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White Light Paperback – April 16, 2001

by Rudy Rucker (Author), John Shirley (Introduction)

4.3 46 ratings

Felix Rayman spends the day teaching indifferent students, pondering his theories on infinity, and daydreaming. When his dreams finally separate him from his physical body, Felix plunges headfirst into a multidimensional universe beyond the limits of space and time — the place of White Light.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Four Walls Eight Windows
Publication date

April 16, 2001
Dimensions

5.25 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

156858198X
ISBN-13

978-1568581989
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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Four Walls Eight Windows; 3rd edition (April 16, 2001)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 156858198X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1568581989
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.75 x 8.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #7,077,820 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #232,601 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #253,469 in Science Fiction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.3 46 ratings

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About the author

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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

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4.3 out of 5

46 global ratings

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B. Macmillan

Tough book to put down

Reviewed in the United States on October 10, 2017

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I stayed up way too late at night reading this book. Read it back in 1982 when RR was a professor at my college...loved it then, but got so much more out of it now, 35 years later. Fun read, good visuals, can't wait to read it again!

3 people found this helpful

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atciii

Trippy Math Humor!

Reviewed in the United States on February 22, 2020

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This book is a hoot! I found it a short, quick read, channeling Philip K Dick mixed with math humor. The main character effectively goes to "Math Heaven" and has to do with all sorts of absurd problems with infinity. Rucker's writing improves with later books, but this (his first novel) is a delight.

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W. Chandler

Recommended to me by a friend

Reviewed in the United States on October 18, 2014

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Recommended to me by a friend, to try to help me expand my literary horizons past non-fiction educational books. I'm glad I read it. Not exciting in the same way a Lord of the Rings adventure may, but much more interesting.

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Andrea F

Super weird and yet awesome

Reviewed in the United States on November 4, 2016

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Found this via boingboing and gave it a shot. Math, dreams, death, aether, mountains, bloogs, professors and it just holds together.

4 people found this helpful

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L. Rodney Ford

Math is Fun!

Reviewed in the United States on April 1, 2002

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.

12 people found this helpful

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Charles

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2016

Mindblowing.

Mathematics - Cyber Punk Style

Reviewed in the United States on July 5, 2000

Blaze` math professor at an obscure university experiences astral projection and embarks on the trip of a lifetime in search of infinity and what lies beyond. Wild associations and images induced by drug abuse and alcohol intoxication constitue the core of this not so fresh cyber punk novel. Recommended on a dull winter day (or night) in the northern hemisphere. Definitively captivating and intriguing with a mind boggling plot. If you are lucky, you might find out what ALEF-NULL stands for...

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John S. Ryan

Transreal

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2001

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.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Lynne

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 23, 2015

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Good condition , very happy

Martin Roberts

Brilliant, and Imaginative writing!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 15, 2018

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There’s a lot of amazing passages in this novel, weird and wonderful bursts of a brilliant imagination at work... I would have given a higher rating if the story itself matched up to the individual parts.

karen nelson

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 1, 2015

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brilliant book, excellent read.

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