Blurbs for Books by Rudy Rucker
Books are listed in reverse order of publication, the newest
to the oldest. This file was last updated on May 7, 2007.
Mathematicians in Love, Tor Books, 2006.
Frek and the Elixir, Tor Books, 2004.
As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter
Bruegel, historical novel, Tor Books, 2002.
Spaceland, SF novel, Tor Books, 2002.
Gnarl!, collected stories, Four Walls
Eight Windows, 2000.
Realware, SF novel, Avon Books, 2000.
Saucer Wisdom, SF novel/nonfiction,
Tor Books, 1999.
Seek!, selected nonfiction, Four Walls
Eight Windows, 1999.
Freeware, SF novel, Avon Books 1997.
The Hacker and the Ants, SF novel,
Avon Books 1994.
Transreal!, fiction and nonfiction
collection, WCS Books 1991.
The Hollow Earth, SF novel, William
Morrow & Co. 1990, Avon Books 1992.
Wetware, SF novel, Avon Books 1988,
Avon Books 1997.
Mind Tools, nonfiction, Houghton Mifflin
1987.
The Secret of Life, SF novel, Bluejay
Books 1985, www.electricstory.com 2001.
Master of Space and Time, SF novel,
Bluejay Books 1984, Baen Books 1985.
The Fourth Dimension, nonfiction, Houghton
Mifflin 1984.
The Sex Sphere, SF novel, Ace Books
1983.
Software, SF novel, Ace Books 1982,
Avon Books 1987, Avon Books 1997.
Infinity and the Mind, nonfiction.,
Birkhäuser ‘82, Bantam ‘83, Princeton U. Press ‘95.
White Light, SF novel, Ace Books 1980,
Wired Books 1997, Four Walls Eight Windows 2001.
Spacetime Donuts, SF novel, Ace Books
1981.
"Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gödel and Lenny Bruce might start to approximate full-on Ruckerian warp-space, but without the sweet, human, splendidly goofy Rudy-ness at the core of the singularity."
--- William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition
"What a Dickensian genius Rucker has for Californian characters, as if, say, Dickens had fused with Phil Dick and taken up surfing and jamming and topologising. He has a hotline to cosmic revelations yet he's always here and now in the groove, tossing off lines of beauty and comic wisdom. 'My heart is a dog running after every cat.' We really feel with his characters in their bizarre tragicomic quests."
--- Ian Watson, author of The Great Escape
"Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today"
--- Charles Stross, author of Accelerando
"For sheer gonzo inventiveness, trust Rucker and this gut-wrenching, near-ftl-speed intellectual adventure. And trust me, too: You won't read another sf work all year this much mind-bending, synapse-tingling fun."
--- Michael Bishop, author of Philip K. Dick Is Dead, Alas
"This may well be Rudy Rucker's best novel --- funny, wise, fast and inventive. A real advance."
--- Gregory Benford, author of The Sunborn
"Rudy Rucker writes like the love child of Philip K. Dick and George Carlin. Brilliant, frantic, conceptual, cosmological . . . like lucid dreaming, only funny. This book rocks!"
---Walter John Williams, author of Dread Empire's Fall
"Rudy Rucker never fails to leave me breathless. . . Reading one of his stories is like a reset button on reality: when it's over, the whole universe looks slightly different...and much stranger."
--Spider Robinson, author of Night of Power
I feel like one of Lewis Carroll's friends, one
of the first witnesses of a significant and possibly future-classic
from a freakish fabulist. The book is like
a hallucination. I can't believe the stuff Rudy's got crammed
in here; it just keeps coming. I envy the reader who encounters
this book and has the top of his skull blown off by it.
Truly spectacular and cosmic. And my kids love it too!
---Marc Laidlaw, Author of
Dad's Nuke and The 37th Mandala, and Writer/Game
Designer for Half-Life.
Astonishingly good and fun. I
am agog. Rucker turns the vanguard of extreme physics into a
saga that is at once gripping, hallucinogenic and convulsively
funny. He bends language into transdimensional forms, then scampers
over their corkscrews.
---Cory Doctorow, Author of Down
And Out In The Magic Kingdom.
