Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2006. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 12 (2012), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

In the year 3003, nothing in the world is the same, except maybe that adolescents are still embarrassed by their parents. Society and the biosphere alike have been transformed by biotechnology, and the natural world is almost gone.

Frek Huggins is a boy from a broken family, a misfit because he's a natural child, conceived without technological help or genetic modifications. His dad, Carb, is a malcontent who left behind Frek's mom and the Earth itself several years ago.

Everything changes when Frek finds the Anvil, a small flying saucer, under his bed, and it tells him he is destined to save the world. The repressive forces of Gov, the mysterious absolute ruler of Earth, descend on Frek, take away the Anvil, and interrogate him forcefully enough to damage his memory. Frek flees with Wow, his talking dog, to seek out Carb and some answers. But the untrustworthy alien in the saucer has other plans, including claiming exclusive rights to market humanity to the galaxy at large, and making Frek a hero.

Frek and the Elixir is a profound, playful SF epic by the wild and ambitious Rudy Rucker.

Carlo Morse and Jimmy Ganzer pioneered dream-fabbing, but these days people only want to close their eyes to trashy stuff -- not the mention the kids and their fancy imported tech. It's a good thing Schwartz's Deli is still the same.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #200 September-October 2005. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 11 (2005), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Mad Professor: The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker (2007).

Like many other stories and novels by Rudy Rucker, "Jack and the Aktuals" is a wild and wooly dramatization of certain principles of higher mathematics, with added talking animals, sentient pencils, and orders-of-infinity nested within one another like Russian dolls. No description can ever encompass the mind-bending experience of reading a Rudy Rucker story.

Among Rudy Rucker's many novels are the Ware tetralogy (Software, Wetware, Freeware, and Realware); White Light, Spacetime Donuts, Mathematicians in Love, and Postsingular. His nonfiction includes such works as Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension and The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy. He is the great-great-great grandson of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Jim and the Flims is a novel set in Santa Cruz, CA... and the afterlife. Acclaimed cyberpunk/singularity author Rudy Rucker explores themes of death and destruction, in the wry, quirky style he is famous for.

Jim Oster ruptures the membrane between our world and afterworld (AKA, The Flimsy), creating a two-way tunnel between them. Jim's wife Val is killed in the process, and Jim finds himself battling his personal grief, and an invasion of the Flims. The process of battling the invading Flims leads him to the center of the afterworld, where the ghost of his wife just might be. Can Jim save earth with the help of a posse of Santa Cruz punks, and at the same time bring his wife back to life?

"The feds aren't going to fund you anymore. Not when your boss is a self-flattening radioactive pancake." Desperate times call for desperate inventions.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

The real world is unbearable to madcap inventor Harry Gerber, so he uses his genius to twist the laws of science and create his own tailor-made universe. Master of Space and Time combines high physics and high jinks, blurring the line between science and magic. From a voyage to a mirror-image world where sluglike parasites make slaves of humanity, to trees and bushes that grow fries and pork chops, to a rain of fish, author Rudy Rucker--two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick Award--takes readers on the ultimate joyride. But once the gluons at the core of Harry's creation run out... disaster looms for Harry and his friends.

A wild, funny tale. Two young mathematicians compete for the love of two women across space, time and logic--spinning out Dr. Seuss-like mathematical mumbo jumbo along the way. Our hero Bela befriends a giant jellyfish god, wins his true love, and alters reality in a new way.

This short story originally appreared Nature Physics, August 2008. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 14 (2009), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer.

Read the full story at Nature.

In his first new novel since 2013, cyberpunk pioneer Rudy Rucker offers his own smart, hilarious, and uniquely gnarly science fiction version of the classic road-trip story.

When a seemingly-innocent trumpet solo somehow opens a transdimensional connection to Mappyworld, a parallel universe containing a single, endless plain divided by ridges into basin-like worlds, three California teens find themselves taken on a million mile road trip across a landscape of alien civilizations in a beat-up, purple 80s wagon... with a dark-energy motor, graphene tires and quantum shocks, of course. Their goal? To stop carnivorous flying saucers from invading Earth. And, just maybe, to find love along the way.

