Reviews of Books by Rudy Rucker
Books are listed in reverse order of publication.
This file was last updated on Sept 3, 2019.
Contents
There's an alien under the bed and another on the lawn. This
is Los Perros, Calif. — playground for Rudy Rucker, setting for his newest
novel, Million Mile Road Trip. And things are only going to get stranger
from here. ... What it cooks down to is music. What it cooks down to is a
jubilant looseness. A freak collision of dialect and voice and neurons well
greased, and a man who wants to tell a story about three teenagers going on a
road trip through alien worlds without leeching any of the inherent strangeness
from it. ... This kind of thing, you just jump in and hang on, warmed by the
goofball joy of it all, buoyed up by the high, jazz-cat bebop of the language,
the glazed stoner rhythms. And by the end of it, your mind will be inevitably
expanded — open to the possibility of almost anything.
— NPR
Review
Tipping his hat to Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, and Douglas
Adams, Rucker immerses readers in a fantastical road trip adventure that’s a
wild ride of unmitigated joy. Rucker populates his story with boldly surreal,
humorous personalities and environments and moves it at a frenzied,
ever-increasing pace. 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
Rucker has outdone himself in creating the most bizarre and
surreal and overstuffed cosmic ecology of his career. The vast majority of the
concepts are brand new. And the abundance of alien characters is the richest
yet of his oeuvre. Yes, it’s all obvious now—Rucker is Lennon & McCartney
rolled up into one.
— Paul Di Filippo in Locus
Online
Million Mile Road Trip mixes in elements of
Kerouac, surfer-dude culture, the high school outsider novel, Road Runner
cartoons, flying saucer lore, teen romance, and even a touch of Miles Daves. …
What you read for is the storm of inventions. … This might be exctly the sort
of thing Lewis Carroll would be up to if he’d known about Einstein-Rosen
bridges and modern geek teen culture.
— Gary K. Wolfe in Locus
Rudy Rucker seldom repeats himself. Consequently, when
Rucker does venture back to previously explored territory, you can be fairly
confident that there’s good reason. This is certainly true in the current case,
as he returns, after nearly thirty years, to the steampunk milieu of his 1990
novel The Hollow Earth. … The two books co-exist quite
harmoniously, despite the large gap of years twixt their composition. The
blending of typical Ruckerian cosmological insanity with 19th-century mindsets
proves to be a stimulating concoction. Toss in some time-travel frissons at the
end, when some metafictional stagecraft happens, and you have a book that is
dense with the kind of intellectual “eyeball kicks” for which Rucker is justly
famous. It’s a tribute to the wild-eyed tales of Poe and his peers that is also
an up-to-the-minute 21st-century SF production.
— Paul Di Filippo in Locus
Online
Rucker's 828-page compilation of journal jottings captures,
with the proper dose of absurdity, Silicon Valley at the millennium's cusp, a
digitized microcosm of the human paradox, simultaneously beautiful and futile,
like a wry batch of contaminated ethanol torched by humor. Rucker always
surprises. … His Journals shine some 4D sunlight on a human time
period when the collective brain punched through former perceived limits with
code and chemicals, and which is just now taking its place in a literary
context.
— San Jose Metro.
Rudy Rucker's latest novel, The Big Aha, is pure
transreal Ruckeriana featuring extreme biological and quantum technologies,
steamy techno-sex, nasty aliens from higher dimensions — and all soaked in the
unique atmosphere of the magical 1960s. … This is a great example of how
science fiction publishing is being redefined.
— Giulio Prisco, io9.
The Big Aha gloriously and objectively exists on an
absolute level with all of Rucker’s classic work, chockfull of crazy yet
scientifically rigorous ideas embodied in gonzo characters and plots. Like a
jazzman, Rucker takes his intellectual obsessions as chords and juggles them
into fascinating new patterns each time out…a rollercoaster ride that is never
predictable and always entertaining…straight out of some Kerouac or Kesey
novel, yet with a twenty-first century affect. Rucker is remarkably attuned to
a new generation. Ultimately, all the craziness and whimsy and otherworldly
menaces of Zad’s mad odyssey induces true pathos and catharsis in the reader.
— Paul Di Filippo, Locus
Online.
Some passages have an oddly beautiful weirdness, tinged with
old memories, like a humid summer day... Splendid flights of the imagination.
— Faren Miller, review in Locus Magazine
Rucker has been writing like a mind-meld of Gödel and
Burroughs on acid, but with some sort of academic overmind trying, and for the
most part succeeding, to run the result through a logical
scientific-refereed-paper process... But there is something else to this novel,
a characterological sweetness combined with a political passion the nature of
which might cause Rucker to deny that it is political... What Rudy
Rucker presents and champions is the last and finally successful battle in the
culture war dating back to the Transcendental Movement of the nineteenth century
that peaked in the 1960s.
— Norman Spinrad, Isaac Asimov's SF
Magazine.
Rucker accomplishes a significant feat by mashing up Greg
Bear-level speculations with a kind of On the Road vibe, full of
slang-laden hipster contempt for the Establishment and a desire to break free
of stifling conventions. … The Eisenhower-era conformity and general societal
suspicion of weirdos is a perfect adventure matrix for these ultimate
outsiders: chimerical, telepathic slugs.
— Paul Di Filippo, review in Locus
Online
Rucker’s “Beatnik SF Novel” deftly combines historic
characters and wild flights of imagination in a spin-off of our world’s
history. … Rudy Rucker has produced an SFnal tour de force. … The
prose in Turing & Burroughs can flow like a drug-stoked dream.
— Faren Miller, review in Locus Magazine
Rucker's novels have ... an angle of attack reminiscent of
the Thomas Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow and the Terry Southern of The
Magic Christian. Turing & Burroughs is all of that and more.
Much more. It is Rudy Rucker's most ambitious novel, and while perhaps not a
perfect success, it is a success. ... Rucker being Rucker, the central
story line is not even half the bizarre, fascinating, scientific, sexual, and
historical content of this delightfully humorous yet somehow thematically
serious novel.
— Norman Spinrad, review in Asimov's
SF Magazine
A delightful alternative history romp set in the middle of
the 1950s. Rucker immerses the reader in the beat milieu, with the added twist
that here they really are pod people, and loving it. … This novel
engages the reader to such an extent that it's easy to overlook the extensive
research that went into making it authentic, not just superficially, but in
depth.
