Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension - Hardcover

Rucker, Rudy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0765303663 ISBN 13: 9780765303660

Publisher: Tor Books, 2002

Synopsis

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!

About this title

About the Author

Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, computer scientist, professor and writer who has twice won the Philip K. Dick Award for best SF paperback original, and has published a number of successful popular books on mathematical subjects, including The Fourth Dimension and Infinity and the Mind. He lives in Los Gatos, California.

Reviews

Like a Mbius strip, that mathematical curiosity in which one surface is produced by twisting judiciously then joining two ends of a ribbon, Rucker's new hard SF satire tweaks the dot-com Y2K subculture into a hilarious tribute to Edwin Abbott's Flatland (1884). Kencom techie Joe Cube fatally miscalculates how his increasingly dissatisfied, yuppie, dingbat wife, Jena, really wants to celebrate the millennial New Year's Eve. Joe should have remembered that Jena likes sex even better than he does. Instead he brings her two Dungeness crabs, a bottle of Dom Perignon and some really cool electronics, an experimental three-dimensional TV. This indigestible combination fizzles Joe's stab at romance, but the electronics sizzle, hurling Jena into the arms of Joe's skuzzy engineer pal, Spazz, and propelling Momo, a siren-voiced denizen of the fourth dimension, into Joe's life. For her own nefarious purposes, Momo cons Joe into helping her people, the Kluppers, against their mortal enemies, the Dronners. Only Joe's three-dimensional reality, Spaceland, separates the two warring races. Combining valid mathematical speculation with wicked send-ups of Silicon Valley and its often otherworldly tribespeople, Rucker achieves a rare fictional world, a belly-laugh-funny commentary on the Faustian dilemma facing a lumpish 21st-century tech-addicted everyman: What is the real price in human relationships, in love and friendship and compassion, of those cutesy little user-friendly gadgets that happen to materialize so innocently on our desks?
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Rucker gives his conception of a fourth dimension of physical extension--a classmate of left-and-right, up-and-down, and backward-and-forward--fictional reality in a romp set in the recent past. At Y2K time in Silicon Valley, manager-type high-techie Joe Cube is visited by Momo from the fourth dimension, or at least half of it, since it is divided by our world, three-dimensional Spaceland. Momo gives Joe some fourth-dimensional capacities, such as being able to see the insides as well as the outsides of three-dimensional stuff, in exchange for making him rich. How? By giving him fourth-dimensional circuitry enabling worldwide clear-channel phone links that bypass phone-company-owned facilities. Business is set up, a funding angel is hooked, and all systems are go--well, except Joe's marriage, spoiled by his hardware specialist's hot bedroom manners with Joe's wife--when it turns out that Momo is double-crossing big-time: we're talkin' end-of-Spaceland here! Rucker spiffs up predictable plot developments with slangy dialogue and catchy descriptions of the second as well as the fourth dimension. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

On the eve of the millennium, Silicon Valley researcher Joe Cube brings home an experimental machine that unexpectedly connects him with the fourth dimension. When Joe meets one of its inhabitants, a curious woman named Momo, she offers to show him the wonders of life beyond the confines of his three-dimensional realm a proposition Joe accepts despite indications that Momo's intentions are not as benevolent as they seem. The author of Realware gives an appreciative nod to Edward Abbot's Flatland, a classic tale of two-dimensional adventure, in this 21st-century allegory of progress and its foibles. As always, Rucker laces his hard science with ample doses of humor to create an sf adventure for the dot-com generation. A good choice for most sf collections.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Tor Books
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0765303663
• ISBN 13: 9780765303660
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304