Hurry!
Be the first in your crowd to check out…
Postsingular for free online!
We’ve got single-column PDF, double-column PDF, HTML, Palm reader, and text file versions ready for you!
Read some or all of it, post a comment on this blog entry, and buy the book.
Check out www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular today!
November 2nd, 2007 at 7:58 am
God, I am a student and usuallycan’t afford first edition hardcovers and so I have to wait and wait for the paperbacks. This is really a great surprise. Thank you so much, I love Creative Commons. Do you have a tip system in place so we can slip you a couple of bucks though Paypal for getting your book free? I would really like to contribute whatever I can.
November 2nd, 2007 at 8:10 am
Clark, I’m glad you’re happy with this. I prefer not to take tips, what I really want is to sell copies of the book! So if you want to pay me back, tell other people about POSTSINGULAR and perhaps they’ll buy it! Your time is as valuable to me as your money. The old viral marketing scenario…
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:40 am
Thank you very much for making Postsingular available online. I’ve really enjoyed your other work, Software, Realware, Wetware, Freeware, and I’m looking forward to reading Postsingular.
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:38 am
I saw a post on BoingBoing this morning about Postsingular and spent the day reading from start to finish. Great work! Thanks for making it available online. I’ll be sure to check out your other work and keep my eyes open for anything with your name on it in the future. 🙂
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:24 pm
Such a nice thing to do. Thank you!
November 2nd, 2007 at 9:50 pm
Very cool, thank you!
I’ll still end up with a paper version in the near future (my wife is a librarian–books are our life). But now I can take it with me on the computer and sneak in a few pages during a boring meeting.
November 3rd, 2007 at 6:21 am
Thank you rudy for opening up the book. It was a GREAT read – didn´t like the highbrane theorie that much but I see why it needs to be in the story (unfolding). I would have personally more fun just staying in the normal world with all those fancy nets and bots. Also the ending for Thuy and Jayjay was a bit rude – couldn´t they have had some wonderful mindboggling telepathic sex after all they have been through? 😉
Anyway I enjoyed the book a lot read it in one go and still drooling over the details.
As for “not accepting donations”. I am all for tree (gaia) saving measures and that means that I would be VERY reluctant to buy the book in dead tree form (now that I read it entirely digitally) – since you don´t want donations of money I am trying to convince some of the english speaking people I know to get it from amazon…
Thanks for the the kindness to open up your thoughts about post-singularity to the (money)free world.
November 3rd, 2007 at 8:15 am
Thanks, all you kiqqies out there. Weird to have people reading my book in one day—after I worked on it for nearly two years!
We had 13,000 downloads of the book in the first twenty-four hours. Awesome.
And the book’s already ported to the Palm, the smartphone, and even Java-enabled dumb phones.
Sitting in a coffee shop yesterday tracking the activity on my laptop, it struck me once again that POSTSINGULAR is “really” about life just as it is in our wired world today.
As for money, I certainly understand that a number of you can’t afford a paper book (at least not in hardback)—and that some of you don’t believe in paper books at all. But I don’t want direct donations.
What you can do for me in return for my giving you the book online is to promote it. Talk POSTSINGULAR up to your friends and mention it on the web. The buzz helps sales a lot.
Although it’s easy to read too much into the gyrating Amazon sales rankings, it did look like my rank improved over the day.
As for fALk’s remark that it might have been more interesting to stay on Earth than to gallavant off to the Hibrane—that’s a criticism that’s often leveled at me; there’s a similar pattern in FREK AND THE ELIXIR and in MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE. I set up an amazing new world, then move off to another one.
Partly this stylistic quirk of mine is a product of the zeitgeist. We’re very distractable now, very prone to web-surfing to some thing new.
And I simply enjoy cramming a lot of stuff into each novel. It’s kind of like the heavy metal “turn it up to eleven” aesthetic. More!
Also, I’m a mature writer now, POSTSINGULAR is my 18th novel and 30th book overall. I’ve learned a lot of craft. So I can’t resist elaborating on the book by dovetailing in more than one world.
Yet another reasons why I hop worlds is that for me, each novel is transreally “about” my actually writing the novel. My getting into the novel is mirrored by having one of my characters get into a higher world. (In POSTSINGULAR I mirror this even more directly by having Thuy write WHEENK.)
As for Thuy and Jayjay’s love story, fALk—well, they DO get to have sex in the last chapter and IMHO, it’ s a fairly hot scene. And they’re still gonna be together in the second volume in this series, HYLOZOIC, which is “still a-building at Rucker Labs” (as Paul DiFilippo put it in his scifi.com review.).
