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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:
Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons
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.
--- 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
Spaceland is hilarious,
exuberant and mind-expanding. A snappy plot, sympahetic character,
crunchy language, and multidimensional aliens: about what one
has come to expect in a Rudy Rucker novel. But Rucker has surpassed
himself in this novel of Y2K in which the unsuspecting Joe Cube
finds his world turned inside-out and in other dimensions as well.
... Rudy Rucker's brilliance as a science-fiction humorist is
equal to Robert Sheckley on his best day; and for sheer inventiveness
of plot and compelling ordinary human characters, Rucker is the
equal of Philip K. Dick..."
--- The New York Review of Science Fiction
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