Customer Reviews

Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A sequel, of sorts, to Edwin Abbott's classic novel, 'Flatland'. Joe Cube is a high tech executive waiting for his company to be IPOed. One night, while playing with his company's product (a TV screen that turns standard television broadcasting into a 3D image), Joe is contacted by Momo, a creature from the fourth dimension. Momo 'augments' Joe, giving him the ability to see into the fourth dimension, and also the ability to see into our dimension using a four dimension perspective. This gives Joe the unique ability of seeing inside people and objects, naturally, Joe tries to use this to make money... Momo only asks (demands, to be more exact) that Joe start a company that will create a specific product that she will supply. The plot gets complicated when another race of four-dimensional creatures, the Wackles, seem intent on stopping Joe. What is going on? Try the book and see.

This sounds like a very cool premise and it really is. The author truly captured the feeling of a 4D universe, a 3D universe from a 4D perspective, as well as a one dimensional and a two dimensional universe. The book is worth reading if only for this.. or perhaps, only for this: The book suffers from the worst characterization I've ever read in a book. The characters are completely unbelievable, obnoxious, annoying, self-contradicting. They are ridiculous. It feels like a cartoon of a cartoon. Maybe that was the purpose? I've never read any other book by the author, so I can't really say if it's his style. It's a pity, because the book could've been so much better. At the end I couldn't stand any of the characters (including the protagonist). Another weakness is the plot itself: Until the middle of the book it's really quite a good story, but then the quality goes downhill from there.. Shame. I'm giving the book 4/5 stars, but if I could, 3.5/5 would be more appropriate.

I'm a big fan of Rudy Rucker, and the sheer power of his imagination continually blows the reader's mind. Unfortunately, this novel overdoes the imaginative science at the expense of a readable story. Granted, the backdrop of this novel is quite fascinating, as the misguided dot-commer protagonist Joe Cube finds himself in the fourth dimension. Rucker does an amazing job with prose, because he himself is exploring what 4D would look like to us spacelanders who are hopelessly stuck in 3D. It's also true that Rucker has engagingly built upon the influential "Flatland" by Edwin Abbott, which concerns a 2D person in our third dimension. But while the science of this novel is mindbending, and the 4D characters and their climactic battle are freaky, you eventually get the impression that Rucker was so interested in exploring his concept that he didn't get around to a useful plotline or likeable characters. The personalities of the characters and their interactions are either stereotypical or implausible, and the love story subplot is poorly constructed and dangerously close to sappy treacle. Rucker also dabbles briefly in some pseudo-religious big thoughts that go nowhere, and the storyline wraps up very awkwardly with implausible resolutions for everyone involved. Of course, this book is still a fine display of Rucker's remarkable imagination, but the story is what matters. And here that story is disappointingly two-dimensional. [~doomsdayer520~]

Joe Cube's marriage is in trouble and he's frustrated with his life. On the turn of the Y-2-K, none of his fantasies of disaster are coming true. What does happen, however, is even weirder. A fourth dimension woman slides into his life, gives him a fourth dimension skin and a third eye at right angles to the three dimensions of "spaceland" and sets him up with a can't lose business opportunity--cellphones that can communicate without interference by transfering their messages through fourth dimension space. Even with his marriage down the tubes, Joe thinks he is on something. Better, with his third eye, he can see the upcoming cards in Las Vegas blackjack. The opportunities are without limit.

Joe soon learns that the fourth dimensional actors are far from united. The three dimensional Spaceland of normal space separates two fourth dimension universes that would war on one another if the Spaceland barrier were to vanish. Meanwhile, back on earth, Joe is having trouble finding another woman, and gangsters are after him.

Author Rudy Rucker has created a light and fun novel with a bit of a message, a bit of math, and some intriguing drawings of Flatland space and linear space. Joe, with his worries about his marriage and women, his dreams of making millions in an IPO, and his increasing addiction to a fourth dimension drug makes a sympathetic anti-hero who is finally given a chance to save the universe--and trundled off to jail for doing so.

SPACELAND is a thought-provoking and amusing tale with a bit of a slanted--maybe even fourth dimension--moral to it.

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This is a clever takeoff on Flatland, starring Joe Cube, done up in the inimitable Rucker style. Joe, an employee of a Silican Valley startup, gets a visit from Momo, a pushy broad from 4D Klupdom, with a business proposition that he absolutely, positively can't refuse. Momo gives Joe an enhancement, a third eye that can see in the fourth dimension -- and a whole stack of hyperspace cellphone antennas. Can you guess that Momo doesn't have Spaceland's best interests at heart?

Not quite top-drawer Rucker, but clever and fun. Recommended.

Book's HP: http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/spaceland.htm
CAUTION: heavy SPOILERS

Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman

Rudy Rucker must be one strange guy. _Spaceland_ is one of the most imaginative, but at the same time grounded, novels I've ever read. The premise of the novel is out there: What if there were an actual fourth dimension? Rucker goes even further into imaginative realms with his incredibly bizarre characters that inhabit the dimension.

Brief summary: Warring creatures of the fourth dimension want to take each other's land but are blocked by our world, or Spaceland, which lies between them. A fourth dimensional being, Momo, induces hapless Silicon Valley manager Joe Cube to market a marvelous new instantaneous messaging device that will tear Spaceland apart, allowing warfare between the two sides.