November 4th, 2007 at 4:02 am
Just finished reading it, had to stop half way through to get some sleep, dreamt about orphidnet, simulations etc. What a great idea! I’m a budding physicist (doing my Masters in String Theory) and loved the idea about being able to use the Big Pig to extend my abilities (they really need extending!).
Interesting use of physics, not too much detail so as to derail the storyline.
I did find it odd that Thuy and JayJay stopped off for a meal in the midst of all the action though 😀
All in all, a really good read. Thanks!
November 4th, 2007 at 5:41 am
Weird to have people reading my book in one day—after I worked on it for nearly two years!
All your own fault for making it so damn interesting 😉
As for Thuy and Jayjay’s love story, fALk—well, they DO get to have sex in the last chapter and IMHO, it’ s a fairly hot scene
Yes. The scene was hot sure – but now that they unfolded all this singular natural glory there is probably 100 million better ways to engage with each other then raw sex – like switching bodies or stuff? 😉
As for the second world – its really not bad more an observation then a critique- it was just this image of a glowing huge slow (=dumb?) angellike figure with spotty trousers that somehow didn´t make the world coherent to me and dropped me out a tiny bit – it “looked” a bit too comic like in my head with the little human critters and the slow giants – it just somehow didn´t fit into that cool fast sparkling endless wonderorphi tech world (yes I also see that this has a reason but still)
Maybe you are in the process of tying this second world a bit more closely to the first 😉 I did at first think the mirror world is something that happened because of the whole vearth 1.0 thing (like digitial left over ghosts or such).
Anyway thank you again for making this book available. I wrote a review on my blog and add some of your comments from here. Looking forward to season 2 🙂
November 5th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
For re-reading purposes, I find it helpful to have a print copy and a PDF. Peter Watts recently went Creative Commons with his awesome first-contact novel, “Blindsight,” and I like having the PDF version for looking up cool passages in a hurry.
November 5th, 2007 at 11:46 pm
I think all of Peter Watts’s novels are available for free download on his website. Starfish is especially good.
http://www.rifters.com/real/shorts.htm
November 7th, 2007 at 2:51 am
Thanks for the download, love your work!
One question, is there any chance I can reasd the download on my Creative Zen Vision:M multimediapod?
November 7th, 2007 at 6:41 am
Aaron, I know that the http://www.manybooks.net lets you choose among a very wide range of bot-generated versions of POSTSINGULAR, check there. POSTSINGULAR is one of their November “Books of the Month.”
November 7th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Hi Rudy!
Thanks for publishing your book online! I’ve added Postsingular to the list of quantum computing sci-fi that I maintain on my blog.
Sincerely,
nextquant
November 11th, 2007 at 12:09 pm
Thanks all, for the good feedback.
Yesterday I sold a hardback copy in person to a guy who’d read the book online! Proof that this marketing concept can work.
Something else you might do to help me out is to post comments about Postsingular on the Amazon page.
November 12th, 2007 at 10:43 am
I loved it. It took me about a week to read during lunch breaks at work. I like when a book becomes something I think about before I fall asleep and then again when I wake up. I haven’t read something so blazing and psychedelic in a long time. Great work!
November 12th, 2007 at 5:06 pm
great idea to let it be downloaded. now i will read it and when it will be available in my bookstore (hopefully translated, not because it is best for me, but just because it is easier some way) i will buy it for sure! keep writing such great books!
November 13th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
i am not interested in a hard copy of the book but after fiending over it for a few days (on my smart phone) i would love to make a digital donation. how can i? thanks for the great work.
November 13th, 2007 at 1:24 pm
641, if you want to do something to repay me, click this link to the Postsingular page on Amazon and make a favorable comment. It’s takes a minute, as you have to log into Amazon, but means more to me than a couple of bucks.
November 15th, 2007 at 11:49 am
Thank you.
November 16th, 2007 at 7:00 am
We have a word in England – “unputdownable”. I don’t know if it’s also in use in the States, but this marks the first time I’ve ever had to apply this unwieldy adjective to a laptop instead of a book!
Postsingular is a splendid read, constantly bubbling with wacky and brain-mangling (or should that be Brane-mangling?) ideas. Thanks for writing it, Rudy, and for making it downloadable. I’m also enjoying reading the notes – it’s a bit like having the “special features” on a DVD release.