— John Walker, review in Fourmilog.
Jim and the Flims offers Rucker’s delightfully
eccentric and transrealist approach to what turns out to be a kind of modern-day
Orpheus tale. It’s often silly and lighthearted, but it’s buoyed by the
emotional weight of Jim’s quest, and also by the often beautiful and moving
view of life and death. And I can guarantee that it’s probably not at all like
anything else you’re going to read this summer.
— Karin L. Kross, review in Tor.com
I love Rudy Rucker. The guy is simply incomparable when it
comes to writing science fiction, managing to seamlessly blend highly
intelligent existential and scientific speculation with wildly satirical and
insanely imaginative plotlines...You can imagine my delight when a copy of his
newest release, Jim and the Flims, landed on my doorstep. In this novel,
Rucker reimagines the myth of Orpheus as only he can – Jim Oster is a former
surfer dude, part-time stoner, and current Santa Cruz mailman who dabbles in
high-tech research.
— Paul Goat Allen, review
on Barnes & Noble Book club
Jim and the Flims...Rudy Rucker's weirdest, craziest,
colorfulest book yet? That's saying a lot, I know. But when it is at its most
bizarre, it is also most hilarious. Nobody else writes like Rudy.
— Marc Laidlaw, author of Kalifornia
Immensely entertaining, spirited and deep. This is Rudy
Rucker at his thoughtful best.
— Greg Bear
Rucker is a writer to whom that cliché “a genuine original”
legitimately applies. His memoir is a pleasantly meandering, chattily
digressive read. We hear the authentic voice of the beat, the hippie, the
cyberpunk, the hacker, and the bomb-throwing revolutionary iconoclast that, at
heart, Rucker has always been and remains—he is the most pleasant and decent
bomb-thrower one could ever hope to meet.
— Paul Witcover, Locus
Rucker knew from an early age that he wanted to be a beatnik
writer, and in many ways, he has succeeded. It is not an easy road: there is
trouble with his parents and with his wild-man lifestyle, and with work and
sheer existence. It’s been an interesting and well-lived life, and it makes for
a fascinating story... Reads like Rucker’s novels, packed with adventures,
filled with humor, and often quite surreal.
— Regina Schroeder, Booklist
Rucker’s yarn of a future where everything—animals, rocks,
the planet Earth—is conscious, telepathic and often irrepressibly chatty.
Rucker’s approach takes a high-comic trajectory with a satirical edge...
Serious, uproarious fun, with brain-teasers and brilliant ideas tossed about
like confetti.
— Kirkus Reviews.
Bristling with cool ideas, bizarre but witty formulations
and neologisms, Carrollian mathematical/logic puzzles, gnarly tech applications
and gonzo speculations, wicked satire, hot sex, nasty aliens, anarchic plots,
and psi powers ... Rucker juggles the disparate elements of his plot with the
zany aplomb of the Flying Karamazov Brothers. His vision of the future is a
hopeful and inclusive one—and one hell of a party.
— Locus
Hylozoic goes much further into the realms of the
twisted, the disturbing and the post-everything. ... The whole thing gets more
and more demented, until it almost feels like you need a post-singularity brain
to understand all of the eighth-dimensional drama and weirdness. But just when
you think Rucker's layered on too much ... for one book, it reveals itself,
once again, to be the story of JayJay and Thuy's marriage, and of their battle
to stay married in the face of alien birds, addictive manta-ray gel, and a
personality-eating world mind.
— io9
Alt-cultural folk strive to save Earth from digitized doom
in this novel from the prince of gonzo SF. A computer mogul's threat to replace
messy reality with clean virtuality and by a memory-hungry artificial
intelligence called the Big Pig propels nanotechnologist Ond Lutter, his
autistic son, Chu, and their allies on an interdimensional quest for a golden
harp, the Lost Chord, strung with hypertubes that can unroll the eighth
dimension and unleash limitless computing power. ... Rucker favors the flower
power of San Francisco over the number crunching of Silicon Valley. His novel
vibrates with the warm rhythms of dream and imagination, not the cold logic of
programming ... Playing with the math of quantum computing, encryption and
virtual reality, Rucker places his faith in people who find true reality
"gnarly" enough to love.
— Publisher's Weekly (C) Reed Business
Information.
Always willing and able to embrace SF's trendiest themes,
Rucker here takes on the volatile field of nanotechnology and the presumed
inevitable "singularity" of human and computer unification. In a
series of interrelated vignettes, he describes the calamity that befalls
nanotech inventor Ond Lutter and his would-be benefactors when Ond unleashes a
variety of self-replicating nanobots. In one episode, trillions of microscopic
bots, dubbed nants, chew up Mars to create a colossal Dyson Sphere orbiting the
sun. When the nants move on to Earth to transform every living being into a
virtual-reality doppelganger, Ond saves the day with a nant-busting virus. The
real fun begins, however, when Ond "improves" on the nants with
apparently benign nanobots, called orphids, that blanket every surface and
provide plugged-in users three-dimensional access to every conceivable scrap of
knowledge and experience. ... His devoted fans and dazzled newcomers to him
will revel in his willingness to push technological extrapolation to its
soaring limits.
— Carl Hays, Booklist
When it comes to unique voices in science fiction, few can
claim to have quite as distinctive a style as Rudy Rucker. Postsingular
is packed full of the larger-than-life weirdness that has become his trademark;
classic genre tropes and clichés rub shoulders with mathematical theorems and
wild technological speculation, delivered in prose that captures the the
languid vibe and hippie undercurrents of California. ... Rucker's quick-draw
style acts as a sleight-of-hand that allows him to slip some of SF's biggest
tropes and ideas beneath the reader's radar, as well as touching some very
human character aspects that are often skipped over (or, worse still, rendered
tiresome) by the pens of others. Postsingular has all the bells and
whistles that only a computing professor could provide, but never at the
expense of the story.
— Paul Raven, Interzone
Rudy Rucker's new novel Postsingular is pure
Rucker: a dope-addled exploration of the way-out fringes of string theory and
the quantum universe that distorts the possible into the most improbable
contortions... A kick-ass, weird-ass post-cyberpunk novel...This is one of the
most fun, strangest, most thought-provoking SF novels I've read.
— Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing
and BoingBoing
(two reviews)
This book is densely written...yet also captivatingly
plotted for sheer narrative verve and laced with plenty of humor and suspense.
Walking a tightrope between information overload and thriller action, the book
captures the heady zip, zest and buzz of the post-singular milieu, a world
where miracles are commonplace but structured logically to provide real
challenges, risks and triumphs.
— Paul DiFilippo, SciFi.com
Rucker writes with a hyperactive level of inventiveness that
seems to owe bits in equal measure to Lewis Carroll, William Burroughs, and Ray
Kurzweil. Rucker can be enormous fun to read, and there are some stunningly
bold ideas here.
— Gary K. Wolfe, Locus
Any true singularity pretty much by definition has to be so
over-the-top that it would stun present-day minds. This is over-the-top as only
Rudy Rucker can do it.
— Tom Easton, Analog
It's fast-paced and subversive: nanomachines dismantle all
life on Earth and send everyone to a virtual world, and you're still only on
page 20. Postsingular turns the singularity, the mythical moment when we
all transcend our humanity and become cyberer, into something much weirder and
more ambivalent. Just as other cyberfiction is becoming more cautious in its
predictions, Rucker takes wilder and wilder leaps into outer possibility.
— Charlie Jane Anders, San Francisco
Bay Guardian
Postsingular is hugely enjoyable. It's never boring,
and never gets bogged down in difficult info-dumps. Rucker's ideas are simple
and elegant, despite the complex thinking behind them shown in his working
notes. Exotic concepts such as shoons, orhipds, beezie and a universe 1.8
Planck lengths away in another dimension all seem natural and logical without
the need for dense scientification to justify them. Highly recommended, and
when you're done take a look at the working notes for further insight into
Rucker's ideas and inspirations.
— Patrick Hudson, The Zone
Rudy Rucker is well-loved for tons of things, but I am
totally in love with his characters. Not since Philip K. Dick has there been an
author more able to drill down to what exactly makes us human and expose it for
everyone to see. Postsingular—which deals mostly with society’s total,
overnight change and the people who get mixed up in it—has an unbelievably
awesome, unbelievably human cast of characters, from the dumpy scientist to his
autistic genius son, to the street kids who have huge dreams and small
ambition. Every word of dialogue is pitch-perfect, and along with a fairly
adventurous interdimensional plot, Postsingular is my favorite Rucker
book in years.
— Ryun Patterson, Bookgasm
Best Sci-Fi Books of 2007
Rucker cleverly pulls off a romantic comedy about
mathematicians in love. This excursion into alternative versions of Berkeley,
Calif., is full of quirky, charming life-forms human and otherwise and ruled by
a god who’s the female jellyfish-creator of Earth. All this seethes around Bela
Kis; Bela’s roommate, Paul Bridge; and Bela’s girlfriend, Alma Ziff, who
ping-pongs between them in a sometimes acute, sometimes obtuse love triangle.
Bela and Paul struggle for their Ph.D.s under mad math genius Roland Haut by
inventing a paracomputer “Gobubble” that predicts future events. ... Rucker’s
wild characters, off-the-wall situations and wicked political riffs prove that
writing SF spoofs, like Bela’s rock music avocation, “beats the hell out of
publishing a math paper.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
In Mathematicians in Love Rucker has created a love story wrapped up in a cross-cultural mystery tour that could only have happened inside the mind of a crazy mathematician. Buy a ticket. It’s well worth the price. It allows you to immerse yourself in math lingo as cool and arcane as anything jazz musicians could come up with and feel knowledgeable, even though it’s all so much mumbo jumbo. Somehow, when Rucker’s characters talk about the nature of the universe (or the curve of a yellow bikini) in terms of fractals, curved planes and number theory, it all seems totally, intense, relevant and hip. Which would be a pretty good description of the author.
— SFRevu
Rucker ... is palpably and quiveringly tuned in to the zeitgeist and can offer cultural and scientific commentary and satire better than almost any other SF author practicing today. And if, as some have it, SF always speaks of the present, no matter what era it’s set in, then Rucker has just cut straight to the chase this time, nevertheless retaining all the glorious weirdness that comes with more futuristic milieus.
— SciFi.com
Mathematicians in Love ... percolates with off-the-wall characters and trippy extra-dimensional shenanigans. Nobody writes math-based science fiction like Rudy Rucker does. He keeps the tone light and the action playful, even as his characters grapple with the meaning of tragedy and the ultimate mechanics of the universe. A definite high point in Rucker’s singular writing career.
— San Francisco Chronicle
All the pleasures of a Rucker novel come forth abundantly:
playfully weird higher physics and math; bizarre conceptual psychedelia; distinctively
Calfornian counter-cultural comedy; zany romance; doppelgangers; generally
happy endings. ... Mathematicians in Love is an engaging and
entertaining book, light yet thought-provoking, funny yet of some gravity. It
deserves success.
— Locus
Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of
American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gödel 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, author of Pattern
Recognition
What a Dickensian genius Rucker has for Californian
characters, as if, say, Dickens had fused with Phil Dick and taken up surfing
and jamming and topologising. He has a hotline to cosmic revelations yet he’s
always here and now in the groove, tossing off lines of beauty and comic
wisdom. ‘My heart is a dog running after every cat.’ We really feel with his
characters in their bizarre tragicomic quests.
— Ian Watson, author of The Great Escape
Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination
working in SF today
— Charles Stross, author of Accelerando
For sheer gonzo inventiveness, trust Rucker and this
gut-wrenching, near-FTL-speed intellectual adventure. And trust me, too: You
won’t read another SF work all year this much mind-bending, synapse-tingling
fun.
— Michael Bishop, author of Philip K. Dick Is
Dead, Alas
This may well be Rudy Rucker’s best novel — funny, wise,
fast and inventive. A real advance.
— Gregory Benford, author of The Sunborn
Rudy Rucker writes like the love child of Philip K. Dick and
George Carlin. Brilliant, frantic, conceptual, cosmological . . . like lucid
dreaming, only funny. This book rocks!
— Walter John Williams, author of Dread Empire’s
Fall
Rudy Rucker never fails to leave me breathless. . . Reading
one of his stories is like a reset button on reality: when it’s over, the whole
universe looks slightly different...and much stranger.
