Art & Creativity Quote by Rudy Rucker

No one expects a working scientist to admit, flat out, that success still refuses to become a machine. Rudy Rucker's line has the dry honesty of someone who understands systems - and keeps running into the one system that won't stabilize: the literary marketplace. The sentence is almost engineered to puncture the myth of the "career author" who eventually cracks the code and coasts. For Rucker, even after awards, influence, and decades in print, the act of selling remains stubbornly non-deterministic.

The specific intent feels twofold: to demystify publishing and to recalibrate expectations. Rucker isn't lamenting; he's reporting. "Absolutely automatic" is doing the heavy lifting, hinting at the fantasy that craft plus experience should eventually yield predictable outcomes. That fantasy makes sense coming from a scientific mind, trained to look for repeatable procedures and reliable results. The subtext is that writing may be learnable, but selling isn't a pure meritocracy or an equation. It's taste, timing, networks, shifting editorial appetites, and the mood of an industry that runs on trend cycles and risk aversion.

Context matters: Rucker is a central figure in cyberpunk and a bridge between math-heavy abstraction and playful, reality-bending fiction. Genres like his often get celebrated after the fact and under-supported in the moment. His remark reads like a quiet warning to younger writers: if even a veteran can't automate acceptance, rejection isn't always a referendum on your talent. It's also an implicit defense of the artist's perpetual vulnerability - the part no amount of expertise fully anesthetizes.