Million Mile Road Trip is a phantasmagoric roller-coaster ride--mind warpingly smart and wildly funny, with a warmly beating heart.

Nested Scrolls reveals the true-life adventures of Rudolf von Bitter "Rudy" Rucker—mathematician, transrealist author, punk rocker, and computer hacker. It begins with a young boy growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, the son of a businessman father who becomes a clergyman, and a mother descended from the philosopher Hegel. His career goals? To explore infinity, popularize the fourth dimension, seek the gnarl, become a beatnik writer, and father a family.

All the while Rudy is reading science fiction and beat poetry, and beginning to write some pretty strange fiction of his own—a blend of Philip K. Dick and hard SF that qualifies him as part of the original circle of writers in the early 1980s that includes Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, John Shirley, and Lewis Shiner, who were the founders of cyberpunk.

At one level, Rucker's genial and unfettered memoir brings us a firsthand account of how he and his contemporaries ushered in our postmodern world. At another, this is the wry and moving tale of a man making his way from one turbulent century to the next.

Joe Cube is a Silicon Valley hotshot--well, a would-be hotshot anyway--hoping that the 3-D TV project he's managing will lead to the big money IPO he's always dreamed of. On New Year's Eve, hoping to impress his wife, he sneaks home the prototype. It brings no new warmth to their cooling relationship, but it does attract someone else's attention.

When Joe sees a set of lips talking to him (floating in midair) and feels the poke of a disembodied finger (inside him), it's not because of the champagne he's drunk. He has just met Momo, a woman from the All, a world of four spatial dimensions for whom our narrow world, which she calls Spaceland, is something like a rug, but one filled with motion and life. Momo has a business proposition for Joe, an offer she won't let him refuse. The upside potential becomes much clearer to him once she helps him grow a new eye (on a stalk) that can see in the fourth-dimensional directions, and he agrees.

After that it's a wild ride through a million-dollar night in Las Vegas, a budding addiction to tasty purple 4-D food, a failing marriage, eye-popping excursions into the All, and encounters with Momo's foes, rubbery red critters who steal money, offer sage advice and sometimes messily explode. Joe is having the time of his life, until Momo's scheme turns out to have angles he couldn't have imagined. Suddenly the fate of all life here in Spaceland is at stake.

Rudy Rucker is a past master at turning mathematical concepts into rollicking science fiction adventure, from Spacetime Donuts and White Light to The Hacker and the Ants. In the tradition of Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel, Flatland, Rucker gives us a tour of higher mathematics and visionary realities. Spaceland is Flatland on hyperdrive!

Table of Contents:

• The 57th Franz Kafka (1982)
• Schrödinger's Cat (1981)
• A New Golden Age (1981)
• Jumpin' Jack Flash (1983)
• Sufferin' Succotash (1983)
• Faraway Eyes (1980)
• Hyperspherical Space and Beyond (1980) essay
• The Indian Rope Trick Explained (1983)
• A New Experiment with Time (1982)
• The Man Who Ate Himself (1982)
• The Facts of Life (1983)
• Tales of Houdini (1981)
• Buzz (1981)
• The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge (1983)
• Pac-Man (1982)
• Pi in the Sky (1983)
• Inertia (1983)
• Message Found in a Copy of Flatland (1983)
• The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics (1982)

This short story originally appeared in Lightspeed, April 2016.

Read the full story for free at Lightspeed.

When Alwin, a disaffected young physicist, takes a vacation in Florence with his wife Sybil and finds himself kidnapped by terrorists, he is soon wrapped up in a potentially world-changing - and utterly bizarre - plot.

It's not just that the terrorists are building an atomic bomb, which they want Alwin to help with, and it's not just that he is desperately attracted to one of his captors. It's that they have trapped a weird, four-dimensional creature of hypermatter who happens to resemble, well, a spherical naked woman. And who absolutely oozes mind-clouding, desire-inducing pheromones...