— Spider Robinson, author
of Night of Power
Much cyberpunk SF is grimly noir in depicting future-shocked
people trapped by their limitations, but in this collection of 19 laid-back
yarns, Rucker (Mathematicians in Love) finds human dilemmas much too
important to take seriously. "Jenna and Me," for example, co-written
with his son Rudy Rucker Jr., shows President Bush's daughter brain-wiped by
agents of the "conspiracy elite," but eventually becoming the
unwitting focus for an alien invasion that may remake humanity for the better.
"Junk DNA," a collaboration with Bruce Sterling, depicts the
accidental benefits of unprincipled commercial exploitation of bioscience.
Other stories emphasize extreme physical transformation, positive or negative
results of thought experiments, and cheerful horniness. While readers who want
rigorously developed plots or characterization may be disappointed, those who
can groove on something like a collaboration between Italo Calvino and Jimmy
Buffett will find themselves grinning and humming along.
— Publishers Weekly, Copyright © Reed Business
Information.
Often cited as one of the original cyberpunk pioneers,
Rucker has channeled his groundbreaking ideas and yen for mathematics into
almost 30 volumes of fiction and cerebral nonfiction over as many years. His
latest book of stories finds him in fine form, extrapolating number theory into
madcap tales about quantum elves and lotto-playing programmers. Five of the 13
pieces are collaborations with other notable SF veterans, such as Bruce
Sterling and John Shirley. In "2+2=5," written with Terry Bisson, two
nursing home-bound seniors zero in on breaking the world counting record.
"Cobb Wakes Up" recounts the fate of a long-dead robot inventor
resurrected as a conscious computer program. In perhaps the volume's most satirical
entry, "The Men in the Backroom at the Country Club," aliens
infiltrate Rucker's former home base of Lynchburg, Virginia, and meet their
unlikely nemesis in the form of the town's religious zealots. A delight for
both Rucker devotees and SF fans who prefer that their fiction be a little
zany.
— Carl Hays, Booklist,
Copyright © American Library Association.
In his introduction to Mad Professor, Rucker cites four factors that spawn his stories: thought experiments, power chords, gnarliness and wit. In other words, Rucker isn't just a hard-core science geek but a true-blue Californian. In fact, it's almost impossible to read a Rucker book without encountering the word "gnarly." One component unmentioned here is the Rucker-styled "transrealism," a form of poetic realism in which Rucker draws upon personal experience, melding this with a speculative fiction-plot staple, such as time travel or a parallel universe. This generates, by way of the weld, symbolic and often perceptive narratives sometimes atoning for genre implausibilities. ... It's not all as preposterous as it seems, in part because Rucker's enthusiasm is infectious. He is an author determined to entertain by any means necessary.
—Edward Champion, Los Angeles Times.
Rucker stands alone in the science fiction pantheon as some kind of trickster god of the computer science lab; where others construct minutely plausible fictional realities, he simply grabs the corners of the one we already know and twists it in directions we don't have pronounceable names for. ... Within the scope of the logical system he has built for his work, he is a peerless genius — a mad professor, in fact.
—Paul Raven, SF Site.
A key debate of the computer revolution concerns Stephen Wolfram’s argument that everything is equivalent to computation; this book explores the implications of that thought. Rucker modifies Wolfram’s basic premises to apply to everyday experience — ending with a half-dozen practical rules for attaining happiness. Charmingly written and thought-provoking.
— Kirkus Reviews
Lifebox is valuable in the same way a wide-ranging
philosophical classic like The Republic is valuable. To read it is to
peer through a conceptual lens with its own unique focal length -- an act that
allows us to see the world in a way we never glimpsed it before. ... Rucker’s
stylistic approach, featuring bite-size sci-fi stories that illustrate his
points, is so innovative that even non-techies will find themselves enjoying
the ride.
— San Francisco Chronicle
Rudy Rucker is an outstanding prophet of what will probably
be the greatest intellectual revolution of our times. This book tells the
ever-surprising story of his transformation as he discovers the wonders of the
computational universe, and grapples with their implications for humanity’s
oldest questions. For people who thrive on new ideas, this book will be a
classic.
— Stephen Wolfram, author of A New Kind of
Science.
This is the Big Book I wish everyone would do. Audacious and
simply inimitable. You are inside Rudy Rucker by the end. Nobody takes the
late-night idea that the universe is a computer as seriously (or with as much
fun) as this book does. What I love about it: it’s part biography, part far-out
science fiction speculation, part best course-in-computation-ever-taught, part
romp through the intellectual frontiers of mathematics and philosophy, part
sage wisdom, part blog, part graduate student thesis, part genius. What it
might become: a new Gödel, Escher, Rucker.
— Kevin Kelly, Wired editor.
Computation, pattern, and information are hot topics these
days as they find increasing applications in science, pure mathematics,
computing, and even philosophy. Dr. Rudy Rucker, long at the center of this
cyclone, has produced a truly stunning survey of their manifold consequences.
No one should pass up the experience of stepping through the portals of this
beautiful book into fantastic new worlds — and topics ranging from brains and
robots to hive minds and quantum souls.
— Cliff Pickover, author of A Passion for
Mathematics.
With the soul of a poet and the insight of a logician, Rudy
Rucker dramatizes the story of one of the most transforming ideas in modern
science: that of computation. Interpreting the notion oh so broadly, Rucker
calls on his impressive background in computer science and science fiction to
clarify, amplify, and vivify a whole complex of seminal concepts. And the book’s
fun to read too!
— John Allen Paulos, author of Innumeracy and
Once Upon a Number
How did a universe composed of just a few kinds of
absolutely identical particles, starting from a state of almost complete
uniformity, evolve in an ever ascending chain of complexity to produce
galaxies, stars, planets, life, intelligence, and culture? In this fascinating
book, Rudy Rucker explores how structures in nature, human consciousness, and
society may actually be computations, showing how extremely simple
computer programs manifest complex emergent behavior which mimics natural
phenomena, suggesting that computer science may become part of the foundation
of the sciences of the twenty-first century.
— John Walker, co-founder of Autodesk,
Inc.
In this immense and ambitious work, former computer science
professor Rucker (The Fourth Dimension) speculates that life is a computation.
