Rudy Rucker Libros

The Fourth Dimension — it's a myth, a reality, a dream, an equation, a hypercube, the face of God, the photograph of everything at once ... and now, The Fourth Dimension is this handy paperback. The result is a fantastic, enlightening, and mind-expanding reading experience. In text, pictures, and puzzles, master science and science fiction writer Rudy Rucker immerses his readers in an amazing exploration of a mysterious realm — a realm once seen only by mystics, physicists, and mathematicians. More accessible than Gödel, Escher, Bach and more playful than The Tao of Physics, Rucker's The Fourth Dimension is the most engaging tour of other dimensions since Flatland. David Povilaitis' 200 drawings illustrate Rucker's heady insights while dozens of puzzles and problems make the book a delight to the eye and mind. As Eileen Pollack has written in her rave review, The Fourth Dimension is "magical ... Its effects persist beyond its covers." That's because, like everything else in the fourth dimension, this is more than a book, it is a mental spaceship capable of grand tours of universes far beyond our own.

In Infinity and the Mind, Rudy Rucker leads an excursion to that stretch of the universe he calls the "Mindscape," where he explores infinity in all its forms: potential and actual, mathematical and physical, theological and mundane. Rucker acquaints us with Godel's rotating universe, in which it is theoretically possible to travel into the past, and explains an interpretation of quantum mechanics in which billions of parallel worlds are produced every microsecond. It is in the realm of infinity, he maintains, that mathematics, science, and logic merge with the fantastic. By closely examining the paradoxes that arise from this merging, we can learn a great deal about the human mind, its powers, and its limitations. Using cartoons, puzzles, and quotations to enliven his text, Rucker guides us through such topics as the paradoxes of set theory, the possibilities of physical infinities, and the results of Godel's incompleteness theorems. His personal encounters with Godel the mathematician and philosopher provide a rare glimpse at genius and reveal what very few mathematicians have dared to admit: the transcendent implications of Platonic realism.

Information, argues the author, is the master concept of the computer age which throws a new light on the concepts of space and number, logic and infinity. This mathematical book guides the reader through the latest theories and theorems, introducing Hilbert space, Turing machines and fractals.

In Rucker's last novel, Postsingular, the Singularity happened. Life on Earth has been transformed by the awakening of all matter into consciousness and telepathic communication. The most intimate moments of your life can be experienced by anyone who cares to pay attention, or by hundreds of thousands of anyones if you are one of the Founders who helped create the Singularity. The small bunch of Founders, including young newlyweds Thuy, a hypertext novelist, and Jayjay, a gamer and brain-enhancement addict, are living a popular live-action media life. But now alien races that have already gone through this transformation notice Earth for the first time, and begin to arrive to exploit both the new environment and any available humans. Some of them are real estate developers, some are slavers, and some just want to help. But who is to tell the difference? Someone has to save humanity from the alien invasions, and it might as well be reality media stars Thuy and Jayjay. They have the problems of soap opera stars, and are still propelled through adventures in time and in other universes, a long strange trip indeed.

"The Hollow Earth" is a classic work of American steampunk. In 1836, our seventeen-year-old narrator Mason Reynolds leaves his father's Virginia farm with the black Otha. He befriends the dissolute Edgar Allan Poe, and they fall through a thousand-mile-deep hole in the ice of Antarctica. Within the Hollow Earth, Mason woos and wins Seela, who lives upon a giant flower. At the earth's the core he finds a sky-surfing tribe known as the black gods-and a cluster of giant, god-like sea cucumbers known as woomo. Mason, Seela, and Poe make their way out through the crust and back to Earth. But due to their time in the strong light of the woomo, their skins are black. And then they encounter Poe's double...

Cobb Anderson created the "boppers," sentient robots that overthrew their human overlords. But now Cobb is just an aging alcoholic waiting to die, and the big boppers are threatening to absorb all of the little boppers--and eventually every human--into a giant, melded consciousness. Some of the little boppers aren't too keen on the idea, and a full-scale robot revolt is underway on the moon (where the boppers live). Meanwhile, bopper Ralph Numbers wants to give Cobb immortality by letting a big bopper slice up his brain and tape his "software." It seems like a good idea to Cobb.

After a bizarre scheme on the part of a ruthless computer billionaire and a wacky U.S. president to radically alter the world through sentient nanotechnology goes awry, mysterious giant humanoids from another quantum universe arrive on Earth with plans to tidy up humankind's mess.

Two complete novels--Software, in which robots offer elderly hippie Cobb Anderson immortality, and Wetware, in which the meatbop, a new life form emerges--enter the world of cyberpunk. Reprint.

A massive outsider sci-fi anthology. Varied and largely critically-acclaimed material by the obscure, the overexposed and the justly renowned

In 2054, Phil Gottner finds himself in over his head as he deals with a drug-addicted girlfriend, a father who has been swallowed by a hyperspatial anomaly, a new love interest with a visitor from the Moon, and a mysterious alien species and their godlike, fourth-dimensional deity. Reprint.