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Rudy Rucker
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 Rudy Rucker is a mathematician and writer influenced by both Lewis Carroll and Jack Kerouac:
his weird variety of sf combines the 19th century abstract mathematical landscapes of Edwin Abbott
(Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, 1884 ) and C. H. Hinton
(Scientific Romances, First Series, 1886;
Scientific Romances, Second Series, 1902;
An Episode of Flatland, 1907), the first writers to create imagined settings out
of the spatial dimensions of mathematical conceptualizing, with the hip, paranoid, literary ethos of the
beatnik underground. His stories tend toward hard sf and then bounce and veer in a variety of directions,
sometimes into the range of cyberpunk. He was a fellow-traveller of Sterling and Gibson in the early 1980s and is
included by Sterling in the Movement anthology
Mirrorshades (1986). But Rucker remains an individualist;
a successful popular science writer, sometime college professor, sf writer who careens and caroms from one
sf form to another. His work is energetic and imaginative; New Wave and hard sf attitudes coexist within it.
His attitude is comic, Kerouac-hippie, his style is somewhere between Mark Twain and John Sladek. His
novel White Light (1980), was followed by several other novels, including
Spacetime Donuts (1981, his first novel),
Software (1982), Wetware (1988) and
The Hollow Earth (1990). His short fiction tends to be
intellectually demanding and abstract.
"Ms. Found in a Copy of Flatland" is an archly old-fashioned tale of a scholar trapped by his
narrow-minded scholarship, a mathematical story at once a parody of the classic by Abbott and a sincere homage .
There is no better example of hard science fiction making literal the abstract imagery of science and
mathematics than this piece. Gregory Benford commented sceptically on the literary effectiveness of math stories:
"Mathematical languages have such a wonderful aura of precision and controllability, which is why
scientists are intuitively drawn to them; but they lack a quality I can only describe as human expressiveness."
However, Rucker, with his broad brush strokes, manages to make his story by turns intriguing, frightening, and hilarious.
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The Ascent of Wonder copyright © 1994 by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. | ||
Cramer: On Science & Science Fiction || Hartwell: Hard Science Fiction
David G. Hartwell || Kathryn Cramer || About Tor Books || Ordering Info
Interactive Intoduction to THE ASCENT OF WONDER copyright © 1995-1997 by Kathryn Cramer.