He offers examples of everyday activities that are computational
processes-speech, agriculture, hunting-as well as instances of computations
found in nature and attempts to model those computations using cellular
automata. He applies this view of life as computation to problems in physics
and biology (e.g., DNA and genetic reproduction) and goes on to explore
artificial intelligence and the application of computation to questions of
society. The “lifebox” in the title is a digital copy of a person’s memory that
would be hyperlinked and “give a reasonably good impression of having a
conversation with you.” Though Rucker ultimately sees the world as beyond
computation, he convincingly argues that the computational view can shed
perspective on reality. Including many examples from the history of computing,
this dense and challenging read is recommended for science collections in
larger public and academic libraries.
— Library Journal (Garrett
Eastman, Rowland Inst. at Harvard Univ.)
Rucker ... is reaching as high as he can to try to use
available computer science and math metaphors to create a new, comprehensive,
multidisciplinary sensibility. The Ruckerian future is one in which new guiding
explanatory ideas will connect all areas of intellectual curiosity.
— Jaron Lanier in American Scientist
With this book, Rudy Rucker seems to have boldly ascended a
new peak in his career. Frek is utterly believable and empathy-inducing from
the first page of the tale. Frek remains both a conquering hero and a
12-year-old boy, showing us that we all may contain avatars bigger than our
shells. This book is Robert Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit — Will Travel with
the vacuum tubes replaced by wetware and all the knobs turned up to 11.
— SF Site
Completely delightful and amusing. A great adventure in a
book that is an enormous amount of fun and full of charms that will appeal to
readers of all ages from about 12 up. Frek and the Elixir may happily
become something to read for the millions of fans who are waiting for Harry
Potter Six.
— San Jose Mercury News
Rucker possesses a wild, unfettered imagination, and he uses
concepts from string theory and quantum mechanics to power this wide-ranging,
almost psychedelic yarn. Fresh, funny and frequently mind-boggling.
— San Francisco Chronicle
Rucker has a clarity of purpose: to entertain with
intelligence.
— Kansas City Star
Rucker successfully combines sharp-edged satire with
old-fashioned pulp sensibilities to create a frantic tale of dirty double-dealing
and high adventure. Readers in search of something different need look no
further than this droll saga of the future.
— Publishers Weekly
Imagine Frodo Baggins as a 31st-century human kid in a
transformed Earth where bio-engineering and consumerism have run amok... Frek’s
grand adventures will leave you simultaneously enlightened, awestruck, dazed,
and amused — “Ruckerized,” you might call it — by an author working at the
height of his powers.
— Locus
Frek and the Elixir is perhaps Rucker’s best book,
containing as it does such a wealth of material in a compelling story. In some
ways, Rucker is a literary descendant of Philip K. Dick, and this book felt to
me like the masterpiece of trashy culture, ordinary people, and wacked-out
ideas that Dick never quite wrote.
— Challenging Destiny
Before you can say “E.T.” or “A Wrinkle In Time,” Frek and
some very odd companions are off on an escapade that will span space, time and
numerous other dimensions ... a magical mystery tour of the universe according
to string theory.
— New York Times
A delightful book, one that carries us through the
sixteenth-century picture-plane at extraordinary angles, illuminating Bruegel,
his art and his world, with warmth and candor.
— William Gibson, author of Pattern
Recognition
Rucker manages the delicate trick of making his tale both
exotically foreign in time and space yet resonant with the present day. Much of
Rucker’s success stems from his obvious identification with his subject. Given
a relative paucity of solid historical data about Bruegel, Rucker is able to
reverse-engineer the man from his paintings, and the result is a visionary
artist who embodies Rucker’s own dichotomous concern with the matters both of
dirty earth and of numinous heaven.”
— Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine
What possesses a popular science fiction writer to write a
historical novel about a sixteenth-century Flemish painter enamored of peasant
ways? Unbridled fascination with the depiction of worlds real and imagined.
Rucker’s keen insights into Peter Bruegel’s spellbinding and politically
subversive work underpin this animated, suspenseful, and affecting tale, a step
up from Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000). Biographical
information about Bruegel is scant, but Rucker’s sense that the painter was
lively, compassionate, courageous, and determined feels right, and the
characters Rucker invents to flesh out Bruegel’s violent and precarious
universe are equally compelling, especially the cultured mapmaker Abraham
Ortelius, who is so careful to conceal his homosexuality; the sexy and volatile
half-Native American, Williblad Cheroo, and Bruegel’s smart, saucy wife. Just
as Bruegel’s paintings are a great joy to behold even as they induce the viewer
to face the grimmer aspects of life, Rucker’s vivid imagining of Bruegel’s
trials and triumphs is set against a cutting indictment of the horrors of the
Spanish occupation and Inquisition. Bruegel’s great gift was his perception of
the sacred in the earthy, and Rucker follows suit in this vital portrait of a
sweet-natured disciple of life’s fecund beauty in a time of cold-blooded
tyranny.
— Book List
Pictures at an exhibition, sort of, as mathematician and SF
writer Rucker tells the life of the great Flemish painter. ... Here we follow
Bruegel’s story from 1552 to 1569 in sixteen chapters that organize themselves
around sixteen of the master’s best-known paintings. ... A lively and
well-narrated tale that will appeal to Bruegel fans and may awaken newcomers to
an interest in his work.”
— Kirkus Reviews
As intricate ... as one of its subject’s own vivid
depictions of 16th-century life in the Spanish-dominated Low Countries, Rucker’s
fictionalized life of Bruegel draws its readers into a teeming world of
politics, art, love, sin and loss. ... This is clearly a labor of love and ...
it grapples handily with Bruegel’s genius — his ability to wittily and
gracefully recreate all human activity, from the sublime to the scatological.”
— Publisher’s Weekly
Speculative fiction based on mathematics, rather than the
physical sciences, is a rare commodity. Edward Abbot’s turn-of-the-century,
geometric fantasy “Flatland” is recognized as one of the classics of the genre.
Rudy Rucker has fashioned an engaging homage to it in Spaceland. Rucker
is one of the genre’s most reliable humorists, and he packs Spaceland with
plenty of wry observations and loopy scenarios. Even if you couldn’t handle college
algebra, Spaceland provides more than its fair share of mind-bending
fun.