And there’s more to come, too – can’t wait. I promise to pimp it on Amazon!
November 19th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Just DLed it to my PDA and drooling in anticipation for great reading.
I sincerely thank you for making your work availiable online, cause it it’s the only way to read some hot new foreing books here, in Russia (delivery from US will cost me the same as book itself or more).
November 30th, 2007 at 4:08 am
I just read this on my PDA, to tell the truth – I would have been quite happy having the first 3 or 4 chapters as it’s own book. a pre-postsingular monster tome to prepare me for the wonderness of chapters 5 and on.
I have literally not been able to do anything else other than read this book since I got it.
I need Hylozoic now please.
no waiting.
gimme.
(or I’ll send some subbies)
November 30th, 2007 at 8:02 am
Hi, I just finished PS on pdf. Good!
What I like most about Rudy’s stories is their playfulness. Yet in the same breath there’s a certain bloodlessness, like a Di$ney movie. I think that may because of the scope and speed doesn’t allow for much gritty detail. That said I ate it all into my brain meats in 4 days snuck in while rendering at work (shhh).
I admit that reading at that speed it turns into a delicious sponge cake of narrative, with lemon-lime cream cheese frosting.
Rudy Rucker’s writing is a good contrast against Chuck Palahniuk’s. Chuck likes to lapse rhapsodic about a few things to a dirty and textural degree, set it on fire and inhale the fumes. While Rudy like to speed over, around, through, vinner, and voutter the thing describing a rainbow Calabi-Yau knot in a child’s marble. But that’s just my opinion.
I would like more smell descriptions in Mr. Rucker work.
Long Live the Gnarl!
Horg!
December 24th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Rudy, it was great to meet you in Live Worms a while back! I posted a picture here: http://aqalicious.zaadz.com/photos/view/283654 – the description of which links to your Postsingular webpage.
I’ve been a fan for a long time. I’ve been slowly savoring your latest novel, and just posted a review in various places on the net, including Amazon and my blog; I’ve also praised the book in various discussion threads and conversations both on- and offline. Here’s a copy of my review:
~~~
Postsingular, Rudy Rucker’s latest novel, is an exhilarating ride through a technological singularity that grants earthlings godlike powers. Though the human condition as we now know it has been transcended through technological means – with telepathy, ominividence (“all-seeing”), and vastly enhanced intelligence among the choices on the postsingular menu – all the flaws and foibles of human nature are included in the postsingular mix, with strange and sometimes hilarious results. The culture and politics of our dark, strange era as reflected in the funhouse mirror of Rucker’s astonishing and playful imagination is both funny and strangely reassuring, with regular people struggling to save the world from sociopathic corporate leaders and corrupt religious politicians.
For the first time in his career, Rucker is experimenting with making his novel available online through a Creative Commons license, as has been done with great success by other science fiction writers such as Cory Doctorow and Peter Watts. As a big fan of both Rudy Rucker and Creative Commons, I hope that this experiment will be highly successful and that many people will support his work by buying copies. The author has also made available over 300 pages worth of working notes for the novel, for those who want more background information.
I highly recommend this novel and I’m looking forward to the next two books in the series. For more information on Rudy Rucker and his work see http://www.rudyrucker.com/
A plot summary of Postsingular is available at http://www.rudyrucker.com/postsingular/#summary
~~~
A version of the above with clickable hyperlinks is available at:
http://pods.zaadz.com/ii/discussions/view/202550#221624
I couldn’t figure out how to make hyperlinks work in this comment field.
Thanks for writing another great novel!
spiral out,
Arthur
December 24th, 2007 at 2:18 pm
LOL – OK, your software is smart enough to make URL’s clickable – that answers that question…my review, in some of it’s incarnations at least, has some of the words made into links, e.g. Postingular, Rudy Rucker, Creative Commons, Cory Doctorow…
cheers
Arthur
January 1st, 2008 at 3:23 am
The ZONE website’s review of POSTSINGULAR is online at:
http://www.zone-sf.com/wordworks/postsing.html
January 20th, 2008 at 10:55 pm
It was a good book, you’ve done another great job of writing what I wonder will one day be a classic to the science fiction community. It was a book for geeks of the fantasy & techno class, liberals with a curiosity of “what if” over the ultimate interaction between man and the net. Darkness and Wonder. Unlike FREK AND THE ELIXIR, I’d never read this one to a kid, too adult for little ones. But like the last one I read from you I got hooked fast. In fact that’s how I made it through it so fast. The urge to know what will happen next is so strong you keep turning pages without caring to count them. With POSTSINGULAR I felt it would make a great DC Vertigo comic. FREK AND THE ELIXIR I felt would make a great traditionally animated movie. Both are things I think would be very cool to one day see happen. Also I thought it was cute reading Wow get visually reincarnated in Azaroth’s animal disguise. I can think of a lot more I’d like to say with the vibrant mental images this book painted but I’m not sure how to sum them up right :).
