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.
]]>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.
]]>Publishers Weekly called Rucker "a mathematician bewitched by the absurdity of the universe," and it shows in almost every sentence he writes. In Rucker's world people have "face holes" instead of mouths or nostrils, wasps remind him of space monsters, and planet X shares more than a few similarities with Earth. And, not coincidentally, almost all of his protagonists are physicists. Also not coincidentally, physics often plays an important role, even making it into the titles of pieces such as "Pi in the Sky," "Schrödinger's Cat," "Inertia," and "Probability Pipeline." But even though Rucker tends to write "hard SF" in the sense that most of his stories rely heavily on science, this is not the usual nuts-and-bolts stuff of, say, Hal Clement. Rather, this is cutting-edge physics extrapolated almost beyond imagination to create fascinating worlds and wonderful stories. Some traditional SF readers may be intimidated by how far off the beaten science fiction path Rucker sometimes strays, but in the end it's almost always a walk worth taking. --Craig E. Engler
]]>Rucker's style is perfect for this material, and his imagination soars. What if aliens travel through complex interstellar radio signals and are attracted to chaos? What if we develop telepathy transmitted over television? What if we perfect genetic engineering? It wouldn't occur to other futurists to suggest a half-dozen pet compsognathii in the backyard of the future, but Rucker goes a step further and literally draws a picture. The 57 illustrations--attributed to Frank the contactee--highlight the text like James Thurber on acid. Saucer Wisdom could have been as boring as most other future histories, but it seems that "the William S. Burroughs of cyberpunk" can't help but write good books. Lucky for us. --Rob Lightner
]]>Divided into three sections ("Science," "Life," and "Art"), Seek! reads like a user's guide to the New Renaissance: after reading "A Brief History of Computers," we can move on to "Cyberculture in Japan," visit Industrial Light and Magic, and examine Brueghel's Peasant Dance in depth. All 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. He provides Web page URLs so that readers will have natural starting points for continuing research, including his own Web site's free software for playing with cellular automata and other funky almost-living critters. As Rucker says to his students, referring to the boundary between order and chaos (and providing a title for this book): Seek Ye the Gnarl! --Rob Lightner
]]>