One of the top fantastic novels
of the year, Frek and the Elixir is an act of the wild but informed
imagination. It is based, with unassailable logic, on a denatured
world of cartoons and biotech companies. This is one of the
best reads I've come across in a long time.
---Robert Sheckley, SF Grand Master
Oh, excellent! I love books
that play with physics --- branes and so forth --- and this
is godzoon googl indeed, as Frek would say, and darned
exciting ... A splendid book.
---Diana Wynne Jones, Author of
The Merlin Conspiracy and The Ogre Downstairs.
Rucker successfully combines
sharp-edged satire with old-fashioned pulp sensibilities to
create a frantic tale of dirty double-dealing and high adventure.
Readers in search of something different need look no further
than this droll saga of the future.
--- Publishers Weekly
Imagine Frodo Baggins as a 31st-century
human kid in a transformed Earth where bio-engineering and consumerism
have run amok... Frek's grand adventures will leave you simultaneously
enlightened, awestruck, dazed, and amused --- "Ruckerized,"
you might call it --- by an author working at the height of
his powers.
--- Locus
Frek and the Elixir is
perhaps Rucker's best book, containing as it does such a wealth
of material in a compelling story. In some ways, Rucker is a
literary descendant of Philip K. Dick, and this book felt to
me like the masterpiece of trashy culture, ordinary people,
and wacked-out ideas that Dick never quite wrote.
--- Challenging Destiny
Rucker has a clarity of purpose:
to entertain with intelligence.
--- Kansas City Star
With this book, Rudy Rucker seems
to have boldly ascended a new peak in his career. Frek is utterly
believable and empathy-inducing from the first page of the tale.
Frek remains both a conquering hero and a 12-year-old boy, showing
us that we all may contain avatars bigger than our shells. This
book is Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit --- Will Travel
with the vacuum tubes replaced by wetware and all the knobs
turned up to 11.
--- SF Site
Completely delightful and amusing.
A great adventure in a book that is an enormous amount of fun
and full of charms that will appeal to readers of all ages from
about 12 up. Frek and the Elixir may happily become something
to read for the millions of fans who are waiting for Harry Potter
Six.
--- San Jose Mercury News
Rucker posesses a wild, unfettered
imagination, and he uses concepts from string theory and quantum
mechanics to power this wide-ranging, almost psychedelic yarn.
Fresh, funny and frequently mind-boggling.
--- San Francisco Chronicle
Before you can say "E.T."
or "A Wrinkle In Time," Frek and some very odd companions
are off on an escapade that will span space, time and numerous
other dimensions ... a magical mystery tour of the universe
according to string theory.
--- New York Times
A delightful book, one that carries us through the sixteenth-century
picture-plane at extraordinary angles, illuminating Bruegel,
his art and his world, with warmth and candor.
--- William Gibson, author of Pattern Recognition
What possesses a popular science fiction writer to write a
historical novel about a sixteenth-century Flemish painter enamored
of peasant ways? Unbridled fascination with the depiction of
worlds real and imagined. Rucker's keen insights into Peter
Bruegel's spellbinding and politically subversive work underpin
this animated, suspenseful, and affecting tale, a step up from
Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring (2000). Biographical
information about Bruegel is scant, but Rucker's sense that
the painter was lively, compassionate, courageous, and determined
feels right, and the characters Rucker invents to flesh out
Bruegel's violent and precarious universe are equally compelling,
especially the cultured mapmaker Abraham Ortelius, who is so
careful to conceal his homosexuality; the sexy and volatile
half-Native American, Williblad Cheroo, and Bruegel's smart,
saucy wife. Just as Bruegel's paintings are a great joy to behold
even as they induce the viewer to face the grimmer aspects of
life, Rucker's vivid imagining of Bruegel's trials and triumphs
is set against a cutting indictment of the horrors of the Spanish
occupation and Inquisition. Bruegel's great gift was his perception
of the sacred in the earthy, and Rucker follows suit in this
vital portrait of a sweet-natured disciple of life's fecund
beauty in a time of cold-blooded tyranny.
----- Book List
Pictures at an exhibition, sort of, as mathematician and SF
writer Rucker tells the life of the great Flemish painter. ...
