Most Popular Books by Rudy Rucker

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.

It all begins next year in California. A maladjusted computer industry billionaire and a somewhat crazy US President initiate a radical transformation of the world through sentient nanotechnology; sort of the equivalent of biological artificial intelligence. At first they succeed, but their plans are reversed by Chu, an autistic boy. The next time it isn''t so easy to stop them. Most of the story takes place in a world after a heretofore unimaginable transformation, where all the things look the same but all the people are different (they''re able to read each others'' minds, for starters). Travel to and from other nearby worlds in the quantum universe is possible, so now our world is visited by giant humanoids from another quantum universe, and some of them mean to tidy up the mess we''ve made. Or maybe just run things. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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

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.

"Rucker’s four Ware novels—Software, Wetware , Freeware , and Realware—form an extraordinary cyberweird future history with the heft of an epic fantasy novel and the speed of a quantum processor. Still exuberantly fresh despite their age, they primarily follow two characters (and their descendants): Cobb Anderson, who instigated the first robot revolution and is offered immortality by his grateful “children,” and stoner Sta-Hi Mooney, who (against his impaired better judgment) becomes an important figure in robot-human relations. Over several generations, humans, robots, drugs, and society evolve, but even weird drugs and the wisdom gathered from interstellar signals won’t stop them from making the same old mistakes in new ways. Rucker is both witty and serious as he combines hard science and sociology with unrelentingly sharp observations of all self-replicating beings. This classic series well deserves its omnibus repackaging, particularly suitable for libraries." — Publisher''s Weekly. "Rudy Rucker is one of the modern heroes of science fiction, one of the original cyberpunks. The early cyberpunks only had a few writers who could be meaningfully called punks — writers like John Shirley and Richard Kadrey — but there was only one who could truly be called cyber: Rudy Rucker. Rucker is a mad professor, a mathematician and computer scientist with a serious, scholarly interest in the limits of computation and the physics and mathematics of higher-dimension geometry. But that’s just about the only thing you can describe as ''serious'' when it comes to Rucker. He’s a gonzo wildman, someone for whom ''trippy'' barely scratches the surface. His work is shot through with weird sex, weird drugs, weird brain chemistry, and above all, weird science." — Cory Doctorow

The honest and intellectually fierce autobiography of one of the most acclaimed voices in science fiction

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.

Three teens ride a car across the universe and back. Look out for the flying saucers! "Tipping his hat to Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, and Douglas Adams, Rucker immerses readers in a fantastical roadtrip adventure that’s a wild ride of unmitigated joy. . . . he ties everything together with internal consistency, playful use of language that keeps his ideas alien yet accessible, and a solid grounding in fourth-dimensional math. This wacky adventure is a geeky reader’s delight."—Publishers Weekly, starred review

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.

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.

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.

Collected together in one ebook: every single one of Rudy Rucker''s science-fiction stories, a trove of gnarl and wonder, dating over more than forty years. This, the updated 2021 edition of Complete Stories, includes stories from 1976 through 2021 Along with Rucker''s solo stories, we have collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn.

One of the most talented contemporary authors of cutting-edge math and science books conducts a fascinating tour of a higher reality, the Fourth Dimension. Includes problems, puzzles, and 200 drawings. "Informative and mind-dazzling." — Martin Gardner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A-bomb + a slacker prof + a sexy hypersphere = cyberpunk extravaganza in this outrageous, comic, and oddly erotic tale of true love and nuclear terrorism from Rudy Rucker. When Alwin, a disaffected young physicist, takes a vacation in Florence with his wife Sybil and finds himself kidnapped by terrorists, he is soon wrapped up in a potentially world-changing—and utterly bizarre—plot. It’s not just that the terrorists are building an atomic bomb, which they want Alwin to help with, and it’s not just that he is desperately attracted to one of his captors. It’s that they have trapped a weird, four-dimensional creature of hypermatter who happens to resemble, well, a spherical naked woman. And who absolutely oozes mind-clouding, desire-inducing pheromones . . . Before they know it, Alwin and Sybil are both discovering the pleasures and curiosities of the sex sphere, while on the run from the various forces chasing them. But what is the sphere itself, really? Why is it stuck in our dimension? And what does it want in the end? Night Shade Books’ ten-volume series with Rudy Rucker collects nine of the brilliantly weird novels for which the mathematician-turned-author is known, as well as a tenth, never-before-published book, Million Mile Road Trip. We’re proud to collect in one place so much of the work of this influential figure in the early cyberpunk scene, and to share Rucker’s fascinating, unique worldview with an entirely new generation of readers.