Before they know it, Alwin and Sybil are both discovering the pleasures and curiosities of the sex sphere, while on the run from the various forces chasing them. But what is the sphere itself, really? Why is it stuck in our dimension? And what does it want in the end?

The saucer aliens are here. They're healing the planet. They've got to be stopped.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Table of Contents:

• Introduction - essay by Robert Sheckley
• "A Cambridge Room..." - (1983) - poem
• President Discharged in Storm - (1983) - poem
• Winter Weekends - (1983) - poem
• Bosch's St. Anthony - (1983) - poem
• Kurt Gödel - (1983) - poem
• "At Dancing School..." - (1983) - poem
• "Winter Wastes..." - (1983) - poem
• Drunken-Hearted Man - (1983) - poem
• She Got a Phonograph - (1983) - poem
• Lucifer - (1983) - poem
• "This Poem Proclaims the Odor of... .." - (1983) - poem
• Thirty-One - (1983) - poem
• The 1976 Circus - (1983) - poem
• White Saturday & Sunday Morning - (1983) - poem
• "I Feel Pretty Good, Considering..." - (1983) - poem
• This Year - (1983) - poem
• "In the World, the Ashes of My Neighbor's House Sift By..." - (1983) - poem
• For Sylvia on Our 11th Anniversary - (1983) - poem
• Repatriate - (1983) - poem
• Causes of Blindness - (1983) - poem
• The New Office - (1983) - poem
• The Æther - (1983) - poem
• "New Ream..." - (1983) - poem
• The 57th Franz Kafka - (1982) - short story
• Schrödinger's Cat - (1981) - novelette
• A New Golden Age - (1981) - short story
• Jumpin' Jack Flash - (1983) - short story
• Sufferin' Succotash - (1983) - short story
• Faraway Eyes - (1980) - short story
• The Indian Rope Trick Explained - (1983) - short story
• A New Experiment with Time - (1982) - short story
• The Man Who Ate Himself - (1982) - short story
• The Facts of Life - (1983) - short story
• Tales of Houdini - (1981) - short story
• Buzz - (1981) - short story
• The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge - (1983) - short story
• Pac-Man - (1982) - short story
• Pi in the Sky - (1983) - short story
• Inertia - (1983) - novelette
• Message Found in a Copy of Flatland - (1983) - short story
• The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics - (1982) - short story
• Monument to the Third International - (1984) - short story
• Storming the Cosmos - (1985) - novelette with Bruce Sterling
• In Frozen Time - (1986) - short story
• Room to Grow - (1986) - short story
• Soft Death - (1986) - short story
• Bringing in the Sheaves - (1987) - short story
• Plastic Letters - (1987) - short story
• Inside Out - (1987) - novelette
• Enlightenment Rabies - (1987) - short story
• Probability Pipeline - (1988) - novelette with Marc Laidlaw
• The Man Who Was a Cosmic String - (1987) - short story
• Instability - (1988) - short story with Paul Di Filippo
• Wishloop - (1988) - short story
• As Above, So Below - (1989) - short story
• Rapture in Space - (1989) - short story
• Drugs and Live Sex--NYC 1980 - (1989) - essay
• The Central Teachings of Mysticism - (1982) - essay
• A Transrealist Manifesto - (1983) - essay
• Phil Dick Lives, 1983 and 1986 - essay
• What SF Writers Want - (1985) - essay
• What is Cyberpunk? - (1986) - essay
• Access to Tools - (1987) - essay
• Jerry's Neighbors - (1987) - essay
• Report from Silicon Valley - (1988) - essay
• "Bob"'s Three Miracles an "Me" - (1989) - essay
• Trip to Japan - (1990) - essay
• Author's Notes - essay

Thanks to "bluegene", life is long. But out Route 42 near Goshen, it's also kind of dull. Just the thing to encourage an expedition into the only actual other universe, the place where... but that would be telling.

Read the full story for free at Tor.com.

