Synopses & Reviews
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.
Table of Contents
Jumpin' Jack Flash -- Enlightenment rabies -- Schrodinger's cat -- A new golden age -- Faraway eyes -- The fifty-seventh Franz Kafka -- The indian rope trick explained -- A new experiment with time -- The man who ate himself -- Tales of Houdini -- The facts of life -- Buzz -- The last Einstein-Rosen bridge -- Pac-Man -- Pi in the sky -- Wishloop -- Inertia -- Bringing in the sheaves -- The Jack Kerouac disembodied school of poetics -- Message found in a copy of flatland -- Plastic letters -- Monument to the third international -- Rapture in space -- Storming the cosmos (written with Bruce Sterling) --In frozen time -- Soft death -- Inside out -- Instability (written with Paul Di Filippo) -- The man who was a cosmic string -- Probability pipeline (written with Marc Laidlaw) -- As above, so below -- Chaos surfari (written with Marc Laidlaw) -- Big jelly (written with Bruce Sterling) -- Easy as pie -- The Andy Warhol sandcandle (written with Marc Laidlaw) -- The square root of Pythagoras (written with Paul Di Filippo).