The 57th Franz Kafka

by Rudy Rucker

Contents:
The 57th Franz Kafka (1982)
Schrödinger's Cat (1981)
A New Golden Age (1981)
Jumpin' Jack Flash (1983)
Sufferin' Succotash (1983)
Faraway Eyes (1980)
Hyperspherical Space and Beyond (1980) essay
The Indian Rope Trick Explained (1983)
A New Experiment with Time (1982)
The Man Who Ate Himself (1982)
The Facts of Life (1983)
Tales of Houdini (1981)
Buzz (1981)
The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge (1983)
Pac-Man (1982)
Pi in the Sky (1983)
Inertia (1983)
Message Found in a Copy of Flatland (1983)
The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics (1982)

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories

243 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre. He is best known for his Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which won Philip K. Dick awards. Presently, Rudy Rucker edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.

Reviews

[Peter Tillman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good to great collection, with one exceptionally hot story, his classic "Jumpin' Jack Flash": V-sex, lesnerizing & the Pure Land:

"Flow now while I'm touching you, darling, " she breathed. I let my head go slack, and it began sinking down thru the collar of my shirt. Helen was fumbling frantically at our clothes... It didn't seem like she was ever going to get them off, so I reduced viscosity and flowed out of my left pant leg and onto the floor. She'd gotten her shirt and bra off, and she lay down to rub her stiff-nippled breasts across me..."

-- the hottest sex-with-aliens scene I know of, & pure essence-of-Rucker in 20 pages. Not to be missed. If that's your sort of thing.....

Online copy of the collection (and all of his short fiction) here: http://www.rudyrucker.com/transrealbo...

[Craig · Rating 4 out of 5]

This delightfully-titled collection is an excellent sampling of Rucker's early work and favorite themes. The concepts and big ideas almost always take precedence over the characters and plot, but it's a challenging and thought-provoking parade of think-pieces, sort of a bizzaro, alternative, underground version of the short pieces Larry Niven produced early in his career.
"Seek Ye The Gnarl!"

[Jlawrence · Rating 3 out of 5]

The truly strange situations Rucker explores in this collection of (mostly) science fiction stories should be fun and fascinating, but there's a problem: often when Rucker's ideas are at their most interesting, his characters, plot and tone are at their most slack (in fact, one entry in the book is simply an essay), and, vice-versa, when he pays attention to plot, character and writing, it's usually in service of half-baked ideas. From a taxonomy of science-fiction view, Rucker's strong-idea-weak-plot&character stories are almost like "classic" 50's era idea-as-protagonist stories, but with the ideas wackier and some 60s counter-culture vibes and gratuitous sexual leering dolloped on top.

Still, he gets some good, if repetitive, mileage out of his obsession with the ramifications of how higher dimensions could intersect our own (in an analogous way that our 3-dimensional world would intersect a 2-dimensional world), and the two stories that bookend this collection escape the problems of the rest of the collection, simply by being excellent short stories. That's the title story "The 57th Franz Kafka" which (unless Rucker is riffing on a particular Kafka story or part of Kafka's life I'm unfamiliar with) makes little sense but at the same time works perfectly as a creepy and precise little gothic fever-dream, and "The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics", a particularly ghoulish take on the anxiety of influence.

[Nick · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of early Rudy Rucker stories is fascinating, but some of them are very difficult to read. His blending of mathematics, philosophy, physics and odd literary styles was intriguing and distracting at the same time. Some, like "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland" blended mathematics with a mixture of pulpish adventure and an odd bit of horror. His "Harry and Fletch" stories were twisted but funny.

[Maria Morrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting collection of tales, some of which come together and others that are simply their own little tales of the weird. Rucker takes us on journeys through Space, Time, Dimensions and beyond into places where you can fall into the world, where the elementals dance in a vacuum of space and where the only laws are those of the perpetual.