Three teens ride a car across the universe and back. Look out for the flying saucers! **ReviewPraise for *Million Mile Road Trip: " *Tipping his hat to Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, and Douglas Adams , Rucker immerses readers in a fantastical roadtrip adventure that’s a wild ride of unmitigated joy. . . . he ties everything together with internal consistency, playful use of language that keeps his ideas alien yet accessible, and a solid grounding in fourth-dimensional math. This wacky adventure is a geeky reader’s delight."— Publishers Weekly , starred review** "One of those journey-means-more-than-the-destination kind of things — a true road trip novel — with Rucker just letting it all hang out . . .  you just jump in and hang on , warmed by the goofball joy of it all, buoyed up by the high, jazz-cat bebop of the language, the glazed stoner rhythms. And by the end of it, your mind will be inevitably expanded—open to the possibility of almost anything. " —Jason Sheehan, NPR " Rucker has outdone himself in creating the most bizarre and surreal and overstuffed cosmic ecology of his career. The vast majority of the concepts are brand new. And the abundance of alien characters is the richest yet of his oeuvre. Yes, it’s all obvious now— Rucker is Lennon & McCartney rolled up into one."—Paul Di Filippo, Locus “Given all that’s come and gone in science fiction, Rucker’s Million Mile Road Trip *brings us to some very fresh territory.”— Electric Review* “ A trippy adventure that would make Gulliver and Candide’s heads spin.”— Amazing Stories “Jack Kerouac may have his name in the canons of literature as ‘that guy who wrote the ultimate road trip book’, but I daresay that for as dynamic and shifting as  On the Road  is,  Million Mile Road Trip  runs through the cosmos and back in the same time without losing any of its humanity. . . . Do yourself a favor if you haven’t read Rucker, light a candle for the saint and buy Million Mile Road Trip. It will wash away the sins of the mediocre, derivative material flooding the market today and cleanse your science fiction soul. ”— Speculiction “Million Mile Road Trip  is unlike any journey you’ve ever been on. Rucker takes the wheel and slams through barriers into a world that bursts with originality and inventiveness. I’m new to Rucker’s work and this surreal experience makes me want to stop what I’m doing and read everything he’s written in a feverish marathon. . . . Overall, it’s impossible not to love Million Mile Road Trip. With a wild cast of characters, an alien world that boggles the mind, and extremely spot-on writing, *Rucker has created a masterpiece that must be experienced.”— Reviews & Robots* Praise for Rudy Rucker: “ 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  “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. ” — New York Review of Science Fiction   “For some two decades now, since the publication of his first novel,  White Light , Rucker has combined  an easygoing, trippy style influenced by the Beats  with a deep engagement with knotty (or ‘gnarly,’ to employ one of his favorite terms) intellectual conceits, based mainly in mathematics. In the typical Rucker novel,  likably eccentric characters —who run the gamut from brilliant to near-certifiable—encounter aspects of the universe that confirm that  life is weirder than we can imagine. ” — The Washington Post   “Rudy Rucker is  the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today. ” — Charles Stross, author of The Laundry Files  “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   “Rucker [gives you]  more ideas per chapter than most authors use in an entire novel. ” — San Francisco Chronicle   About the Author Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism, often including himself as a character. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Product DescriptionIn 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 extraordinary expedition to the South Pole, and the entrance to the Hollow Earth. It is there, at the center of the world, where strange physics, strange people, and stranger creatures abound, that their bizarre adventures truly begin. An early steampunk classic.

Three science fiction novels by Rudy Rucker, blending realism and the fantistic in a "transreal" style.

In his outrageous new Cyberpunk adventure, Rucker infiltrates fundamentalist Virginia to witness the apocalyptic clash between Bible-thumpers and Saucer Demons at a country club barbecue; undresses in orbit to explore the future of foreplay in freefall; and dons the robe of a Transreal Lifestyle Adviser with How-to Tips on how one can manipulate the Fourth Dimension to master everyday tasks like finding an apartment and dispatching a tiresome lover! A quantum physics infused SF novel from this award-winning author.

The essays and memoirs collected in Seek! trace Rudy Rucker's trajectory through the final decade of the second millennium. His topics include artificial life, chaos, the big bang, Pieter Brueghel, the church of the subgenius, live sex, mathematics, science fiction, and TV evangelism. A computer scientist and programmer, Rucker is an articulate, engaging guide to the world on either side of the computer screen.Amazon.com ReviewRudy Rucker, author of the Software tetralogy and White Light, possesses a quality that could endanger his cyberpunk credibility: enthusiasm. No sullen antihero, Dr. Rucker is a computer science professor and a devoted family man, but his fiction has kept many a reader up all night with visions of humans uploading their consciousnesses into robots that eventually return the favor. His collection of short nonfiction, Seek!, is just as clear and sassy as his novels. Whether he's having visions in Yosemite with his son, flipping the bird at Jerry Falwell's second in command, or playing with his favorite artificial life forms, Rucker seems to know he'll be telling us about it later; his uncanny knack for perfectly apt descriptions must arise from this knowledge. Once you've been told that the "Mandelbrot set is shaped like big fat warty buttocks ..." you're not likely to forget it.Divided into three sections ("Science," "Life," and "Art"), Seek! reads like a user's guide to the New Renaissance: after reading "A Brief History of Computers," we can move on to "Cyberculture in Japan," visit Industrial Light and Magic, and examine Brueghel's Peasant Dance in depth. All 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. He provides Web page URLs so that readers will have natural starting points for continuing research, including his own Web site's free software for playing with cellular automata and other funky almost-living critters. As Rucker says to his students, referring to the boundary between order and chaos (and providing a title for this book): Seek Ye the Gnarl! --Rob LightnerFrom Library JournalSf novelist Rucker (Freeware) is also a professor of computer science at San Jose State University, CA, and an industrial-strength programmer. In this collection of his nonfiction, Rucker ruminates on a variety of topics, mostly digital. His thoughts range from Silicon Valley where he has lived since 1946 to hacking, cyberpunking, the ghost of Philip K. Dick, and art in Amsterdam. You don't have to install anything other than your own mindAand the effect will be longer-lasting than most net-related IPOs. A very good book, for all libraries. Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From a two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick award, and one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk comes a novel about a very modern nightmare: the most destructive computer virus ever has been traced to your machine. Computer programmer Jerzy Rugby spends his days blissfully hacking away in cyberspace — aiding the GoMotion Corporation in its noble quest to create intelligent robots. Then an electronic ant gets into the machinery ... then more ants .... then millions and millions of the nasty viral pests appear out of nowhere to wreak havoc throughout the Net. And suddenly Jerzy Rugby is Public Enemy Number One, wanted for sabotage, computer crime, and treason — a patsy who must now get to the bottom of the virtual insectile plague. "Rudy Rucker warms the cockles of my heart ... I think of him as the Scarlet Pimpernel of science fiction." — Philip Jose Farmer

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.At the publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied.

Nine wild, weird and wondrous stories, written together by Rucker and Sterling. What do you get if two cyberpunk masters spend thirty years writing tales about transreally warped versions of themselves? A unique perspective on giant ants, flying jellyfish, Soviet rocketeers, runaway genomics, Silicon Valley, and the death of the Universe.

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...

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...