Timeline for Rucker's Transreal Novels
Rudy Rucker
Last updated, August 31, 2013
As I often say, I’ve written many of my SF novels in what I call a “transreal” style. This means that, although the novels deal with science-fictional scenes, the characters and situations in the novels are to some extent modeled on me, the people around me, and events I’ve experienced in my life. I had this idea back in 1983, very early in my career. You can find “A Transrealist Manifesto” as part of my Collected Essays, which I recently put online.
I’ve always thought that, in a loose sense, my transreal novels could be thought of as parts of a single extended work, so here I've tried to fit thirteen of them together.
Book Title | R's "Name" | ~ R's Life | ~ R's Activities |
Frek and the Elixir | Frek Huggins | 1956 - 59 | Boyhood in Louisville |
The Secret of Life | Conrad Bunger | 1963 - 67 | College, engagement |
Spacetime Donuts | Vernor Maxwell | 1968 | Being a hippie |
Master of Space and Time | Joe Fletcher | 1969 | Newlywed, grad school |
Mathematicians in Love | Bela Kis | 1972 | Getting a Ph. D. in math |
White Light | Felix Rayman | 1972 - 78 | Math professor at Geneseo |
The Sex Sphere | Alwin Bitter | 1978 - 80 | On a grant in Heidelberg |
The Hollow Earth | Mason Reynolds | 1984 - 86 | Lynchburg, Virginia |
The Hacker and the Ants | Jerzy Rugby | 1989 - 91 | Programming at Autodesk |
Spaceland | Joe Cube | 1991 - 94 | The Silicon Valley scene |
Saucer Wisdom | Rudy Rucker | 1995 - 97 | Being a writer |
Jim and the Flims | Jim Oster | 2008 | Brain hemorrhage, near death |
The Big Aha | Zad / Lennox Plant | 2009 - 12 | Remembering Louisville |
In making this table, I was inspired by seeing an article about Jack Kerouac’s thirteen-novel transreal Duluoz Legend cycle.
Note that some of the correspondences are more of a stretch than others. And some of the novels incorporate elements from more than one period of my life, and could have been positioned at different points on the timeline. When I had a choice, I tried to order the books in what seemed to make for the best flow.
I chose not to include my six specifically cyberpunk novels in he transreal timeline table. These are the four Ware novels, and the pair Postsingular and Hylozoic. My cyperpunk novels do include characters and situations drawn from my life, but they are so purely science-fictional that they don’t really match with specific periods of my life.
I also left out my beatnik SF novel Turing & Burroughs, and my historical As Above, So Below: Peter Bruegel. These novels are, at least in a fanciful sense, biographies, and thus are less readily seen as transreal, although there are, as always, transreal elements.