— San Francisco Chronicle.
Spaceland puts the hyper into hyperspace and the high
into higher dimensions. A fast-paced tribute to the classic Flatland
that challenges all of our comfortable assumptions about the world we inhabit.
— Ian Stewart, author of Flatterland and The
Annotated Flatland.
Books on higher dimensions with such beauty, breadth, and
insight are rare. Dr. Rucker’s Spaceland is chock full of mind-boggling
images and ideas. The eclectic Rucker is both a mathematician and
science-fiction guru, and with the cold logic of the one and the inspired
vision of the other, he covers an array of topics sure to stimulate your
imagination and sense of wonder at the incredible vastness of our mathematical
universe.
— Clifford Pickover, author of Surfing Through
Hyperspace
Rucker’s new hard SF satire tweaks the dot-com Y2K
subculture into a hilarious tribute to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland (1884).
... Combining valid mathematical speculation with wicked send-ups of Silicon
Valley and its often otherworldly tribespeople, Rucker achieves a rare
fictional world, a belly-laugh-funny commentary on the Faustian dilemma facing
a lumpish 21st-century tech-addicted everyman: What is the real price in human
relationships, in love and friendship and compassion, of those cutesy little
user-friendly gadgets that happen to materialize so innocently on our desks?
— Publishers Weekly
The astonishing Rudy Rucker ... gets off a lot of good shots
at the peculiar dotcom-nerd mentality of his California environs. And the
romantic mishaps among Joe and his crowd are touchingly real. But Rucker
reserves his most brilliant sallies for depicting the strangenesses associated
with higher dimensions.
— Washington Post Book World
Rucker laces his hard science with ample doses of humor to
create an SF adventure for the dot-com generation. A good choice.
— Library Journal
Rucker’s determination to one-up the dimensional
explorations of Flatland gives Spaceland appeal.
— The New York Times Book Review
In the grand tradition of Jonathan Swift (with a tip of the
hat to the ancestral mathematical absurdist, Lewis Carroll), Spaceland
is a sharp morality tale in fool’s motley. Beneath all the riotous wordplay and
antic multi-dimensionality lies a fable about conservative fear-mongering and
corporate greed, as well as the trials of a man muddling his way through
everyday life. ... I predict a long shelf life.
— Locus
This tribute to Edwin A. Abbott’s classic novel Flatland
works wonderfully. This is because Spaceland is written by Rudy Rucker,
a Silicon Valley professor of mathematics and computer science who is also a
hard-SF writer with the most gonzo sensibility in science fiction.
— Amazon.com
His work links the largest possible cosmic view with the
trivia and tribulations of everyday life ... He portrays thoroughly real,
everyday people grappling with some farfetched phenomenon ... with comic
results.
— Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Rucker has fun with all kinds of sci-fi and mathematical
concepts, from Venusians who travel from dimension to dimension, sucking people’s
brains out, to scientists who learn to move objects three seconds into the
future via the fourth dimension.
— San Jose Mercury News.
Rucker has always displayed a taste for the goofily
outlandish... He dares to show the details of his outré creations rather than
simply sketch their outlines.
— San Francisco Chronicle.
Rucker’s writing is great like the Ramones are great: a
genre stripped to its essence, attitude up the wazoo, and cartoon sentiments
that reek of identifiable lives and issues. Wild math you can get elsewhere,
but no one does the cyber version of beatnik glory quite like Rucker. Rucker
does it through sheer emotional force ... it’s not his universes, it’s his
people and how they relate to each other — and to the spiritual. That’s what Realware
has going for it: healing and a calm sense of spirituality.
— New York Review of Science Fiction.
Realware is a joy to read. The characters are some of
the best crafted of Rucker’s career.
— NOVA Express.
Realware is the fourth and possibly last volume in
Rucker’s ‘Ware’ series, which began in 1982 with Software. Strangeness
is one of the main attractions of science fiction, and Rucker delivers plenty
of it — exotic technologies, a funky future culture, mathematical head trips. Yet
Rucker invests his main characters with surprising depth and complexity. From
time to time the novel’s often madcap tone becomes unexpectedly serious, even
tragic.
— SCIFI.COM
Few writers pack as many ideas into their novels as Rudy
Rucker ... and getting there is a lot of fun.
— Orlando Sentinel.
Rucker has written a generational saga that spans sixty
years of mind-blowing change. Without sacrificing any of his id-driven
wildness, Rucker has developed into a benevolent, all-seeing creator ... Realware
brings to a fully satisfying conclusion this landmark quartet.
— Isaac Asmiov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Realware continues his wild funny series of a
neo-hippy multidimensional future. ... Rucker takes premises that seem faintly
possible and develops them to wild, albeit logical, conclusions.
— Denver Post.
We have seen the future and it crawls, swims, teems with
billions of soft, sentient piezoplastic beasts — a brave new biotech world
where Rucker-revealed secrets of immortality, space travel and congress with
aliens are as readily available as mushroom pizzas or a bigger hard drive. Saucer
Wisdom soars.
— Nick Herbert, author of Faster Than Light.
With Saucer Wisdom Rucker has reached a new peak. Saucer
Wisdom is absolutely one of the best books of the year. Rucker has ...
grown up, elucidating the wild-eyed, gonzo ideas of his youth with the
clear-eyed, well-honed craft of a mature writer at his creative peak.
— NOVA Express.
Groove to a mind-expanding leap into the future.
— Publisher’s Weekly.
How delightful it was to open up Rudy Rucker’s latest madcap
fantasy, Saucer Wisdom. Of all the new science-fiction writers, it is
Rucker who most nearly approaches Dick’s imaginative mania.
— The Australian’s Review of Books.
It’s brilliantly funny, prescient, and as fully engaging as
a coffee-fueled late-night conversation with a slightly manic genius. From the
aloof-yet-naughty aliens ... to the detailed, personalized visions of future
people’s technology, Saucer Wisdom shines with a humanity firmly rooted
right here on Earth... It seems that ‘the William S Burroughs of cyberpunk’ can’t
help but write good books.
— Amazon.com.
Generous, wild-eyed, yet sage ... The future envisioned here
is one of liberating, near-utopian technologies that make the Extropians look
like Alan Greenspan.
— Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.