Here we follow Bruegel's story from 1552 to 1569 in sixteen
chapters that organize themselves around sixteen of the master's
best-known paintings. ... A lively and well-narrated tale that
will appeal to Bruegel fans and may awaken newcomers to an interest
in his work.
--- Kirkus Reviews
Rucker manages the delicate trick of making his tale both
exotically foreign in time and space yet resonant with the present
day. Much of Rucker's success stems from his obvious identification
with his subject. Given a relative paucity of solid historical
data about Bruegel, Rucker is able to reverse-engineer the man
from his paintings, and the result is a visionary artist who
embodies Rucker's own dichotomous concern with the matters both
of dirty earth and of numinous heaven.
--- Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine
As intricate ... as one of its subject's own vivid depictions
of 16th-century life in the Spanish-dominated Low Countries,
Rucker's fictionalized life of Bruegel draws its readers into
a teeming world of politics, art, love, sin and loss. ... This
is clearly a labor of love and ... it grapples handily with
Bruegel's genius --- his ability to wittily and gracefully recreate
all human activity, from the sublime to the scatological."
--- Publisher's Weekly
Speculative fiction based on mathematics, rather than the
physical sciences, is a rare commodity. Edward Abbot’s turn-of-the-century,
geometric fantasy “Flatland” is recognized as one of the classics
of the genre. Rudy Rucker has fashioned an engaging homage
to it in Spaceland. Rucker is one of the genre’s most
reliable humorists, and he packs Spaceland with plenty of wry
observations and loopy scenarios. Even if you couldn’t handle
college algebra, Spaceland provides more than its fair
hare of mind-bending fun.
--- San Francisco Chronicle.
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
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.
--- The 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
His work links the largest possible cosmic view with the trivia
and tribulations of everyday life ... He portrays thoroughly
real, everyday people grapping with some farfetched phenomenon
... with comic results.
--- Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Rucker has fun with all kinds of sci-fi and mathematical concepts,
from Venusians who travel from dimension to dimension, sucking
people’s brains out, to scientists who learn to move objects
three seconds into the future via the fourth dimension.
--- San Jose Mercury News.
Rucker has always displayed a taste for the goofily outlandish...
He dares to show the details of his outré creations rather than
simply sketch their outlines.
--- San Francisco Chronicle.
Rucker’s writing is great like the Ramones are great: a genre
stripped to its essence, attitude up the wazoo, and cartoon
sentiments that reek of identifiable lives and issues. Wild
math you can get elsewhere, but no one does the cyber version
of beatnik glory quite like Rucker. Rucker does it through
sheer emotional force ... it’s not his universes, it’s his people
and how the relate to each other --- and to the spiritual.
That’s what Realware has going for it: healing and a
calm sense of spirituality.
--- New York Review of Science Fiction.
Realware is a joy to read. The characters are some
of the best crafted of Rucker’s career.
--- NOVA Express.
Realware is the fourth and possibly last volume in
Rucker’s ‘Ware’ series, which began in 1982 with Software.
Strangeness is one of the main attractions of science fiction,
and Rucker delivers plenty of it --- exotic technologies, a
funky future culture, mathematical head trips. Yet Rucker invests
his main characters with surprising depth and complexity. From
time to time the novel’s often madcap tone becomes unexpectedly
serious, even tragic.
--- SCIFI.COM
Few writers pack as many ideas into their novels as Rudy Rucker
... and getting there is a lot of fun.
--- Orlando Sentinel.
Rucker has written a generational saga that spans sixty years
of mind-blowing change. Without sacrificing any of his id-driven
wildness, Rucker has developed into a benevolent, all-seeing
creator ... Realware brings to a fully satisfying conclusion
this landmark quartet.
--- Isaac Asmiov’s Science Fiction Magazine.
Realware continues his wild funny series of a neo-hippy
multidimensional future. ... Rucker takes premises that seem
faintly possible and develops them to wild, albeit logical,
conclusions.
--- Denver Post.
We have seen the future and it crawls, swims, teems with billions
of soft, sentient piezoplastic beasts --- a brave new biotech
world where Rucker-revealed secrets of immortality, space travel
and congress with aliens are as readily available as mushroom
pizzas or a bigger hard drive. Saucer Wisdom soars.
--- Nick Herbert, author of Faster Than Light.
