New Releases by Rudy Rucker

At the untamed frontiers of intelligence, consciousness, matter, and reality lies Rudy Rucker''s The Mad Professor, a collection of twelve mind-bending science fiction stories that probe the outer limits of possibility. Rucker, an accomplished computer scientist and mathematician with numerous science books and novels to his credit, brings his deep and varied knowledge of the mind, mathematics, and the ever-weird and wondrous workings of the physical universe to the stories collected here. In Chu and the Nants we read of a bizarre future following a Verge Singularity, in which hyperintelligent computers have taken over the solar system. Panpsychism Proved breaks down the boundaries between mind and matter, exploring the notion that "every object has a mind." And Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation is an exhilarating collection of mini-stories taking us to the outrageous extremes of theoretical speculation. In The Mad Professor, Rucker deploys the full range of his writing talent and scientific knowledge to take us on a wild romp through the known, the unknown, and the awesomely peculiar.

After the Singularity, everyone and everything is sentient and telepathic. Aliens notice and invade Earth. In Rucker''s last novel, Postsingular, the Singularity happened and life on Earth was transformed by the awakening of all matter into consciousness and into telepathic communication. The most intimate moments of your life can be experienced by anyone who cares to pay attention, or by hundreds of thousands of anyones if you are one of the Founders who helped create the Singularity. The small bunch of Founders, including young newlyweds Thuy, a hypertext novelist, and Jayjay, a gamer and brain-enhancement addict, are living a popular, live-action media life. But now alien races that have already gone through this transformation notice Earth for the first time, and begin to arrive to exploit both the new environment and any available humans. Some of them are real estate developers, some are slavers, and some just want to help. But how to tell the difference? Someone has to save humanity from the alien invasions, and it might as well be reality media stars Thuy and Jayjay. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The birth of cyberpunk! A seaweed-smoking rebel becomes an incredible shrinking man. Under the bottom is the top--and the power to smash the Machine. After humanity becomes inextricably linked to the computers, a heroic couple makes a scale-ship journey beneath the smallest particles and through the largest cosmic structures, seeking a perfect world.

A riveting new science fiction novel from the writer who twice won the Philip K. Dick Award for best SF novel.Bela and Paul, two wild young mathematicians, are friends and roommates, and in love with the same woman, who happens to be Alma, Bela''s girlfriend. They fight it out by changing reality using cutting edge math, to change who gets the girl. The contemporary world they live in is not quite this one, but much like Berkeley, California, and the two graduate students are trying to finish their degrees and get jobs. It doesn''t help that their unpredictable advisor Roland is a mad mathematical genius who has figured out a way to predict isolated and specific bits of the future that can cause a lot of trouble. . .and he''s starting to see monsters in mirrors. Bela and Paul start to mess around with reality, and when that happens, all heaven and hell break loose. Those monsters of Roland''s were really there, but who are they? This novel is a romantic comedy with a whole corkscrew of SF twists. At the publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

These lost works of Wells, written near his death, deal with the apocalypse and the afterlife.

In the year 3003, nothing in the world is the same, except maybe that adolescents are still embarrassed by their parents. Society and the biosphere alike have been transformed by biotechnology, and the natural world is almost gone. Frek Huggins is a boy from a broken family, unusual becaise he was conceived without technological help or genetic modifications. His dad, Carb, is a malcontent who left behind Frek''s mom and the Earth itself several years ago. Everything changes when Frek finds the Anvil, a small flying saucer, under his bed, and it tells him he is destined to save the world. The repressive forces of Gov, the mysterious absolute ruler of Earth, descend on Frek, take away the Anvil, and interrogate him forcefully enough to damage his memory. Frek flees with Wow, his talking dog, to seek out Carb and some answers. But the untrustworthy alien in the saucer has other plans, including claiming exclusive rights to market humanity to the galaxy at large, and making Frek a hero. Frek and the Elixir is a profound, playful SF epic by the wild and ambitious Rudy Rucker.

In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker leads an excursion to that stretch of the universe he calls the "Mindscape," where he explores infinity in all its forms: potential and actual, mathematical and physical, theological and mundane. Rucker acquaints us with Gödel''s rotating universe, in which it is theoretically possible to travel into the past, and explains an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which billions of parallel worlds are produced every microsecond. It is in the realm of infinity, he maintains, that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations. Using cartoons, puzzles, and quotations to enliven his text, Rucker guides us through such topics as the paradoxes of set theory, the possibilities of physical infinities, and the results of Gödel''s incompleteness theorems. His personal encounters with Gödel the mathematician and philosopher provide a rare glimpse at genius and reveal what very few mathematicians have dared to admit: the transcendent implications of Platonic realism.

