Rudy Rucker: Mathematicians in Love (Math Apocalyptic)

An excellent read. Rudy Rucker has got a highly lubricated imagination and can churn this stuff out like rocketfuel. For those of us who have lived through at minimum an undergraduate math degree, awesome vindication! Complete with hyperdimensional faculty soap operas. Like a Russian Kominderhutz, but with a west-coast tang. Its true, some mathematicians do surf. Best line? The Fascist Earth Rapers have stolen another election! (pg 52). Brian Aldiss had this one old book, Barefoot in the Head, which was pretty comparable in certain ways, but its more tempting to reference other modern writers who deal in the density and speed of modern life. If Thomas Pynchon wrote in modern dialog, filtered through the speed of computers, he might have similar density of abstract structures hiding out behind the text as Rucker, although they are built off of the fractal history of human literature rather than conceptual abstract mathematic structures. Though, of course, one may be closer to the other than some would admit. In Mathematicians in Love, Rucker is full speed ahead. Plots change every page. Its like, Jetski, or whatever. Its nice to read his importing of emotional quandry eggs into the abstract mathematical imaginings, as books like this need to communicate some tinge of honesty if they dont want to spin off into the realm of pure textual structure like the Solid Confessor or Joyce Ulysses or Rabelais, tho the Solid Confessor is pretty much science fiction. Or the strangeness of Plantaddict from Otternesses Boerarrium... But the early Rucker shorts like 57th Franz Kafka have a more direct focus which his later novels lack, minus Wetware of course. At the end of the torus, though, his writing gets better and better, and his imagination is on an exponential curve upward. One of those authors that give hope the human race can survive its apocalyptic bent, if only it could gestalt a bit more.

- 57th Franz Kafka [Jan 29 2007 03:26 AM]