With Saucer Wisdom Rucker has reached a new peak.
Saucer Wisdom is absolutely one of the best books of
the year. Rucker has ... grown up, elucidating the wild-eyed,
gonzo ideas of his youth with the clear-eyed, well-honed craft
of a mature writer at his creative peak.
--- NOVA Express.
Groove to a mind-expanding leap into the future.
--- Publisher’s Weekly.
How delightful it was to open up Rudy Rucker’s latest madcap
fantasy, Saucer Wisdom. Of all the new science-fiction
writers, it is Rucker who most nearly approaches Dick’s imaginative
mania.
--- The Australian’s Review of Books.
It’s brilliantly funny, prescient, and as fully engaging as
a coffee-fueled late-night conversation with a slightly manic
genius. From the aloof-yet-naughty aliens ... to the detailed,
personalized visions of future people’s technology, Saucer
Wisdom shines with a humanity firmly rooted right here on
Earth... It seems that ‘the William S Burroughs of cyberpunk’
can’t help but write good books.
--- Amazon.com.
Generous, wild-eyed, yet sage ... The future envisioned here
is one of liberating, near-utopian technologies that make the
Extropians look like Alan Greenspan.
--- Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.
Saucer Wisdom is, first and foremost, a wild and exhilarating
ride through the next 2,000 years of human history, throwing
up enough bizarre concepts to sustain two or three careers of
SF writing. What saves the book from overload is Rucker’s characteristically
snappy, wisecracking style... Rucker is able to explain in witty
and convincing ways just how most of the technological innovations
he proposes would work, and --- unusual in futurist narratives
--- he shows how these various technologies evolve. A pop-science
book like no other.
--- Locus.
Rucker’s sensibility is a combination of gonzo humor, fictionalized
autobiography in the Kerouacian mode (what Rucker calls “transrealism”),
and the sheer, bugs-in-your-teeth thrill of scientific extrapolation
taken to blitz-punk extremes.
--- Salon.com.
Whether cast as travelogues, journalism, musings, speculations,
or autobiography, these essays offer intimate insights into
both Rucker’s keen unique mind and the universe in which it
is embedded --- if they’re not indeed one and the same.
--- Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.
Whether he’s investigating the fractal-ized cutting edge of
science and math theory, or traveling through Tonga and Tokyo,
it’s hard to think of a more genial, or more well-informed tour
guide. And like his idol Kerouac, Rucker’s a hell of a reporter.
--- American Book Review.
This is Rudy Rucker having fun, the purpose of life. In Seek!
he’s picked a brilliant bunch of his columns, essays and interviews,
a travelogue of discovery from cellular automata to his ‘transreal’
fiction. So this is how to be a professor of computing science,
write acclaimed nonfiction, become a hit with the cyberpunks
and have an excellent time.
--- New Scientist.
Rucker’s collection of short nonfiction, Seek!, is
just as clear and sassy as his novels. [These essays 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.
--- Amazon.com
Science-fiction author Rudy Rucker is an oddity and a treasure.
In Seek!, Rucker explains his preoccupations as mathematician,
professor, family man, and limit breaker with a novelist’s attention
to freaky and convincing details. Few writers attempt to cover
so much ground.
--- Wired.
Rudy Rucker is in a class by himself. He writes mathematics-based
science fiction with a wild hippie sense of humor ... [and]
a view of robots unlike anything Isaac Asimov ever considered.
--- Denver Post.
One of science fiction’s wittiest writers. A genius ... a
cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers.
--- San Diego Union-Tribune.
Thought-provoking, highly original, and at times extremely
funny. Freeware is the real stuff, 180 proof and smooth as
silk.
--- SF Site.
Genially twisted ... this is your kind of book.
--- The New York Times Book Review.
Eminently satisfying ... intelligent and witty ... the climax
of what may well have been one of the most important SF series
of the past 15 years.
--- Washington Post Book World.
Reading a Rudy Rucker book is like finding Poe, Kerouac, Lewis
Carroll and Philip K. Dick parked on your driveway in a topless
’57 Caddy ... and telling you they’re taking you for a RIDE.
The funniest science fiction author around.
--- Sci-Fi Universe.
