Spaceland

Tor Books, 2003

A novel of the fourth dimension.

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The background of this page is a picture I painted of Drabk the Sharak of Okbra...who appears in the novel.

 

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: Understanding Higher Universes in Six Easy Lessons

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.
--- 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

Spaceland is hilarious, exuberant and mind-expanding. A snappy plot, sympahetic character, crunchy language, and multidimensional aliens: about what one has come to expect in a Rudy Rucker novel. But Rucker has surpassed himself in this novel of Y2K in which the unsuspecting Joe Cube finds his world turned inside-out and in other dimensions as well. ... Rudy Rucker's brilliance as a science-fiction humorist is equal to Robert Sheckley on his best day; and for sheer inventiveness of plot and compelling ordinary human characters, Rucker is the equal of Philip K. Dick..."
--- The New York Review of Science Fiction