Amazingly Rucker is able to tell his 'far out' story in such a way that it never seems too implausible. This is a marvelous science fiction novel. Unfortunately, Mr. Rucker is below the radar of most popular SF readers so this entertaining award-worthy novel will undoubtedly go unnoticed by the SF populace. Don't miss this stand-out novel. Highly recommended.

Spaceland isn't the first attempt to honor Abbott's classic "Flatland", it won't be the last, and it probably won't be the best. And it isn't, by a fair stretch, Rudy Rucker's best novel. But it's a rollicking comic strip of a ride. It's every bit as good at teaching neophytes about the fourth dimension as its model, and (dare I say it?) in prose that's far less tedious. (For one thing, Rucker's hero Joe Cube unabashedly explores the sexual possibilities of every dimension he enters. Don't assign this text for extra credit to your sixth grade math class.)

It's superior to most other updates of "Flatland", in that it captures the full flavor of the original, which was one third math instruction, one third humane philosophical musing, and one third sharp social satire. As a professional mathematician, and perhaps the best popularizer of math around today in nonfiction, Rucker is more than equal to the first task. The war between the sort-of-animals living on one 4D "side" of our universe, and the Loki-like sort-of-plants dwelling on the other, takes on a nearly theological dimension before it's through, although it's a zany kind of Pixar-production theology drawn in primary colors. Rucker's satirical target is less timeless than the simple bead that Abbott drew on heirarchy and stratification: Silicon Valley society at its frenetic dot-com peak. Better read it now while it's still funny - but it sure is comical now.

What Rudy Rucker does best is to take a premise, build consequences on it, then tease out meta-consequences and meta meta consequences in a dizzying tower of speculation. His fiction can be pretty mind blowing. He doesn't build his tower all that high in this effort. But maybe he just didn't feel it was fitting, in a tribute, to upstage old Edwin too far.

It is clear that Rucker has read Edwin Abbott's "Flatland," and bases his story loosely on it. Even his choice of "Joe Cube" as the hero's name (a cube is the 3-dimensional analog of a square, and Abbott's hero was literally a square!) is an allusion to Abbott's book. It is really hard to write why I did not like the book without giving away the ending, however. My biggest problem is that, early on in the book, you decide on "good guys" and "bad guys," but in reading the whole book, you end up having to change your earlier assignment of those roles, in a way I find unnerving.

I read this book at about the same time as Ian Stewart's "Flatterland." Both are in a sense alike in being fictional sequels to "Flatland," though Stewart's book is more closely resemblant to Abbott's original. This book is more of an adventure, while Stewart's is more didactic in terms of conveying a good impression of the spaces it treats; it also covers more varieties of spaces than this book. I rather prefer Stewart's book, though I can imagine that people more interested in the novel aspects may reverse this preference.

I enjoyed this book, but thought that the fourth dimension concepts somewhat overpowered the plot. I found the Flatland references appealing, but readers who have not read Flatland may find this book difficult to enjoy. On the other hand, serious Flatland students might find this too lighthearted.

At times Rucker over-explains the science; at times he under-explains the science; and sometimes he makes significant plot twists without enough context. That said, this is a very creative story. The silicon valley references, and its characters, are amusing. I also appreciated Rucker's sketches sprinkled throughout the book.

I think this book would be most appealing to casual Flatland readers looking for a light, humorous read.

This is an entertaining book, that provides useful and informative analogies for thinking about higher dimensions. Unfortunately, Rucker has already written this book before, multiple times (e.g., _White Light_ and _The Sex Sphere_). But fortunately, it's just as entertaining as ever, and perhaps a bit more polished. If you want to *really* get into the higher mathematics, get _White Light_, which goes into more detail and looks at more philosophical puzzles regarding infinity as well as higher dimensions, and in which the main character has more of a mathematical background than Joe Cube in this book.

Having just come across reviews of Rudy Rucker's work accidentally last week I decided to check out his website (which is very good) and Spaceland, about which I have very mixed feelings. To start with the good comments: Mr. Rucker's imagination in clearly above-average, sort of a combination style-wise of Star Trek and George Carlin's "hippy dippy" era material. (That's a good thing). But I almost wrote a review of this novel before finishing it because, well, the characters are just so damn unlikeable, even nasty. Many elements of the story are obnoxious and not very believable as well; I wasn't offended by the sexual content (though it seemed a little out of place) but the wild, pointless mood-swings of the characters and the meanness they treated each other with gave a bad vibe to the actual story. I finished Spaceland a few minutes ago and am glad I read it overall, but not in the overwhelming way I felt when discovering Octavia Butler's amazing books, for example. (HIGHLY recommended, if you're wondering). Spaceland is full of (dated) high-tech, dot-com excitement but the story itself may leave you, well, flat. PS: It was a real toss-up for me between giving this 2 or 3 stars but I went with two, not because the book is terrible, but to clearly draw attention to some of the aspects of it that many of the above, more-common 3-star reviews have mentioned lightly (like the unlikeable characters). These elements just bothered me more, I guess, and sometimes got in the way of enjoying Mr. Rucker's wild, playful thinking. One more thing: I will read more of Rudy Rucker (I have "Postsingular" next on my list) and you should know that this man is a WONDERFUL artist. Visit his site (rudyrucker.com) and check out the wonderful, colorful, intensely imaginative paintings he shows there. That alone is worth your time. Here's hoping "Postsingular" retains the wild imagination of Spaceland but leaves mean, spiteful characters behind. Dave S. Springfield, Mo. (doctordavestone.com)