Hylozoic

by Rudy Rucker

Tor Books, 2009.
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Summary

After the Singularity, everyone and everything is sentient and telepathic. In Rucker’s previous novel, Postsingular, the Singularity happened and life on Earth was transformed. And now alien races who have already gone through this transformation notice Earth for the first time---and begin to arrive. Someone has to save humanity from the aliens, and it might as well be reality-media stars Thuy and Jayjay. And their new friend, Hieronymus Bosch...

Writing Notes for Hylozoic

Download or read online the 4.3 Meg PDF file Notes for Hylozoic, a 385 page single-spaced document containing the working notes for the book. I have numerous images in the document and internal and external links as well.

Reviews

"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

It's all a fun romp, and Rucker makes it work by providing a cutting-edge hard-science basis for the world's transformation.. Read these novels. They are like candy with a light, fluffy outside and a hard, dense core. And nobody can eat just one.
          — Sci Fi Wire

 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 eigth-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

(Reviews of Rudy Rucker's Other Books)