White Light [Import] [Paperback]

RUDOLF V.B. RUCKER (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1980

1980 1st Ed. Import Signed Virgin

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: VIRGIN BOOKS; paperback / softback edition (1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0907080014
• ISBN-13: 978-0907080015
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (32 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Math is Fun!, March 31, 2002

By 

L. Rodney Ford (Athens, AL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: White Light, Third Edition (Paperback)

It is obvious to me that mankind has a built-in desire to expand - in any and every way. Today, virtual worlds of various scope and quality are common (mostly, as games) and interconnected via the internet. I am coming to believe that the impetus for these creations must lie deep within us - it seems instinctive and critical to us in some way. The dream of the Buddha? Or, some aspect of evolution?

Before the existence of the current virtual worlds came to be so common, William Gibson imagined and coined the term "cyberspace". Gibson and other writers like Bruce Sterling and Neal Stephenson wrote stories of "cyberspace" and its relation to the human spirit and evolution. I think, however, it was probably necessary for computer technology to advance to a certain level before imagining these stories was possible. Or, was there synergy? Did the desire, inspired by cyberpunk authors, to create these worlds further drive the development of computer technology once it had achieved a level that inspired the authors? Ah, now I have a headache.

Well, before the computer technology was such as would inspire the concept of "cyberspace", there was a similar concept out of which the concept of "cyberspace" also likely grew. That concept involved a higher plane of reality that could be experienced by achieving "enlightenment" or having and out-of-body experience, sometimes with the assistance of drugs and/or sensory-deprivation tanks. This is the time and place that (I think) probably inspired the book "White Light" by Rudy Rucker. If you consider it a while, you can also see how these concepts extend in many ways into human history. These all obviously have a relationship to our current concepts regarding virtual worlds and a potential next evolutionary step for mankind - the synthesis of man and a machine of his own creation that will allow him to exist both in this world and worlds of his own creation. Ah, the headache is worse, now.

In "White Light", Rudy Rucker tells the story of an out-of-body experience. Felix Rayman, the main character, is a math professor who is frustrated in many aspects of his life. His job is unfulfilling and his relationship with his wife, the mother of his toddler child, is not good. Somehow, he wills himself out of his body and into a strange realm that he struggles to understand. It is very reminiscent of the land of Oz or the Wonderland experienced by Alice with a lot of abstract mathematics added. The story is filled with discussions of abstract mathematics - infinity, infinities of infinities, the point/place/whatever where infinity and absolute zero come together. This makes the story intellectually and philosophically stimulating. I especially enjoyed the irreverent humor involving well-known figures - mathematicians, philosophers, cartoon characters, and even deities and demons. I enjoyed this work of Rudy Rucker for the same reasons I have enjoyed some of his other works. He takes me places that I have never been - in literary style, imagination, and contemplation of the nature of reality and man's current and future role in it.

If you would like to experience an absolutely lunatic and irreverent comic story that is wonderfully entertaining, intellectually stimulating, and likely a direct ancestor of the cyberpunk genre, Rudy Rucker's "White Light" is it.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Transreal, December 22, 2001

By 

John S. Ryan "Scott Ryan" (Cuyahoga Falls, OH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: White Light, Third Edition (Paperback)

I reviewed Rudy Rucker's finest nonfiction work, _Infinity and the Mind_, a while back, and it's about time I reviewed this one too. I think this is probably his finest fiction.

Nor is that an accident, as it was written at about the same time as _Infinity and the Mind_ and deals with the same primary theme: the soul's quest for God, the Absolutely Infinite. And Rucker's is my kind of mysticism.

For this novel is about a mathematician who went to college to dodge the draft and winds up working in set theory in an attempt to (as Lord Buckley would have put it) dig infinity. At one time, Rucker himself was a mathematician who was supposed to be working on Georg Cantor's Continuum Problem while stuck teaching at a college in upstate New York; the novel's protagonist, Felix Rayman, is closely modeled on Rucker in this and other respects. (Some of the other characters are modeled on real and fictional people as well: for example, "Franx," the giant cockroach, is modeled on Franz Kafka -- author of "Metamorphosis," in which Gregor Samsa finds himself turned into a giant cockroach -- and "Donald Duck" is modeled on Donald Duck.) In fact, the original subtitle of the novel was "What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem?" -- which is, incidentally, to determine what order of infinity the points in space make up.

This is thus the first novel in Rucker's series of "transreal" novels -- "transrealism" being defined as somewhat metaphorical storytelling based pretty closely on the author's own experiences. In the present case, we're talking about mystical experiences, some drug-induced, some not. At any rate, Felix Rayman does indeed get to dig infinity -- and so does the reader, although those with _no_ mathematical background may dig infinity a little better if they read _Infinity and the Mind_ either before or after this one.

Rucker writes in his introduction to the Princeton edition of _Infinity and the Mind_ that he must have settled his questions about God, because he stopped thinking about them. Here, in a short afterword, he confirms that he still accepts the premises on which _White Light_ is based, and adds that he has also adopted a new belief: that far from being merely an impersonal metaphysical abstraction, God can and will help human beings overcome our spiritual difficulties if we just ask. He also gives us a bit more information about the influences that shaped the novel.

Also included in this new edition is a somewhat informative but mostly irritating foreword by John Shirley, who helpfully expounds the novel's relationship to the ideals of the '60s but vastly overstates its relationship to cyberpunk. (Rucker's _Software_ and its sequels may be cyberpunk, but this one isn't.)

But the main feature is still the story itself, which I happen to think is mind-blowingly cool. Check it out.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I loved it!, September 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: White Light (Cortext : Science Fiction That Changed the World) (Paperback)

Gregory Benford once stated that he was skeptical on the literary effectiveness of math stories because "mathematical languages have such a wonderful aura of precision and controllability, which is why scientists are intuitively drawn to them; but they lack a quality I can only describe as human expressiveness." To those who concur with Benford I point out Rucker's White Light as a counterexample. White Light is hilarious, intriguing and even poignant at times. The hero Felix Rayman is actually likeable and he keeps the story grounded in the sphere of human emotions even at its most fantastical moments. What does Felix as Donald Duck think about after he has had his heart ripped out by an Aztec priest? - That he never told Hewey, Dewey and Louie that he loved them! However, I must add that this book might be confusing to someone who has had minimal exposure to math beyond calculus. The enjoyment of the book is heightened if you've read Cantor's proof that the cardinality of the real numbers is greater than the cardinality of the natural numbers, know something about the Banach-Tarski paradox and the Axiom of Choice, and have a general knowledge of the great mathematicians of the late 19th century. If you like Stanislaw Lem, are interested in higher mathematics and are tired of those space operas I would highly recommend White Light.