Mad Professor
The Uncollected Short Stories of Rudy Rucker
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Much cyberpunk SF is grimly noir in depicting future-shocked people trapped by their limitations, but in this collection of 19 laid-back yarns, Rucker (Mathematicians in Love) finds human dilemmas much too important to take seriously. "Jenna and Me," for example, co-written with his son Rudy Rucker Jr., shows President Bush's daughter brain-wiped by agents of the "conspiracy elite," but eventually becoming the unwitting focus for an alien invasion that may remake humanity for the better. "Junk DNA," a collaboration with Bruce Sterling, depicts the accidental benefits of unprincipled commercial exploitation of bioscience. Other stories emphasize extreme physical transformation, positive or negative results of thought experiments, and cheerful horniness. While readers who want rigorously developed plots or characterization may be disappointed, those who can groove on something like a collaboration between Italo Calvino and Jimmy Buffett will find themselves grinning and humming along.