The saucer aliens are here. They''re healing the planet. They''ve got to be stopped. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

It''s the only alternate universe. Just the one. Thanks to "bluegene", life is long. But out Route 42 near Goshen, it''s also kind of dull. Just the thing to encourage an expedition into the only actual other universe, the place where...but that would be telling. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

"The feds aren''t going to fund you anymore. Not when your boss is a self-flattening radioactive pancake." Desperate times call for desperate inventions. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The lives of scientist Alan Turing and author William Burroughs are turned upside down in this off-the-wall sci-fi caper from Rudy Rucker. What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, faked his suicide to escape assassination by the secret service? What if he then became the lover of Beat author William Burroughs? And what if they then mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI agents tracking them, raised Burroughs''s wife—killed in a tragic drunken mishap—from the dead, and, finally, tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos to use them for a very different purpose? Turing & Burroughs is a wild beatnik adventure: compulsively readable, hysterically funny, with insane warps and twists—and a bad attitude throughout.

The real world is unbearable to madcap inventor Harry Gerber, so he uses his genius to twist the laws of science and create his own tailor-made universe. Master of Space and Time combines high physics and high jinks, blurring the line between science and magic. From a voyage to a mirror-image world where sluglike parasites make slaves of humanity, to trees and bushes that grow fries and pork chops, to a rain of fish, author Rudy Rucker -- two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick Award -- takes readers on the ultimate joyride. But once the gluons at the core of Harry''s creation run out . . . disaster looms for Harry and his friends.

(Bio-)Mechanische Evolution Die Roboter haben sich auf dem Mond verschanzt, Asimovs Robotergesetze aus ihren Speichern gelöscht und machen jetzt Front gegen die Menschen. Die Menschheit kann sie nicht einfach vernichten, denn sie hat sich zu lange auf die Dienste der Roboter blind verlassen. Sie auszuradieren hieße, fast das gesamte technische Wissen zu verlieren. Die Roboter entwickeln Androiden, die sich optisch nicht von Menschen unterscheiden und in der Lage sind, sich mit menschlichen Frauen fortzupflanzen. So soll die Gesellschaft auf der Erde unterwandert werden. Die Menschen hingegen entwickeln die sogenannte Chip-Hefe, die wichtige Schaltkreise und Hardware überwuchert. Die Evolution endet vorerst in einem Patt ...

Originally published: Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

The original “Mad Professor” of cyberpunk, Rudy Rucker (along with fellow outlaws William Gibson and Bruce Sterling) transformed modern science fiction, tethering the “gnarly” speculations of quantum physics to the noir sensibilities of a skeptical and disenchanted generation. In acclaimed novels like Wetware and The Hacker and the Ant he mapped a neotopian future that belongs not to sober scientists but to drug-addled, sex-crazed youth. And won legions of fans doing it. In his outrageous new story “The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club,” Dr. Rucker infiltrates fundamentalist Virginia to witness the apocalyptic clash between Bible-thumpers and Saucer Demons at a country club barbecue. He shoots erotica into orbit with “Rapture in Space” to explore the future of foreplay in freefall. In his gonzo nonfiction masterpiece “Surfing the Gnarl,” he documents the role of the Transreal in transforming both the personal and the political, distinguishes with mathematical precision between “high gnarl” and “low gnarl” in literature and life, and argues for remaking popular culture as a revolutionary project. And Featuring: PM’s exclusive Outspoken Interview, in which the author explains Infinity, deconstructs his own outrageous film career, answers one Jeopardy question, and (finally!) reveals the truth about Time. All under oath. You’ll never be the same. Is that good or bad? Your call.

Carlo Morse and Jimmy Ganzer pioneered dream-fabbing, but these days people only want to close their eyes to trashy stuff -- not the mention the kids and their fancy imported tech. It''s a good thing Schwartz''s Deli is still the same. At the Publisher''s request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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.

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.