Malcontent mathematics instructor Feliz Raymond's afternoon naps are the subject of Rudy Rucker's strange and delightful White Light. Bored with his life and job at a state university in New York and making no headway in solving Georg Cantor's Continuum Problem, Raymond finds himself every afternoon, lying flat on his floor, entering into a state of lucid dreaming that allows him to explore an entirely new surreal and mathematically-charged reality. What follows is an adventure through time and space, the likes of which only a collaboration between Umberto Eco and Lewis Carroll could attempt. With traveling companions ranging from Einstein to the devil to a giant beetle named Franx, Raymond explores the infinite reaches of his new playground, which is filled with a multitude of cultural and scientific references, some subtle and many overt. Each turned corner of White Light is another gleeful surprise, another celebration of cleverness and imagination. Rucker, who is just as comfortable presenting accessible introductions to modern ideas in geometry (The Fourth Dimension: A Guided Tour of the Higher Universes) as he is spinning yarns of hacker fiction (The Hacker and the Ants), wrote this novel while, like the protagonist, endeavoring to solve Cantor's Continuum Problem at a state university in New York. This novel belongs to the tradition of science fiction pioneered by H. G. Wells, where the science is the source of intrigue that adventures grow from and propel the protagonists.

This novella was a Finalist for the Asimov's Readers' Awards and was first published in Asimov's Science Fiction in November/December 2019.

Read this story for free at Asimov's.

Combining both the fiction and nonfiction of one of the most unique contemporary science fiction writers, this collection offers a rare look into Rudy Rucker's mind as an author and mathematician. Featuring an in-depth interview with Rucker about his ideas, politics, and how his career as a mathematician and scientist overlap with that of a bestselling author, this exclusive compilation is a must-have for any science fiction enthusiast. Infiltrating fundamentalist Virginia to witness the clash between religious fanatics and drug-addled and sex crazed youth, this collection is a one-of-a-kind examination of reality according to Rudy Rucker.

Table of Contents:

• The Men in the Back Room at the Country Club - (2005)
• Surfing the Gnarl - (2012)
• Rapture in Space - (1989)
• Load on the Miracles and Keep a Straight Face - (2012) - interview of Rudy Rucker by Terry Bisson
• Bibliography - (2012)

It all begins next year in California. A maladjusted computer industry billionaire and a somewhat crazy US President initiate a radical transformation of the world through sentient nanotechnology; sort of the equivalent of biological artificial intelligence. At first they succeed, but their plans are reversed by Chu, an autistic boy. The next time it isn't so easy to stop them. Most of the story takes place in a world after a heretofore unimaginable transformation, where all the things look the same but all the people are different (they're able to read each others' minds, for starters). Travel to and from other nearby worlds in the quantum universe is possible, so now our world is visited by giant humanoids from another quantum universe, and some of them mean to tidy up the mess we've made. Or maybe just run things.

After the Singularity, everyone and everything is sentient and telepathic. Aliens notice and invade Earth. In Rucker's last novel, Postsingular, the Singularity happened and life on Earth was transformed by the awakening of all matter into consciousness and into 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 how 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.

In 1836, Mason Algiers Reynolds leaves his family's Virginia farm with his father's slave, a dog, and a mule. Branded a murderer, he finds sanctuary with his hero, Edgar Allan Poe, and together they embark on an expedition to the South Pole. It is there where strange people, and stranger creatures abound, that their bizarre adventures truly begin.

"Return to the Hollow Earth" is Rucker's second steampunk novel featuring Mason Reynolds. In 1850, Mason and his wife Seela embark upon a perilous trip around Cape Horn to San Francisco. Their ship sinks, but they're saved by a tentacled, flying nautilus--who carries them to meet Edgar Allan Poe. Poe leads them on a return voyage to the Hollow Earth, passing through the throat of a thousand-mile-deep maelstrom at the North Pole. Within the Hollow Earth, they learn that the god-like woomo sea cucumbers mean to send them them on a epic mission across space and time. The initial stage of this mission brings them to Santa Cruz, California--in the year 2018. And then things get gnarly...