Much has been made of Rucker’s affinity with Dick, insofar
as they both identify with and honor the common man, and both
men write with a lucid simplicity that allows them to convey
the weirdest ideas in the easiest to understand form. Rucker
wishes --- for himself, his characters, and everyone else ---
the maximum freedom that reality will allow.
--- Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.
It is fast-paced, funny, and celebrates the complexity of
the universe without dumbing it down. It adds up to a unique
voice in SF, exuberant, vigorous an dense with strange but vividly
realized ideas.
--- Interzone.
Freeware is a fearlessly weird and very funny romp
through a seedy, decadent 21st century America. Rucker’s evocation
of the 21st century has an internal logic that provides a firm
foundation for his gonzo inventiveness and dark humor.
--- San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner.
A professor of mathematics with a penchant for the unusual,
if not for the downright weird... Rucker’s writing is filled
with cunning comic twists.
--- Austin American-Statesman.
A fascinating vision of corporate intrigue and digital creativity
run amok. Told with a great amount of humor, this lighthearted
look at the world of hacking and cyberspace is as much parody
as a possible misadventure of the future.
--- Interzone
An incredibly hilarious and adventurous sci-fi novel.
--- Computer Literacy.
He has caught the very soul of Silicon Valley.
--- Nick Herbert, author of Quantum Reality.
As a satire of Silicon Valley and a cockeyed glimpse at the
future of virtual reality, The Hacker and the Ants works
marvelously. Rucker is one of science fiction’s wittiest writers,
and this new novel displays his considerable talents to full
effect.
--- San Francisco Examiner-Chronicle.
Humorous thriller... Estimable.
--- New York Times Book Review.
This is SF rigorously following crazy rules. My mind of science
fiction. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. Rucker
is what happens when you cross a mathematician with the extrapolating
jazz spirit.
--- Robert Sheckley.
Rucker never wants for new inventions... Irresistible.
--- Washington Post Book World.
Jam-packed with Rucker’s dada-gaga, aurora-borealism, and
gargantuan playfulness. Rucker is one of my all-time favorite
writers. He warms the cockles of my heart and fires up the
little gray cells.
--- Philip Jose Farmer.
Terrific... A thrilling-wonder sci-fi novel... Rucker’s Poe
is the most endearingly repulsive character I can recall having
met in fiction.
--- Fantasy & Science Fiction.
Edgar Allan Poe would have loved this book --- and so will
you!
--- Robert Bloch, author of Psycho.
A craftily conceived adventure story, full of wonder, beauty
and humor ... Goofily outlandish ... The Hollow Earth
is a treat.
--- San Francisco Chronicle.
I never doubted that Mr. Rucker knew the way, and I never
lost interest in the plucky young Mason and the redoubtable
if reprehensible Eddie Poe, who encounters in real life every
one of the nightmares he has so memorably to paper.
--- The New York Times Book Review.
It’s more fun than anything I’ve read in I don’t know how
long, and it’s certainly the reigning king of the ‘hollow Earth’
novels. Rucker has an enviable imagination, an astonishing
ear for language, and a rare sense of proportion and humor.
I wish books like this would come along more often.
--- James P. Blaylock, author of The Digging Leviathan.
Delightfully irreverent... This is science fiction as it should
be: authoritative and tightly linked with our real lives and
our real future.
--- Washington Post Book World.
Rucker [gives you] more ideas per chapter than most authors
use in an entire novel.
--- San Francisco Chronicle.
One of Rucker’s greatest assets is his ability to make complexities
comprehensible to the general reader without lecturing.
--- Washington Post.
Rudy Rucker’s Mind Tools is an original and fascinating
look at various aspects of mathematics that is rue to fascinate
the non-mathematician. Throughout Rucker has the gift of the
apt illustration that makes the most abstruse notion accessible.
--- Isaac Asimov.
Approaching all of mathematics, and everything else, by way
of information theory, Dr. Rucker’s latest and most exciting
book opens vistas of dazzling beauty --- scenes that blend order
with chaos, reality with fantasy, that startle you with their
depths of impenetrable mystery.
--- Martin Gardner.
Rucker is an artist well worth discovering, reading, and keeping
up with... [His novels] sparkle with deadpan wit and a natural
storyteller’s flair...blending mathematical speculation, such
concepts as Hilbert space, rock’n’roll, drugs, and sex...[with]
imaginative ideas worthy of H.G.Wells.
