was an absurd, psychedelic story about astral projection and the afterlife used to introduce and play with the concept of transfinite numbers.
It's a pretty fun trip with a lot of silly fun and adventure, if unnecessarily lascivious and arguably a tiny bit rapey at one point.
One of my favorites of all time, If Georg Cantor had been the mathematician who wrote Alice in Wonderland, for adults,
On LSD. I've been going through and reading/rereading Rudy Rucker's books since I realized that an acquaintance of mine was Rudy's daughter, People reading Rucker because he's "Cyberpunk" probably aren't going to get this, but this is a really creative book, A blatantly silly sense of humor, a lot less selfconsciouses "hipness" than you usually associate with cyberpunk, and a firm foundation in theoretical math Rucker is a math professor put this hallucinatory narrative in a category of it's own.
One of the weirdest books I've ever read, The science behind it is centered around trying to comprehend infinity and it stretched my brain to the limit a couple of times.
the first/of the book reads a lot like a well described acid trip, but then he ropes you back into reality for a VERY satisfying conclusion.
I knew when Donald Duck was getting his heart ripped out as a sacrificial offering a' la Temple of Doom that this was going to be a memorable read.
Perhaps I should say why I have read this book in the first place: Rudy Rucker is a mathematician, a set theorist to be precise, and this book, his opera prima, was written around a central theme: infinity.
To write fiction trying to convey Cantor's theory of transfinite numbers is no minor feat, and that alone is worthstars,
The plot is, in my opinion, a bit too dreamlike, sometimes is not too sharp: a Lewis Carroll in C flat.
But, tthat said, there are some serious fireworks here and there, for instance the speedup to be able to count aleph null steps: a real feast for the brain.
I will try to write my own novel as a reply to Rudy's celebration of Cantor, Where he depicts the White Light of the Absolute, I will strive to paint the Gray Light which blurs the boundaries of Finite and Infinite.
Not really sure how to score this one, Effectively its Rick and Morty without the laughs, but at least it kept me coming back for more,
Kind of want to give it five and pretend I found something truly profound in it, . but, nah.
I did spot a real meta quality to the infinity angle with this book, though, It felt as if, even though Id read hundreds of pages, the end didnt seem to get any closer, No matter how many chapters I got through, there were still alefone pages left,
Granted, there are some interesting mathematical concepts in the story, For example, the infinite hotel rooms sketch was quite fun, But passages like this just annoyed me:
A jetliner came floating above the city, circled and headed down for a landing.
It was following the red light, The space between the buildings was too narrow, but the plane kept on, One of the wings hit, scraped, broke off, Flames and smoke, and the wreckage went tumbling down towards the light, falling in frozen time, The shapes began changing, rearticulating, The falling wreckage became a spilled bag of groceries, The jetliner a carton of eggs, The red light moved up towards me, then flew off, The eggs broke and a flock of roast turkeys flew out, headless and beating their golden safetypin wings, They followed the red light off to the side, The dark city lay waiting for a replay,
I do realise that Rucker was going for an AliceinNumberland kind of thing, but pages of meaningless garbage take their toll after a while.
The whole thing reminded me very much of sitelinkThe Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy , in fact, Rucker even makes direct reference to Stanislaw Lem in the story.
I imagine this book was intended to appeal to science / mathematics scholars, with injokes and not so subtle nerdwinks, But I cant get my head around why a book aimed at the science market should be so reliant on cod metaphysics and Poundland newage concepts involving astral projection, ghosts, Jesus and the devil.
Lets not even talk about how badly his treatment of female characters holds up in thest century,
It kind of redeemed itself in the last quarter, Mostly. But even then, the narrator was only able to make his point by getting a ghost to light some spookweed during a lecture to get his class stoned enough to grasp his point.
Maybe I just needed weed,
Eventually it stopped. This is the earliest of the Rucker bks I've read amp probably my favorite, The simple premise of a math professor who has outofbody experiences when he naps is expanded to a wild ride that's part hallucinogenic daydream, part semiserious attempt to address notions of how to demonstrate that there aren't onetoone mappings of specific infinities.
The result was completely engrossing amp entertaining for me amp is proof 'positive' that Rucker's one heckuva imaginative guy, Thank the holy ceiling light for nerd culture, It just so happens that I was listening to Exile on Main Street when I started reading White Light.
How cool is that My favorite Stones song is on that album, “I Just Want to See His Face, ” I could listen to it on a loop for hours, Pack a bowl. Play some tunes. Read about a mathematicians Dantean journey through the astral realm, I never thought math could be so much fun, Strange sort of a mathematical philosophical hallucinogenic fiction, but a casual, enjoyable read for the interested layman, i think the author does actually have professional background in metaphysics/mathematics but im not sure, Math nerd takes LSD in the 's, finds god, writes book imagining he's as clever as Lewis Carroll, He is not.
Pleasantly loopy at times, but not much to care about in here, And though infinity is referenced endlessly ha, Rucker doesn't really have anything to say about it, which I found
disappointing, This is nerdy in the names and topics it drops, but not nerdy in terms of depth of thought, .