, published and unpublished, mostly written in the late-80s to mid-90s (and admittedly published 15 years ago, so any sense of "dated-ness" is my personal struggle, not one of the author's) it is about a world that has greatly affected the one we live in now, but is very much a vision of the future set in the past. The life section is best, with autobiographical essays about Rucker's life, with great stories about living in Lynchburg, VA during the height of Fallwell's reign and living in the Bay Area during the weird days of the early 90s. It serves as an encapsulation of a portion of the cyberpunk days of twenty years ago, like leafing through old issues of Wired and Boing Boing (where many of these pieces first appeared). But as soon as swerves out of culture and writing, and into science, it is like the worst parts of leafing through old issues of Wired. Nothing is worse than the certainty of predictions of how science will change the world read with the hindsight of how it hasn't. But the essays that I loved have reignited my interest in the cyberpunk fiction that I only skimmed at the time, so I expect to see a lot of familiar authors, and twenty year old titles, showing up in my feed in the next few months.
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