It starts with Software, where rebel robots bring immortality to their human creator by eating his brain. Software won the first Philip K. Dick Award. In Wetware, the robots decide to start building people--and people get strung out on an insane new drug called merge. This cyberpunk classic garnered a second Philip K. Dick award. By Freeware, the robots have evolved into soft plastic slugs called moldies--and some human "cheeseballs" want to have sex with them. The action redoubles when aliens begin arriving in the form of cosmic rays. And with Realware, the humans and robots reach a higher plateau. Includes an introduction by William Gibson.

It was Cobb Anderson who built the"boppers"--the first robots with real brains. Now, in 2020, Cobb is just another aged "pheezer" with a bad heart, drinking and grooving an the old tunes in Florida retirement hell. His "bops" have came a long way, though, rebelling against their subjugation to set up their own society an the moon. And now they're offering creator Cobb immortality but at a stiff price: his body his soul... and his world.

In 2030, bopper robots in their lunar refuge have founds a way to infuse DNA wetware with their own software code. The result is a new lifeform: the "meatbop." Fair is fair, after all. Humans built the boppers, now bops are building humans... sort of. It's all part of an insidious plot that's about to ensnare Della Taze--who doesn't think she killed her lover while in drug-induced ecstasy... but isn't sure. And it's certainly catastrophic enough to call Cobb Anderson -- the pheezer who started it all -- out of cold-storage heaven.

The Godfather of cyberpunk--a mad scientist bravely meddling in the outrageous and heretical--Rucker created Bopper Robots, who rebelled against human society in his award-winning classic Software.

Now, in 2953, "moldies" are the latest robotic advancement--evolved artificial lifeforms made of soft plastic and gene-tweaked molds and algae, so anatomically inventive and universally despised that their very presence on the planet has thrown the entire low-rent future into a serious tailspin. So the moon is the place to be, if you're a persecuted "moldie" or an enlightened "flesher" intent an creating a new, more utopian hybrid civilization. Of course up there, there are other intergalactic intelligences to contend with--and some not so intelligent--who have their own agendas and appetites.

This is scientific fabulation at its most brazenly inventive--funny, cutting-edge and deeply informed. No writer alive puts it all together like Rudy Rucker.Artificial life forms made of soft plastic and gene-tweaked mold and algae, moldies are evolved robots in the year 2053--anatomically inventive and universally despised. In a sleazy, low-rent future, sexual fraternization with moldies is strictly taboo--a societal sin that is of no concern whatsoever to Randy Karl Tucker. A Kentucky boy who has seriously strayed from the Heritagist religion1s stern teachings about the evils of artificial life, Randy feels a definite something for Monique, moldie bookkeeper and maid at the Clearlight Terrace Court Motel But Monique1s sudden and inexplicable abduction from the planet--coupled with unsettling revelations about Randy1s own dubious origins--is dragging the degenerate flesher and all those around him into an ugly, conspiratorial mess... even as it pulls an unsuspecting humanity ever-closer to a stunning encounter with intergalactic intelligence.

Gottner doesn't know where his life is. His girlfriend is hooked on merge, a drug used in "bacteria-style" sex. His father has just been swallowed by a hyperspatial anomaly that materialized from a piece of art designed to project images of four-dimensional objects into three-dimensional space. Then, at the funeral, Phil meets and falls in love with Yoke Starr-Mydol, a young lovely visiting from the Moon.

Spuring Phil's advances, Yoke flies to the Polynesian island of Tonga, where she discovers an alien presence at the bottome of the sea. Calling themselves Metamartians, the aliens offer Yoke an alla,a handheld device that gives its owner the power of mind over matter--which, it turns out, is pretty much like having a magic wand.

But as Phil pursues Yoke, and the altruistic Metamartians distribute more allas, he begins to suspect that his father's disappearance and presumed death are linked to the aliens and their miraculous gift. For it seems that the allas are accompanied by a fourth-dimensional entity known as Om, a godlike being who's taken a special interest in humans. Now Phil and Yoke must solve the mystery of the Metamartians and their god, before humanity uses its newfound powers to destroy itself altogether.