Hylozoic [Hardcover]

Rudy Rucker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 26, 2009

After the Singularity, everyone and everything is sentient and telepathic. Aliens notice and invade Earth. In Rucker’s last novel, Postsingular, the Singularity happened and life on Earth was transformed by the awakening of all matter into consciousness and into telepathic communication. The most intimate moments of your life can be experienced by anyone who cares to pay attention, or by hundreds of thousands of anyones if you are one of the Founders who helped create the Singularity.

The small bunch of Founders, including young newlyweds Thuy, a hypertext novelist, and Jayjay, a gamer and brain-enhancement addict, are living a popular, live-action media life. But now alien races that have already gone through this transformation notice Earth for the first time, and begin to arrive to exploit both the new environment and any available humans. Some of them are real estate developers, some are slavers, and some just want to help. But how to tell the difference? Someone has to save humanity from the alien invasions, and it might as well be reality media stars Thuy and Jayjay.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Surfing across the transfinite dimensions, this giddy sequel to 2007's Postsingular chronicles the fight to keep Earth œgnarly in the face of aliens who want to steal the quantum chaos that makes the planet interesting. Metanovelist Thuy and her husband, JayJay, who's addicted to the global groupmind called Gaia, maneuver between worlds to fend off chaos-diverting Peng real estate developers and flying manta-ray Hrull. Math prodigy Chu, who mitigates his autism with telepathy, and a parallel universe Hieronymus Bosch join Thuy and JayJay as they escape from modern-day fundamentalists and Renaissance witch-hunters and try to keep Gaia from going volcanic. Rucker's plotting can be as loopy as his time lines, and the ending is so confusing that even his characters complain, but his wild imagination never slows down. (June)
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Review

Praise for the novels of Rudy Rucker:

"It's all a fun romp, and Rucker makes it work by providing a cutting-edge hard-science basis for the world's transformation.. Read these novels. They are like candy with a light, fluffy outside and a hard, dense core. And nobody can eat just one."
--Sci Fi Wire on Hylozoic

"Hylozoic goes much further into the realms of the twisted, the disturbing and the post-everything. . . .   The whole thing gets more and more demented, until it almost feels like you need a post-singularity brain to understand all of the eigth-dimensional drama and weirdness.  But just when you think Rucker's layered on too much . . . for one book, it reveals itself, once again, to be the story of JayJay and Thuy's marriage, and of their battle to stay married in the face of alien birds, addictive manta-ray gel, and a personality-eating world mind."
--io9

"Rucker’s yarn of a future where everything­--animals, rocks, the planet Earth­--is conscious, telepathic and often irrepressibly chatty. Rucker’s approach takes a high-comic trajectory with a satirical edge. . . .  Serious, uproarious fun, with brain-teasers and brilliant ideas tossed about like confetti."
--Kirkus Reviews on Hylozoic
 
"Bristling with cool ideas, bizarre but witty formulations and neologisms, Carrollian mathematical/logic puzzles, gnarly tech applications and gonzo speculations, wicked satire, hot sex, nasty aliens, anarchic plots, and psi powers. . . .  Rucker juggles the disparate elements of his plot with the zany aplomb of the Flying Karamazov Brothers.  His vision of the future is a hopeful and inclusive one--­and one hell of a party."
--Locus on Hylozoic

“Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channelling Kurt Godel 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, author of Spook Country on Postsingular

“Rucker puts the weird in science. String theory might as well have been invented to give rise to mind-benders like this book.”
--Cory Doctorow, New York Times bestselling author of Little Brother, on Postsingular

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (May 26, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765320746
• ISBN-13: 978-0765320742
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #257,730 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Teleporting, Alien Manta Rays, Surfing and Infinity - all before lunch, July 7, 2009

By 

Alex McLaren "Kamejima" (Nagoya, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hylozoic (Hardcover)

It's very good. Just how good is this book? Well I've done some calculations and come up with this theory, it's weird multiplied by wonderful and then raised to the power of freakin awesome!

Looking for a fun story about Teleporting, Alien Manta Rays, Surfing, Infinity, Alef-null, Time travel, Bosch (yes Hieronymus Bosch the painter)? Well this book has all these and more.

It's set in a post singularity world where everything has come "alive". Stones, rivers, trees, houses and you can talk them all. This is done via a thought process called "Teep". It sounds mad, but it's done in an utterly convincing matter of fact manner. After a few days reading this book I found myself wishing I could "Teep" the fridge to find out what was in there.

As with all Rudy Rucker books this is an easy read, the story moves along at a very lively pace. The only times I stopped reading was to ponder the amazing ideas.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crazier than ever, July 13, 2009

By 

D. Newman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hylozoic (Hardcover)

If you are already a Rudy Rucker fan you know how crazy the worlds he creates can be. "Hylozoic" is the craziest most intricate story yet. It's a fun book to read, but I wouldn't recommend it for the first time Rucker reader. Since "Hylozoic" is the sequel to "Post Singular" I recommend reading that fantastic book first.

4 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars An epic mess, January 4, 2010

By 

Jacob Glicklich "Raskolnikov" (The American Midwest) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hylozoic (Hardcover)

A number of interesting ideas here, but developed in a devestatingly incoherent fashion. A random mess of stuff happens, then some more stuff happens, then there's other events. Aliens, weird science indistinguishable from poorly designed magic. Quite a few drafts short of making an effective world, scenario or setting. Combine this with leaden prose, arbitrary character developments (the female lead deciding to bang a 14 year old boy while being broadcast on global reality tv was probably the worst) and you have a story that doesn't remotely believe in itself. The whole angle of 'the world is watching your sexscipades now' raises other issues, as it appears that the larger planet is watching but uninterested in the iminent threat of alien invasaion, and all the action has to be focused in the hands of a small group of supertalented people using the lion's share of the wanky tech.

I see no reason to invest in it or further things by the author. This is basically a crackfic that happens to be original and canon. If readers are interested in the singularity and/or aliens there are many better authors--Iain M. Banks, Vernor Vinge, Charles Stross, Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter come to mind.