White Light

(Paperback)

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Description

Author Rudy Rucker offers a unique vision of life, death, and the infinite worlds that lie beyond in this thought-provoking, inspiring, romanticand funny as hellmathematical SF novel.

Young prof Felix Rayman spends his days in another world. Between teaching indifferent students, pondering his theories on infinity, napping, and worrying about his wife, hes barely here.

But when his dreams separate him from his physical body, Felix plunges headfirst into a transfinite universe that looks a lot like the afterworldcomplete with angels, demons, and the restless souls of the dead. And it only gets stranger, as his trials and tribulationsin the company of a giant talking beetlesend Felix up other-worldly peaks that range past infinity to the zone of the White Light, where Nothing and Everything are the same.

Night Shade Books ten-volume series with Rudy Rucker collects nine of the brilliantly weird novels for which the mathematician-turned-author is known, as well as a tenth, never-before-published book, Million-Mile Road Trip. Were proud to collect in one place so much of the work of this influential figure in the early cyberpunk scene, and to share Ruckers fascinating, unique worldview with an entirely new generation of readers.

Reviews

Praise for White Light

White Light is a good, intelligent, powerful novel, and the most auspicious debut in the SF field since I dont know when. Thomas M. Disch, Fantasy & Science Fiction

In White Light Rucker commandingly synthesizes mysticism, pop imagery, the Devil Himself, Jesus Christ, the great mathematicians and their ideas, head culture, and even voodoo into a novel that takes us on a wild journey to infinity, to the Absolute, and back again. As for sheer writing, theres probably no one like him. John Shirley

A marvelously inventive and lunatically logical story, where not only is the scaling of infinity a mad, convincing adventure, but where ordinary human happiness matters too movingly. Ian Watson, Vector

An adventure through time and space, the likes of which only a collaboration between Umberto Eco and Lewis Carroll could attempt . . . each turned corner of White Light is another gleeful surprise, another celebration of cleverness and imagination. Amazon.com

Praise for Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gdel 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

Ruckers 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 characterswho run the gamut from brilliant to near-certifiableencounter 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 theyre 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
Praise for White Light

White Light is a good, intelligent, powerful novel, and the most auspicious debut in the SF field since I dont know when. Thomas M. Disch, Fantasy & Science Fiction

In White Light Rucker commandingly synthesizes mysticism, pop imagery, the Devil Himself, Jesus Christ, the great mathematicians and their ideas, head culture, and even voodoo into a novel that takes us on a wild journey to infinity, to the Absolute, and back again. As for sheer writing, theres probably no one like him. John Shirley

A marvelously inventive and lunatically logical story, where not only is the scaling of infinity a mad, convincing adventure, but where ordinary human happiness matters too movingly. Ian Watson, Vector

An adventure through time and space, the likes of which only a collaboration between Umberto Eco and Lewis Carroll could attempt . . . each turned corner of White Light is another gleeful surprise, another celebration of cleverness and imagination. Amazon.com

Praise for Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gdel 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

Ruckers 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 characterswho run the gamut from brilliant to near-certifiableencounter 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 theyre 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

Author Bio

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.