June 26th, 2008 at 11:34 am
greetings from (‘they still use oil around here’) bangalore. It had been a long time since writing felt as alive and teeming as a DMT experience or a night in a buzzing forest. Postsingular is the perfect (whether hyper-imaginal or scarily future-real) book to read to soothe some of the ache one develops as a young man after experiencing the rush of jazz, psychedelics, sex, Qawwali music, near-telepathic online conversations and synchronistic meetings and then learns to curb as he grows older. I wish I could have understood the physics and mathematics of the Planck frontier better but nevertheless, I felt superconnected to the concepts and the experiences and the visions.
I have been spreading the word around about your book – I hope when I travel to the Lobrane San Francisco again I can offer you some raw image and video data and any ultra-dimensional storylines from India.
July 19th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
I think Postsingular is absolutely brilliant, as well as just good fun… I haven’t been quite so thrilled since first discovering Wm Gibson ages and ages ago.
I am very curious about your discouraging of donations. The hardcover book with shipping is a good deal more than I am willing to spend as a token of support, but it would be nice to give concrete appreciation of your efforts… are you independently wealthy or what? I think looking at putting a Paypal link on your blog as “just tips” is belittling a generosity-based economic model that might actually surprise you. It is a pet theory of mine that a donation based economic model might end up actually being more functional than the outmoded “no money, no entertainment” model that Hollywood and the “music industry” is still so desperately (and ineffectually) clinging to.
I stand down from my soapbox now.
Thanks again for your brilliance and generosity.
July 21st, 2008 at 7:35 am
Thanks, Will, I’m glad you liked POSTSINGULAR.
As for my “no donations” policy on POSTSINGULAR, since my publisher Tor Books is selling hard copies of the book, they prefer that I not be soliciting money myself for the free preview that they’re allowing me to give away.
But I can imagine trying the donations-only approach sometime, perhaps with a reprint version of one of my older books.
By the way, from what I hear from Tor, we will probably not be posting HYLOZOIC (the sequel to POSTSINGULAR) for free download; I think they’re interested in comparing how the sales do with and without the download available.
February 17th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Hello! I am telling everyone I know that they will love this book.
I bought the book and now just downloaded the notes and digital copy to re-visit my favorite kiqqies and “The Founders” while I wait for the sequel.
I really get the surreal feeling one must have hearing we all read your long and amazing journey in one day. Reading as consuming in over indulgence. That blew my mind thinking about how much is packed in to this story, and to read it so quickly, considering the time and effort it must have taken to write it!
I have to read it again now that I know what all the math and physics terms mean (to a degree) because to be honest since I was unfamiliar with some terms I just ran past them as fictional gobbley gook. Don’t judge me for being honest here as I am just sharing that even noob/novices will love the book.
Peace
April 2nd, 2009 at 4:36 pm
PostSingular just mentioned in a Pecha Kucha presentation in Rock Hill, SC, outside of Charlotte, NC. Context was description of future media perhaps as nanobots and the orphidnet. Referrer @budesigns
October 23rd, 2009 at 11:56 am
Great book! I just finished reading it on my phone and I am off to order the sequel.
February 9th, 2012 at 11:08 am
Dear Rucker,
I had the pleasure of meeting you once in Torino (Italy) possibly 12 years ago.
I have read many of your books, and I like the way Postsingular mixes deep Computer Science and social reflections with an intriguing plot.
I’m teaching Artificial Intelligence in a media-technology bachelor, in Denmark, and I wanted to assign my class something to read to introduce intelligent agents and possible scenarios of application… So I suggested my students to read the first 2 chapters of your book.
I anticipate some debate and very interesting discussions… now I go back to my copy of The lifebox, the seashell and the soul” 😉
February 10th, 2012 at 7:43 am
Thanks, Andrea. That was a good trip to Torino, and I remember you. I’m glad you’re using the free Creative Commons edition of POSTSINGULAR in your class. That was my hope in making CC editions of POSTSINGULAR and the WARE TETRALOGY…that people would use them in courses, and for sampling my work.