Most Popular Books by Rudy rucker

"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

Silicon Valley researcher Joe Cube recieves an offer from Momo, a woman from the All, a world of four spacial dimensions.

A disturbed billionaire and a deranged president jeopardize the future of the world with nanotechnology in this science fiction adventure. “Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Godel and Lenny Bruce might start to approximate full-on Ruckerian warp-space, but without the sweet, human, splendidly goofy Rudy-ness at the core of the singularity.” —William Gibson It begins the day after next year in California. A maladjusted computer industry billionaire and a somewhat crazy U.S. 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 an autistic boy named Chu. The next time it isn''t so easy to stop them. And the human world changes permanently. Most of the story takes place in our world after a previously unimaginable transformation. All things look the same, and all people feel the same—but they are different (they’re able to read one another’s minds for starters). Travel to and from other nearby worlds in the quantum universe is possible. Our world is visited by giant humanoids from another quantum universe, some of whom mean to tidy up the mess we’ve made . . . or maybe just run things. “Rucker takes on the hot topics of nanotechnology and the transformation of humanity with exuberance and irreverent wit. . . . Wildly inventive, tossing out ideas on the cutting edge of science with attention to their most offbeat consequences .” —The Denver Post “Rucker puts the weird in science. String theory might as well have been invented to give rise to mind-benders like this book.” —Cory Doctorow “[Rucker’s] devoted fans and dazzled newcomers to him will revel in his willingness to push technological extrapolation to its soaring limits.” —Booklist

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Punk-rock SF! Nuclear terrorists, a political kidnapping, and a giant woman from the fourth dimension. Say goodbye to the old world. This literary tour de force explores the landscape of the higher dimensions with the humor and vigor of an underground cartoon. At the same time, it manages to be a heartfelt and realistic depiction of a contemporary marriage.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

(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.

It''s 2054, and Phil Gottner doesn''t know where his life is. His girlfriend is hooked on merge, a drug used in ''bacteria-style'' sex. His father has just been swallowed by a hyperspatial anomaly that materialized from a piece of art designed to project images of four-dimensional objects into three-dimensional space. Then, at the funeral, Phil meets and falls in love with Yoke Starr-Mydol, a young lovely visiting from the Moon.Spuring Phil''s advances, Yoke flies to the Polynesian island of Tonga, where she discovers an alien presence at the bottome of the sea. Calling themselves Metamartians, the aliens offer Yoke an alla,a handheld device that gives its owner the power of mind over matter-which, it turns out, is pretty much like having a magic wand.But as Phil pursues Yoke, and the altruistic Metamartians distribute more allas, he begins to suspect that his father''s disappearance and presumed death are linked to the aliens and their miraculous gift. For it seems that the allas are accompanied by a fourth-dimensional entity known as Om, a godlike being who''s taken a special interest in humans. Now Phil and Yoke must solve the mystery of the Metamartians and their god, before humanity uses its newfound powers to destroy itself altogether.Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards.As his "own alternative to cyberpunk," Rucker developed a writing style he terms: Transrealism, as outlined in his 1983 essay "The Transrealist Manifesto," is science fiction based on the author''s own life and immediate perceptions, mixed with fantastic elements that symbolize psychological change. Many of Rucker''s novels and short stories apply these ideas.Rucker often uses his novels to explore scientific or mathematical ideas; White Light examines the concept of infinity, while the Ware Tetralogy (written from 1982 through 2000) is in part an explanation of the use of natural selection to develop software (a subject also developed in his The Hacker and the Ants. His novels also put forward a mystical philosophy that Rucker has summarized in an essay titled, with only a bit of irony, "The Central Teachings of Mysticism".

Ride the wave with Rudy Rucker---author, programmer, mathematician, professor, cyberpunk, hipster, transrealist, and family man. A writer’s journey. Rucker composed "Journals: 1990-2014" over twenty-five years. A long-running adventure. Entries include: Introspection and philosophizing, sketches of daily life, descriptions of Rucker''s travels, and notes on writing.

In 1836, Mason Algiers Reynolds leaves his family''s Virginia farm with his father''s slave, a dog, and a mule. Branded a murderer, he finds sanctuary with his hero, Edgar Allan Poe, and together they embark on an extraordinary expedition to the South Pole, and the entrance to the Hollow Earth. It is there, at the center of the world, where strange physics, strange people, and stranger creatures abound, that their bizarre adventures truly begin.Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards.As his "own alternative to cyberpunk," Rucker developed a writing style he terms: Transrealism, as outlined in his 1983 essay "The Transrealist Manifesto," is science fiction based on the author''s own life and immediate perceptions, mixed with fantastic elements that symbolize psychological change. Many of Rucker''s novels and short stories apply these ideas.Rucker often uses his novels to explore scientific or mathematical ideas; White Light examines the concept of infinity, while the Ware Tetralogy (written from 1982 through 2000) is in part an explanation of the use of natural selection to develop software (a subject also developed in his The Hacker and the Ants. His novels also put forward a mystical philosophy that Rucker has summarized in an essay titled, with only a bit of irony, "The Central Teachings of Mysticism".

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.