Saucer Wisdom is, first and foremost, a wild and
exhilarating ride through the next 2,000 years of human history, throwing up
enough bizarre concepts to sustain two or three careers of SF writing. What
saves the book from overload is Rucker’s characteristically snappy,
wisecracking style... Rucker is able to explain in witty and convincing ways
just how most of the technological innovations he proposes would work, and —
unusual in futurist narratives — he shows how these various technologies
evolve. A pop-science book like no other.
— Locus.
Rucker’s sensibility is a combination of gonzo humor,
fictionalized autobiography in the Kerouacian mode (what Rucker calls “transrealism”),
and the sheer, bugs-in-your-teeth thrill of scientific extrapolation taken to
blitz-punk extremes.
— Salon.com.
Whether cast as travelogues, journalism, musings,
speculations, or autobiography, these essays offer intimate insights into both
Rucker’s keen unique mind and the universe in which it is embedded — if they’re
not indeed one and the same.
— Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.
Whether he’s investigating the fractal-ized cutting edge of
science and math theory, or traveling through Tonga and Tokyo, it’s hard to
think of a more genial, or more well-informed tour guide. And like his idol
Kerouac, Rucker’s a hell of a reporter.
— American Book Review.
This is Rudy Rucker having fun, the purpose of life. In
Seek! he’s picked a brilliant bunch of his columns, essays and interviews, a
travelogue of discovery from cellular automata to his ‘transreal’ fiction. So
this is how to be a professor of computing science, write acclaimed nonfiction,
become a hit with the cyberpunks and have an excellent time.
— New Scientist.
Rucker’s collection of short nonfiction, Seek!, is
just as clear and sassy as his novels. [These essays are] infused with Rucker’s
intense delight and frustration with the things and people of this world; they
inevitably provoke the kind of staring-into-space reveries long thought lost to
our youth.
— Amazon.com
Science-fiction author Rudy Rucker is an oddity and a
treasure. In Seek!, Rucker explains his preoccupations as mathematician,
professor, family man, and limit breaker with a novelist’s attention to freaky
and convincing details. Few writers attempt to cover so much ground.
— Wired.
Rudy Rucker is in a class by himself. He writes
mathematics-based science fiction with a wild hippie sense of humor ... [and] a
view of robots unlike anything Isaac Asimov ever considered.
— Denver Post.
One of science fiction’s wittiest writers. A genius ... a cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers.
— San Diego Union-Tribune.
Thought-provoking, highly original, and at times extremely
funny. Freeware is the real stuff, 180 proof and smooth as silk.
— SF Site.
Genially twisted ... this is your kind of book.
— The New York Times Book Review.
Eminently satisfying ... intelligent and witty ... the
climax of what may well have been one of the most important SF series of the
past 15 years.
— Washington Post Book World.
Reading a Rudy Rucker book is like finding Poe, Kerouac,
Lewis Carroll and Philip K. Dick parked on your driveway in a topless ‘57 Caddy
... and telling you they’re taking you for a RIDE. The funniest science fiction
author around.
— Sci-Fi Universe.
Much has been made of Rucker’s affinity with Dick, insofar
as they both identify with and honor the common man, and both men write with a
lucid simplicity that allows them to convey the weirdest ideas in the easiest
to understand form. Rucker wishes — for himself, his characters, and everyone
else — the maximum freedom that reality will allow.
— Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.
It is fast-paced, funny, and celebrates the complexity of
the universe without dumbing it down. It adds up to a unique voice in SF,
exuberant, vigorous an dense with strange but vividly realized ideas.
— Interzone.
Freeware is a fearlessly weird and very funny romp
through a seedy, decadent 21st century America. Rucker’s evocation of the 21st
century has an internal logic that provides a firm foundation for his gonzo
inventiveness and dark humor.
— San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner.
A professor of mathematics with a penchant for the unusual,
if not for the downright weird... Rucker’s writing is filled with cunning comic
twists.
— Austin American-Statesman.
A fascinating vision of corporate intrigue and digital
creativity run amok. Told with a great amount of humor, this lighthearted look
at the world of hacking and cyberspace is as much parody as a possible
misadventure of the future.
— Interzone
An incredibly hilarious and adventurous sci-fi novel.
— Computer Literacy.
He has caught the very soul of Silicon Valley.
— Nick Herbert, author of Quantum Reality.
As a satire of Silicon Valley and a cockeyed glimpse at the
future of virtual reality, The Hacker and the Ants works marvelously. Rucker
is one of science fiction’s wittiest writers, and this new novel displays his
considerable talents to full effect.
— San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle.
Humorous thriller... Estimable.
— New York Times Book Review.
This is SF rigorously following crazy rules. My mind of
science fiction. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. Rucker is what
happens when you cross a mathematician with the extrapolating jazz spirit.
— Robert Sheckley.
Rucker never wants for new inventions... Irresistible.
— Washington Post Book World.
Jam-packed with Rucker’s dada-gaga, aurora-borealism, and
gargantuan playfulness. Rucker is one of my all-time favorite writers. He warms
the cockles of my heart and fires up the little gray cells.
— Philip Jose Farmer.
Terrific... A thrilling-wonder sci-fi novel... Rucker’s Poe
is the most endearingly repulsive character I can recall having met in fiction.
— Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe would have loved this book — and so will
you!
— Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.
A craftily conceived adventure story, full of wonder, beauty
and humor ... Goofily outlandish ... The Hollow Earth is a treat.
— San Francisco Chronicle.
I never doubted that Mr. Rucker knew the way, and I never
lost interest in the plucky young Mason and the redoubtable if reprehensible
Eddie Poe, who encounters in real life every one of the nightmares he has so
memorably set to paper.
— The New York Times Book Review.
It’s more fun than anything I’ve read in I don’t know how
long, and it’s certainly the reigning king of the ‘hollow Earth’ novels. Rucker
has an enviable imagination, an astonishing ear for language, and a rare sense
of proportion and humor. I wish books like this would come along more often.
— James P. Blaylock, author of The Digging
Leviathan.
Delightfully irreverent... This is science fiction as it
should be: authoritative and tightly linked with our real lives and our real
future.
— Washington Post Book World.
Rucker [gives you] more ideas per chapter than most authors
use in an entire novel.
— San Francisco Chronicle.
