Postsingular [Paperback]

Rudy Rucker (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2009

It begins the day after next year in California. A maladjusted computer industry billionaire and a somewhat crazy US president initiate a radical transformation of the world through sentient nanotechnology; sort of the equivalent of biological artificial intelligence. At first they succeed, but their plans are reversed by Chu, an autistic boy. The next time it isn’t so easy to stop them.

Most of the story takes place in our world after a previously unimaginable transformation. All things look the same, and all people feel the same—but they are different (they’re able to read each others’ minds, for starters). Travel to and from other nearby worlds in the quantum universe is possible. And our world is visited by giant humanoids from another quantum universe, some of whom mean to tidy up the mess we’ve made.

Or maybe just run things.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Alt-cultural folk strive to save Earth from digitized doom in this novel from the prince of gonzo SF. A computer mogul's threat to replace messy reality with clean virtuality and by a memory-hungry artificial intelligence called the Big Pig propels nanotechnologist Ond Lutter, his autistic son, Chu, and their allies on an interdimensional quest for a golden harp, the Lost Chord, strung with hypertubes that can unroll the eighth dimension and unleash limitless computing power. Though he tries to unite the hard and the fuzzy sides of physics, Rucker (Mathematicians in Love) favors the flower power of San Francisco over the number crunching of Silicon Valley. His novel vibrates with the warm rhythms of dream and imagination, not the cold logic of programming (or, for that matter, plotting). Playing with the math of quantum computing, encryption and virtual reality, Rucker places his faith in people who find true reality gnarly enough to love. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

While less well known than William Gibson or Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker was one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement—science fiction with a grittier, dystopian turn. In Postsingular, Rucker explores the idea of the Singularity, a hypothetical point in the future where the combination of artificial intelligence and human enhancement will launch technological advance into an unprecedented overdrive. Reviewer (and fellow SF novelist) Paul DiFilippo writes that while the Singularity—the "Rapture of the nerds"—has become a common theme in science fiction, Rucker is one of the few writers who have sufficiently explored what it would be like to actually experience it. Then again, for novices to Rucker or the SF genre, Postsingular—each page, according to BoingBoing, "weirder than the last"—isn’t necessarily the place to start.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Tor Books; First Edition edition (February 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765318725
• ISBN-13: 978-0765318725
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #908,667 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars When anything is possible nothing is interesting, January 28, 2008

By 

R. Hubbard (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Postsingular (Hardcover)

I have been a fan of Rudy Rucker for many years and admire the inventiveness and irreverence of his earlier works. However, I feel that his more recent work has become increasingly sloppy and Postsingular is probably the worst example of this. There are some ideas about quantum computation, string theory, cryptography, etc at the heart of this story, but they are so overlayered with slick sounding, brightly colored but ultimately meaningless nonsense that the book has nothing to say about technology or people or the interface of people and technology or, well, anything really. There is no problem encountered in the story that isn't solved a few pages later by an inexplicable application of magic. It is impossible to empathize with (or be the least interested by) the antics of the characters when the rules of the game are constantly being changed by the magical intervention of other dimensional demi-gods and aliens. The book would have been much improved if Rucker had stuck to his original idea (in which von Neumann machines provide infinite computation but at the price of devouring the physical earth and replacing it with a simulation) and actually developed it rather than just piling crazy garbage on top of it hoping that some of it might stick.

In addition to this lazy plotting, the characterization is inconsistent and two-dimensional. Especially the characters from the alternate dimension have no consistent motivation and alternately intervene to help or hinder the protagonists as suits the plot. The protagonists themselves have very little depth. And for a book about life after the technological singularity, the events of the book seem to have little or no impact on the characters, banging them about for a while, but at the end leaving them the same boring caricatures they were at the beginning.

The stories of Cory Doctorow provide far more interesting gonzo technological extrapolations if that's what you're in the market for. And for readers interested in speculation on how infinite computational resources would transform humanity I would recommend Permutation City by Greg Egan. In one of the latter chapters of Postsingular, Rucker describes life inside the simulated virtual earth. His description of this world is so depauperate, so lacking in creativity, that it is almost embarrassing when compared to the works of Greg Egan who developed these ideas really brilliantly over 10 years ago. If Rucker couldn't be bothered to invest this section of the book with creativity or thought, it should have been omitted. I feel the same could be said for about 90% of the novel. If you, like me, are looking for the next great work by Rucker, I guess my best advice would be to keep waiting.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Vasty Mentation, March 22, 2008

By 

doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Postsingular (Hardcover)

Rudy Rucker's bodacious ideas are easy to love, but it's harder to love the books. His level of creativity will amaze the adventurous reader, but his skills in distilling those ideas into a coherent plot still have some catching up to do. This book is overflowing with quirky forward thinking about the upcoming quantum singularity, in which every atom in the universe possesses computing power and humanity is freed from earthly isolation. And unlike many of his fellow extropian authors, Rucker makes his stories fun and engaging with brightly described settings, oddball adventures, and quirky characters. He also overloads his prose with wild terminology that might seem like made-up slang but are actually constructed neologisms that will mean something a few decades from now (such as "ubbaflop"). It's certainly fun to read this story of geeky villainy, street-kid heroism, and inter-dimensional shenanigans in the race to either save or ruin humanity in the face of the oncoming singularity. That is, after a rocky start that was apparently pieced together from multiple pre-existing short stories, with incredibly vast but under-explained thought experiments by Rucker appearing and disappearing haphazardly. The book eventually becomes more functional, notwithstanding some very inconsistent plotting. But the real problem is the poorly-written romantic relationships - which are so obviously not Rucker's forte. This novel highlights all of Rucker's weaknesses, sometimes to the point of embarrassment, but the strengths of his ideas and cosmos-sized compu-thinking still make for an adventurous read. [~doomsdayer520~]

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Too weird for me, July 22, 2008

By 

Lynellen Perry "lynellenDOTcom" (Dumfries, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Postsingular (Hardcover)

I really enjoyed Rucker's early fiction ("Software", "Wetware" and "Freeware"), but then I lost track of him. I was pretty disappointed by Postsingular. After reading it, I learned that it was supposed to be teaching me about parallel worlds, nanotechnology, virtual reality, string theory, quantum physics and other mathematical theories. Okay, looking back I can see that. But at the time I just reminded myself that Rucker had a bizarre imagination or that he had been suckling on the Big Pig's teats too often. After all, the plot line is so full of made up adjectives (jitsy? starky? vibby?), coincidences and randomness that why should I assume that any of the math/physics is based on reality at all? On top of this, there's the heavy slathering of Rucker's world view which includes Gaia worship and the smearing of anyone conservative, "Deep down the religious right wants the world to end. They hate women, and they hate Earth. For them, Gaia is a piece of crap for us to use up. The sooner we destroy her, the sooner we get clean and go to heaven. They're equating the nants to their myth of the rapture, see?" Interestingly the "good guys", the hibraners, are Sikh, practice Tai Chi, and also believe that digital technology is rotten, corrupt, and compromised. It was neat to see my favorite Stargate SG-1 submachine gun, the Belgian P90, featured. Overall a bizarre read that I won't be re-reading.