--- Washington Post Book World.
One of the writers we will follow into the new future.
--- Raleigh Spectator.
Master of a playful, intellectual humor ... Rudy Rucker’s
sense of fun is rare indeed. He has been compared to Lewis Carroll,
and the comparison is not presumptuous. Like Carroll, Rucker
is a mathematician who not only enjoys paradoxes, but can propagate
that enjoyment as pure lunatic humor... Pure frivolity aside,
Rudy Rucker is genuinely curious about space and time.
--- John Sladek in The Washington Post.
An amusing, high-speed, lunatic whirl through a variety of
unlikely worlds. Inventive, agreeable batty fun.
--- Kirkus Reviews.
Money? A cure for world hunger? A beautiful body? Rudy
Rucker, professional mathematician and master of the crazy scenario,
has probably already thought of it.
--- Locus.
Rucker is a mathematician bewitched by the absurdity of the
universe, and a writer possessed of a brilliantly witty pen.
An inventive and hilarious variation on the fairy tale of the
granting of three wishes.
--- Publisher’s Weekly.
Those who think the fourth dimension is nothing but time should
be encouraged to read The Fourth Dimension, along with anyone
else who feels like opening the hinges of his mind and letting
in a bit of fresh air.
--- Washington Post Book World.
Anyone with even a minimal interest in mathematics and fantasy
will find The Fourth Dimension informative and mind-dazzling...
Rucker plunges into spaces above three [dimensions] with a zest
and energy that is breathtaking.
--- Martin Gardner.
One great achievement of the book is that it should help to
overcome the feeling of bemused awe by which non-mathematicians
are often overwhelmed when multi-dimensional space is mentioned.
--- Nature.
You cannot know where modern science fiction has gotten to
unless you are familiar with Rucker’s work.
--- Fantasy and Science Fiction.
One of cyberpunk’s most inventive works.
--- Rolling Stone.
Rucker is one of science fiction’s wittiest writers.
--- San Francisco Examiner.
He leads his readers through these mental gymnastics in an
easy, informal way, often illustrating his points with cartoons.
--- San Francisco Chronicle.
Informal, amusing, witty, profound ... In an extraordinary
burst of creative energy, Rudy Rucker has managed to bring together
every aspect of mathematical infinity... A dizzying glimpse
into that boundless region of blinding light where the mysteries
of transcendence shatter the clarity of logic, set theory, proof
theory, and contemporary physics.
--- Martin Gardner.
Rudy Rucker, set theorist and science-fiction author, has
continued the tradition of making mathematics and computer science
accessible to the intellectually minded lay-person. Infinity
and the Mind is funny, provocative, entertaining and profound.
--- Journal of Symbolic Logic.
Attempts to put Gödel’s theorems into sharper focus, or at
least to explain them to the non-specialist, abound. My personal
favorite is Rudy Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind, which I recommend
without reservation.
--- Journal of the American Mathematical Society.
A captivating excursion through the mathematical approaches
to the notions of infinity and the implications of that mathematics
for the vexing questions on the mind, existence and consciousness.
--- Mathematics Teacher.
White Light is a good, intelligent powerful novel,
and the most auspicious debut in the SF field since I don’t
know when.
--- Thomas M. Disch. in Fantasy & Science Fiction.
In White Light Rucker commandingly synthesizes mysticism,
pop imagery, the Devil Himself, Jesus Christ, the great mathematicians
and their ideas, ‘head culture,’ and even voodoo into a novel
that takes us on a wild journey to infinity, to the Absolute,
and back again. As for sheer writing, there’s probably no one
like him.
--- John Shirley, author of the Eclipse trilogy.
White Light is a marvelously inventive and lunatically logical
story, where not only is the scaling of infinity a mad, convincing
adventure, but where ordinary human happiness matters too movingly.
--- Ian Watson in Vector.
Hip, humorous, and refreshing.
--- American Book Review.
It’s all done up in great style and it marks an auspicious
debut.
--- Roanoke, Virginia, Times & World News.
He knows how to boggle the mind and, next chapter, to boggle
it again.
--- Thomas M. Disch.