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Though he is also a mathematician, computer scientist, and essayist, Rudy Rucker is best known for his ground-breaking science fiction. The companion volume to Seek!, Rucker's selected nonfiction, Gnarl! brings together three dozen of the writer's best science fiction short stories. His first major story collection in 17 years, the volume includes a number of previously unanthologized stories, including tales cowritten with Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, and Bruce Sterling. Classics such as "The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka," a timely meditation on the paradoxes of cloning, are side by side with works of pseudomemoir like "The Indian Rope Trick Explained." The Rucker formula - cutting-edge physics, a wild but perversely logical imagination, and a decidedly punk attitude - illuminates this new collection.
At the untamed frontiers of intelligence, consciousness, matter, and reality lies Rudy Rucker's The Mad Professor, a collection of twelve mind-bending science fiction stories that probe the outer limits of possibility. Rucker, an accomplished computer scientist and mathematician with numerous science books and novels to his credit, brings his deep and varied knowledge of the mind, mathematics, and the ever-weird and wondrous workings of the physical universe to the stories collected here. In Chu and the Nants we read of a bizarre future following a Verge Singularity, in which hyperintelligent computers have taken over the solar system. Panpsychism Proved breaks down the boundaries between mind and matter, exploring the notion that "every object has a mind." And Six Thought Experiments Concerning the Nature of Computation is an exhilarating collection of mini-stories taking us to the outrageous extremes of theoretical speculation. In The Mad Professor, Rucker deploys the full range of his writing talent and scientific knowledge to take us on a wild romp through the known, the unknown, and the awesomely peculiar.
A treasure trove of gnarl and wonder. The ninth edition of Rucker's Complete Stories set, released in 2025. Volume 1 runs from 1976 to 2005, and Volume 2 runs from 2007 tp 2024. The stories include collaborations with Bruce with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, Eileen Gunn, and Rudy Rucker Jr.. The full Complete Stories set is also available as a single e-book. .
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.
"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... "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 modern-day Santa Cruz, California. This 2021 edition supersedes all previous versions of "The Hollow Earth" and "Return to the Hollow Earth."