One of Rucker’s greatest assets is his ability to make
complexities comprehensible to the general reader without lecturing.
— Washington Post.
Rudy Rucker’s Mind Tools is an original and
fascinating look at various aspects of mathematics that is rue to fascinate the
non-mathematician. Throughout Rucker has the gift of the apt illustration that
makes the most abstruse notion accessible.
— Isaac Asimov.
Approaching all of mathematics, and everything else, by way
of information theory, Dr. Rucker’s latest and most exciting book opens vistas
of dazzling beauty — scenes that blend order with chaos, reality with fantasy,
that startle you with their depths of impenetrable mystery.
— Martin Gardner.
Rucker is an artist well worth discovering, reading, and
keeping up with... [His novels] sparkle with deadpan wit and a natural
storyteller’s flair...blending mathematical speculation, such concepts as
Hilbert space, rock’n’roll, drugs, and sex...[with] imaginative ideas worthy of
H.G.Wells.
— Washington Post Book World.
One of the writers we will follow into the new future.
— Raleigh Spectator.
Master of a playful, intellectual humor ... Rudy Rucker’s
sense of fun is rare indeed. He has been compared to Lewis Carroll, and the
comparison is not presumptuous. Like Carroll, Rucker is a mathematician who not
only enjoys paradoxes, but can propagate that enjoyment as pure lunatic
humor... Pure frivolity aside, Rudy Rucker is genuinely curious about space and
time.
— John Sladek in The Washington Post.
An amusing, high-speed, lunatic whirl through a variety of
unlikely worlds. Inventive, agreeable batty fun.
— Kirkus Reviews.
Money? A cure for world hunger? A beautiful body? Rudy
Rucker, professional mathematician and master of the crazy scenario, has
probably already thought of it.
— Locus.
Rucker is a mathematician bewitched by the absurdity of the
universe, and a writer possessed of a brilliantly witty pen. An inventive and
hilarious variation on the fairy tale of the granting of three wishes.
— Publisher’s Weekly.
The Fourth Dimension by Rudy Rucker is not exactly
practical knowledge (and the math section is borderline impossible), but it
expands the mind in unexpected ways. It still informs the way I think about
almost everything.
— Chuck Klosterman, New York Times Book Section
Those who think the fourth dimension is nothing but time
should be encouraged to read The Fourth Dimension, along with anyone else who
feels like opening the hinges of his mind and letting in a bit of fresh air.
— Washington Post Book World.
Anyone with even a minimal interest in mathematics and fantasy
will find The Fourth Dimension informative and mind-dazzling... Rucker plunges
into spaces above three [dimensions] with a zest and energy that is
breathtaking.
— Martin Gardner.
One great achievement of the book is that it should help to
overcome the feeling of bemused awe by which non-mathematicians are often
overwhelmed when multi-dimensional space is mentioned.
— Nature.
Alien invaders tend to squirt acid, go invisible, or drive humongous ships. Not the ones in Rudy Rucker's 1980s classic The Sex Sphere, where an alien named Babs and her crew take the form of disembodied sex organs that attach to human hosts... Only trip-tastic writerRucker could imagine such a scenario. The best part is that Rucker, a mathematics professor, opens the book with a whole introduction on the fourth dimension and how it works. The aliens, you see, are trying to return to this dimension... If you like your science fiction to contain hard science mixed with bizarro humor, don't miss The Sex Sphere.
—Annalee Newitz, io9
You cannot know where modern science fiction has gotten to
unless you are familiar with Rucker’s work.
— Fantasy and Science Fiction.
One of cyberpunk’s most inventive works.
— Rolling Stone.
Rucker is one of science fiction’s wittiest writers.
— San Francisco Examiner.
Rudy Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind is a terrific
study with real mathematical depth.
— The New Yorker
He leads his readers through these mental gymnastics in an
easy, informal way, often illustrating his points with cartoons.
— San Francisco Chronicle.
Informal, amusing, witty, profound ... In an extraordinary
burst of creative energy, Rudy Rucker has managed to bring together every
aspect of mathematical infinity... A dizzying glimpse into that boundless
region of blinding light where the mysteries of transcendence shatter the
clarity of logic, set theory, proof theory, and contemporary physics.
— Martin Gardner.
Rudy Rucker, set theorist and science-fiction author, has
continued the tradition of making mathematics and computer science accessible
to the intellectually minded lay-person. Infinity and the Mind is funny,
provocative, entertaining and profound.
— Journal of Symbolic Logic.
Attempts to put Gödel’s theorems into sharper focus, or at
least to explain them to the non-specialist, abound. My personal favorite is
Rudy Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind, which I recommend without reservation.
— Journal of the American Mathematical Society.
A captivating excursion through the mathematical approaches
to the notions of infinity and the implications of that mathematics for the
vexing questions on the mind, existence and consciousness.
— Mathematics Teacher.
White Light is a good, intelligent powerful novel,
and the most auspicious debut in the SF field since I don’t know when.
— Thomas M. Disch. in Fantasy & Science
Fiction.
In White Light Rucker commandingly synthesizes
mysticism, pop imagery, the Devil Himself, Jesus Christ, the great
mathematicians and their ideas, ‘head culture,’ and even voodoo into a novel
that takes us on a wild journey to infinity, to the Absolute, and back again. As
for sheer writing, there’s probably no one like him.
— John Shirley, author of the Eclipse
trilogy.
White Light is a marvelously inventive and
lunatically logical story, where not only is the scaling of infinity a mad,
convincing adventure, but where ordinary human happiness matters too movingly.
— Ian Watson in Vector.
An adventure through time and space, the likes of which only
a collaboration between Umberto Eco and Lewis Carroll could attempt. With
traveling companions ranging from Einstein to the devil to a giant beetle named
Franx…each turned corner of White Light is another gleeful surprise,
another celebration of cleverness and imagination… This novel belongs to the
tradition of science fiction pioneered by H. G. Wells, where the science is the
source of intrigue that adventures grow from and propel the protagonists.
— Amazon editorial review.
Hip, humorous, and refreshing.
— American Book Review.
It’s all done up in great style and it marks an auspicious
debut.
— Roanoke, Virginia, Times &
World News.
He knows how to boggle the mind and, next chapter, to boggle
it again.
— Thomas M. Disch.