Peter Bruegel''s paintings---a peasant wedding in a barn, hunters in the snow, a rollicking street festival, and many others---have long defined our idea of everyday life in sixteenth century Europe. They are classic icons of a time and place in much the same way as Norman Rockwell''s depictions of twentieth-century America. We know relatively little about Bruegel, but after years of research, novelist Rudy Rucker has built upon what is known and has created for us the life and world of a true master who never got old. In sixteen chapters, each headed by a reproduction of one of the famous works, Rucker brings Bruegel''s painter''s progress and his colorful world to vibrant life, doing for Bruegel what the best-selling Girl with a Pearl Earring did for Vermeer. We follow the artist from the winding streets of Antwerp and Brussels to the glowing skies and decaying monuments of Rome and back. He and his friends, the cartographer Ortelius and Williblad Cheroo, an American Indian, are as vivid on the page as the multifarious denizens of Bruegel''s unforgettable canvases. Here is a world of conflict, change, and discovery, a world where Carnival battles Lent every day, preserved for us in paint by the engaging genius you will meet in the pages of As Above, So Below. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Joe Cube is a Silicon Valley hotshot--well, a would-be hotshot anyway--hoping that the 3-D TV project he''s managing will lead to the big money IPO he''s always dreamed of. On New Year''s Eve, hoping to impress his wife, he sneaks home the prototype. It brings no new warmth to their cooling relationship, but it does attract someone else''s attention. When Joe sees a set of lips talking to him (floating in midair) and feels the poke of a disembodied finger (inside him), it''s not because of the champagne he''s drunk. He has just met Momo, a woman from the All, a world of four spatial dimensions for whom our narrow world, which she calls Spaceland, is something like a rug, but one filled with motion and life. Momo has a business proposition for Joe, an offer she won''t let him refuse. The upside potential becomes much clearer to him once she helps him grow a new eye (on a stalk) that can see in the fourth-dimensional directions, and he agrees. After that it''s a wild ride through a million-dollar night in Las Vegas, a budding addiction to tasty purple 4-D food, a failing marriage, eye-popping excursions into the All, and encounters with Momo''s foes, rubbery red critters who steal money, offer sage advice and sometimes messily explode. Joe is having the time of his life, until Momo''s scheme turns out to have angles he couldn''t have imagined. Suddenly the fate of all life here in Spaceland is at stake. Rudy Rucker is a past master at turning mathematical concepts into rollicking science fiction adventure, from Spacetime Donuts and White Light to The Hacker and the Ants. In the tradition of Edwin A. Abbott''s classic novel, Flatland, Rucker gives us a tour of higher mathematics and visionary realities. Spaceland is Flatland on hyperdrive! At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Brace yourself when you open this book, for it purports to be the about the visions of neat biotechnologies one Frank Shook brings back from future times where he has been taken to by flying saucers, and gives to the writer, Rudy Rucker, who''s telling the story. That''s an odd way to begin a work of popular science . . . . but amusing. Please heed the warning from the Introduction by Bruce Sterling: "If you are examining Saucer Wisdom imagining that Rudy (or some fictional ''Frank Shook'') has been actually logging a lot of on board saucer time, well, you can knock that off right now. 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. "I''m going to spill the beans as directly as I can here: 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. "Pop-science writers didn''t used to treat ''science'' in this boisterous way, but there might well be a trend here, there may be a real future in this. Saucer Wisdom is a book by a well-qualified mathematician and computer scientist, a veteran pop science writer, in which ''science'' is treated, not as some distant and rarefied quest for absolute knowledge, but as naturally great source material for a really long, cool rant." Rucker, in character, describes, and illustrates with delightful cartoon sketches (the way he would use chalk and a blackboard while talking science), the world of the progressively more distant future as it is transformed by computer technology, biotechnology, and human evolution. He also describes a hell of a party in Berkeley. Popular science writing will never be the same. At the publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

La quatrième dimension a depuis toujours, mais singulièrement depuis le début du siècle, excité les imaginations les plus blasées. Qu''a t-elle à voir avec le temps ? Recèle-t-elle la clé d''autres univers ? A la fois mathématicien et auteur de science-fiction, Rudy Rucker propose ici un voyage peu ordinaire au pays de la quatrième dimension. Une vulgarisation originale, riche d''anecdotes, d''illustrations savoureuses et de problèmes délectables - avec leurs solutions ! En digne successeur de Lewis Carroll, il passe des " fantômes de l''hyperespace " aux trous noirs, et des voyages dans le temps aux théories physiques à onze dimensions, liant toujours les mathématiques les plus profondes aux exemples les plus quotidiens.

Though he is also a mathematician, computer scientist, and essayist, Rudy Rucker is best known for his ground-breaking science fiction. The companion volume to Seek!, Rucker''s selected nonfiction, Gnarl! brings together three dozen of the writer''s best science fiction short stories. His first major story collection in 17 years, the volume includes a number of previously unanthologized stories, including tales cowritten with Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, and Bruce Sterling. Classics such as "The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka," a timely meditation on the paradoxes of cloning, are side by side with works of pseudomemoir like "The Indian Rope Trick Explained." The Rucker formula - cutting-edge physics, a wild but perversely logical imagination, and a decidedly punk attitude - illuminates this new collection.

The essays and memoirs collected in Seek! trace Rudy Rucker''s trajectory through the final decade of the second millennium. His topics include artificial life, chaos, the big bang, Pieter Brueghel, the church of the subgenius, live sex, mathematics, science fiction, and TV evangelism. A computer scientist and programmer, Rucker is an articulate, engaging guide to the world on either side of the computer screen.

A computer hacker working on a race of intelligent robots, Jerzy Rugby finds he has been made a scapegoat for an attack of electronic viral ants, and must pursue the plague until he encounters Death itself. Reprint.

A detailed description of what the fourth dimension would be like.

Published here for the first time in illustrated trade paperback, this is Rudy Rucker''s brilliant novel that helped define the cyberpunk movement in science fiction and won the first Phillip K. Dick Award. 16 black-and-white illustrations. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.