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Jack and the Aktuals, or, Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory
Like many other stories and novels by Rudy Rucker, "Jack and the Aktuals" is a wild and wooly dramatization of certain principles of higher mathematics, with added talking animals, sentient pencils, and orders-of-infinity nested within one another like Russian dolls. No description can ever encompass the mind-bending experience of reading a Rudy Rucker story.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
32 pages, Kindle Edition
First published July 14, 2010
1 person is currently reading
41 people want to read
About the author
Rudy Rucker
196 books584 followersRudolf 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.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 29, 2013
Holy shit.
Buckle up, because we’re going in deep on this one.
Jack Bohn is a retired mathematics professor chasing after his greatest intellectual revelation yet. While sitting with his wife Ulla in their living room one late winter afternoon, Jack explains his goal of writing a comprehensive paper that explains the transfinite nature of the layers of reality. He’s wrestling with the “Generalized Continuum Problem”, a paradox of discovering the truth of either Georg Cantor’s belief that transfinite numbers are well-behaved, Jack’s theory that they are wholly erratic, or some ineffable and unknown third (or fourth, or fifth, or etc…) alternative. “Dear Infinity, please help me”, Jack offers up a mathematician’s prayer for an epiphany.
His prayers are “answered” by him coughing up a smooth, crystalline USB drive shaped like an infinity sign. when inserted, the drive instigates a crash sequence wherein a infinitely regressive series of smaller and smaller task windows begin to pop up. His laptop becomes a “Turing Calculator”; calculating every possible outcome for every past paper he has ever written to culminate into his greatest achievement, titled “Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory”.
Then a talking pencil with backwards knees named “Stanley” and a frog in a petticoat named “Anton” (short for Antagonistic) materialize through a hoola-hoop and invite the couple to come to “Alefville” with them.
According to Rudy’s bio page on Macmillan’s site, he’s the “great-great-great grandson of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.” After reading “Jack and the Aktuals”, I’m couldn’t be more convinced that that’s the case. I honestly can’t be certain as to whether this was all just a shared hallucination, one man’s psychotic break ( As if Anthony Burgess wrote a hair-brained combination of A Beautiful Mind, Faust, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), or if all this craziness is reality. Probably some Gordian knot of all three or more of those explanations.
Coincidentally, a friend of mine had just recently recommended Rucker’s most well-known work, “The Ware Tetralogy”, to me saying that it was without a doubt one of the strangest things he had ever read. After reading “Jack and Aktuals”, I couldn’t be more excited to delve into it now. Aside from my initial bewilderment with symbolic mathematical proofs that far exceeded my sub-high school ken of modest mathematics, I was legitimately compelled to journey further into this fun house labyrinth of oddities all the way to its whimsically self-aware conclusion that evokes comparisons to a particularly good Twilight Zone episode.
This review and others can be read at my blog, Sifting Through Patterns.
Buckle up, because we’re going in deep on this one.
Jack Bohn is a retired mathematics professor chasing after his greatest intellectual revelation yet. While sitting with his wife Ulla in their living room one late winter afternoon, Jack explains his goal of writing a comprehensive paper that explains the transfinite nature of the layers of reality. He’s wrestling with the “Generalized Continuum Problem”, a paradox of discovering the truth of either Georg Cantor’s belief that transfinite numbers are well-behaved, Jack’s theory that they are wholly erratic, or some ineffable and unknown third (or fourth, or fifth, or etc…) alternative. “Dear Infinity, please help me”, Jack offers up a mathematician’s prayer for an epiphany.
His prayers are “answered” by him coughing up a smooth, crystalline USB drive shaped like an infinity sign. when inserted, the drive instigates a crash sequence wherein a infinitely regressive series of smaller and smaller task windows begin to pop up. His laptop becomes a “Turing Calculator”; calculating every possible outcome for every past paper he has ever written to culminate into his greatest achievement, titled “Physical Applications of Transfinite Set Theory”.
Then a talking pencil with backwards knees named “Stanley” and a frog in a petticoat named “Anton” (short for Antagonistic) materialize through a hoola-hoop and invite the couple to come to “Alefville” with them.
According to Rudy’s bio page on Macmillan’s site, he’s the “great-great-great grandson of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.” After reading “Jack and the Aktuals”, I’m couldn’t be more convinced that that’s the case. I honestly can’t be certain as to whether this was all just a shared hallucination, one man’s psychotic break ( As if Anthony Burgess wrote a hair-brained combination of A Beautiful Mind, Faust, and Who Framed Roger Rabbit?), or if all this craziness is reality. Probably some Gordian knot of all three or more of those explanations.
Coincidentally, a friend of mine had just recently recommended Rucker’s most well-known work, “The Ware Tetralogy”, to me saying that it was without a doubt one of the strangest things he had ever read. After reading “Jack and Aktuals”, I couldn’t be more excited to delve into it now. Aside from my initial bewilderment with symbolic mathematical proofs that far exceeded my sub-high school ken of modest mathematics, I was legitimately compelled to journey further into this fun house labyrinth of oddities all the way to its whimsically self-aware conclusion that evokes comparisons to a particularly good Twilight Zone episode.
This review and others can be read at my blog, Sifting Through Patterns.
February 26, 2017
I guess I would need a better grasp of higher math to enjoy this story.
December 19, 2023
Georg Cantor on acid.
Strongly reminded me of White Light, which I read while still a child. Which in turn reminds me that I should be reading more Rucker, because he's great.
Here he goes back to the constituents of the expression 'science-fiction'; even though his science is not cosmonautics, bio-engineering, nor cybernetics, but mathematics — and infinity theories in particular.
Strongly reminded me of White Light, which I read while still a child. Which in turn reminds me that I should be reading more Rucker, because he's great.
Here he goes back to the constituents of the expression 'science-fiction'; even though his science is not cosmonautics, bio-engineering, nor cybernetics, but mathematics — and infinity theories in particular.
April 26, 2015
Having never read a Rudy Rucker story before I quickly fell into a "this is the most niche kind of scifi storytelling I have ever read" which developed into "and I love it so much I want to hug it". Definitely one I'd recommend.
August 27, 2018
Infinite fun!
Sorry, I couldn't resist. A good story though. My objection is that it goes by so quickly. If one likes this sort of thing, see "White Light", and other novels by Rudy Rucker.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. A good story though. My objection is that it goes by so quickly. If one likes this sort of thing, see "White Light", and other novels by Rudy Rucker.
Read
January 13, 2021no rating because i know nothing about mathematics and had absolutely no idea what was going on at any point, thus this story clearly wasn't for me; however i read it anyway and still enjoyed the experience despite that, which must say something about the writing!
December 24, 2021
Awesome short story. This is what Rucker does best, a crazy fantastical exploration of science and math in an enjoyable story. One of the best I have read.
-Gregory Kerkman
-Gregory Kerkman
October 30, 2022
Higher mathematics begins to press itself onto reality in this weird little tale from Rudy Rucker.
April 4, 2018
Do you like math? Then this is for you! While I enjoyed the surrealism of the story the constant math references left me feeling like I was missing out, since I just kinda grasped the theory without really understanding it. I think?
Also I see the common shelving for this seems to be sci fi, but it felt more like urban fantasy to me.
Also I see the common shelving for this seems to be sci fi, but it felt more like urban fantasy to me.
Read
August 31, 2016Still high on higher maths, Rucker constructs a fantastical allegory of infinities which is kin to Alice and Flatland, though perhaps unlikely to be so widely remembered even as the latter.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews