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Rudy Rucker

Postsingular (Postsingular, 1) Paperback – February 3, 2009

by Rudy Rucker (Author)

3.9 55 ratings

Part of: Postsingular (2 books)

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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.

Part of series

Postsingular
Print length

320 pages
Language

English
Publication date

February 3, 2009
Dimensions

5.5 x 0.72 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0765318725
ISBN-13

978-0765318725
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling 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 Spooks

“Rucker takes on the hot topics of nanotechnology and the transformation of humanity with exuberance and irreverent wit….Wildly inventive, tossing out ideas on the cutting edge of science with attention to their most offbeat consequences.” ―The Denver Post

“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

“This is over-the-top as only Rudy Rucker can do it.” ―Analog

About the Author

Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. His books include Postsingular and Spaceland.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Tor Books; First Edition (February 3, 2009)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 320 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0765318725
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0765318725
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.72 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,972,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,498 in Cyberpunk Science Fiction (Books)
- #35,505 in Contemporary Literature & Fiction
- #40,352 in Science Fiction Adventures

Customer Reviews:
3.9 55 ratings

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Rudy Rucker

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Rudy Rucker has written forty books, both pop science. and SF novels in the cyberpunk and transreal styles. He received Philip K. Dick awards for for the novels in his "Ware Tetralogy". His "Complete Stories," and his nonfiction "The Fourth Dimension" are standouts. He worked as a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley for twenty years. He paints works relating to his tales. His latest novel "Juicy Ghosts" is about telepathy, immortality, and a new revolution. Rudy blogs at www.rudyrucker.com/blog

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5

55 global ratings

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Kurt_Mastodon

Rudy Can't Fail

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 28, 2011

Verified Purchase

I picked this one up on a whim despite the mixed reviews, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Postsingular offered chapter upon chapter of Rucker's mind-blowing imagination, while always keeping the zaniness rooted by a scientific underpinning. If you enjoyed 'Frek and the Elixir' or 'Spaceland', then you'll enjoy this trip past the singularity.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Robie Bridges

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 1, 2016

A+

Frenetic and Colorful, but Lacking Humanity

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 29, 2018

I really enjoy Rucker's novels, but having trouble with this one. I expect it to move at a frantic pace, which it does (in what other genre can you destroy, then rebuild the world -- in the first 20 pages?) "Postsingular" introduces vivid and unique characters. But this one moves TOO fast, never settling into the characters minds or following their thought processes, which is what a novel brings to the reader like no other medium. "Postsingular" relies upon technology so much that it suppresses most all of the humanity. The dialogue and language are common, aside from the geek-speak.

Rucker's ability to apply current technology to the future is amazing if not prescient. His concepts are fantastic. But it's like listening to someone brilliant with ADHD. I want to care about the characters, but I'm just not invested.

Maybe I'm anachronistic. Maybe I'm quaint. Maybe I'm reading the wrong genre, but I just want to know a little bit about the humans.

2 people found this helpful

Helpful

R. Hubbard

When anything is possible nothing is interesting

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 28, 2008

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.

38 people found this helpful

Helpful

Autonomeus

Fantastic psychedelic hyper-scientific adventure

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 9, 2021

Everything moves faster in Rudy Rucker's fictional world. All the colors are brighter. It's a day-glo comic book! And reality keeps morphing into something new and unexpected.

Nanobots are going to devour the universe. The singularity approaches. No, the world becomes completely sentient and telepathically connected.

I'll leave it to you to try to follow the wild rollercoaster ride, all informed by Rucker's mathematical expertise and use of string theory. The main characters are hip young people, so if you are a hip young person you should be able to relate.

I read "Software" and "Wetware" back in the late Nineties, and "Postsingular" is another incomparable trip.

Don't miss it if you need a strong buzz without any chemical side-effects!

(verified paperback purchase from the Cosmic Book Emporium)

Helpful

Vasty Mentation

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 22, 2008

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~]

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Vincent

funny as hell. great science background. many feels

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 3, 2021

Verified Purchase

i loved the human interaction details:
X looked and Y to make sure she saw him being playful with a child.

So many laugh out loud moments.

also great technology and science (a new kind).

Thank you Rudy, you are a champ.

Anton Gourman

Re-read Accelerando instead

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 23, 2015

Verified Purchase

This is the first book by Rucker that I've read. I don't remember where I heard about 'Postsingular', but it was somewhere where Charles Stross' accelerando was discussed. It could have been Stross' blog itself, or it could have been amazon recommendations, but I digress.

The book starts relatively strongly, although the story does a 180 in the first 40 or so pages (already). Thee first two thirds of the book are what make it - an exploration of a society fundamentally changed by a global computing network that anyone can access at any time. These are interesting and worthy topics, and I think Rucker deals with them well, moving through the first "honey moon" period, to deeper implications, to how it could affect life. Then it all goes south. The final third of the book is a mix between Deus Ex Machina, unpredictability and sudden solutions. The story loses its momentum and becomes chopped and in-cohesive, with dreamy bits thrown in that should have been left on the cutting room floor. The episode in the Subnet comes to mind - it didn't really add anything to the story, it didn't develop the characters and it didn't get us anywhere new. So, in conclusion, I think the plot, and the interesting ideas, could have been tightened up significantly. If you compare this to Charles Stross' classic Accelerando, the ideas and execution on those ideas are excellent in the latter, because Stross exhibits an unflinching ability to take an idea and its implications to the next and next and next level.

Another thing that prospective readers of this should be aware of, is that Rucker's language is some times very strange. There is a distinct dryness, or maybe an inability to deeply connect to the characters emotional states. One of the main characters in this book is an autistic boy, and I felt, almost throughout the book, that his voice was the one narrating everything. A chopped, observant without understanding the emotional context, kind of thing. This is a "Gina was very angry. She said: "Seeing this kind of behavior makes me so angry"" - kind of writing.

In summary, the ideas are good, but the execution is not. Read Stross and Gibson instead.

One person found this helpful

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