This volume contains the two last works by HG Wells. Nearing the end of his life, increasingly distressed over the war, Wells deals with death and apocalypse, mortality and religion, and with human insufficiency. "Mind at the End of its Tether" One approaches it with awe. You come across references to it everywhere: Colin Wilson, Priestly, Koestler. It seems to have been a wounding work; something no one could agree with, but something that couldn t be taken lightly. Art Beck In the face of our universal inadequacy . . . man must go steeply up or down and the odds seem to be all in favor of his going down and out. If he goes up, then so great is the adaptation demanded of him that he must cease to be a man. Ordinary man is at the end of his tether. HG Wells "The Happy Turning" Wells barbed fantasies about the afterlife take the forms of happy dream walks. In one he converses with Jesus: "But being crucified upon the irreparable things that one has done, realizing that one has failed, that you have let yourself down and your poor silly disciples down and mankind down, that the God in you has deserted you that was the ultimate torment. Even on the cross I remember shouting out something about it. "" Eli. Eli, lama sabachthani? I said." "Did someone get that down? he replied."" Don t you read the Gospels? " "Good God, No! he said. How can I? I was crucified before all that. ""

Combining both the fiction and nonfiction of one of the most unique contemporary science fiction writers, this collection offers a rare look into Rudy Rucker's mind as an author and mathematician. Featuring an in-depth interview with Rucker about his ideas, politics, and how his career as a mathematician and scientist overlap with that of a bestselling author, this exclusive compilation is a must-have for any science fiction enthusiast. Infiltrating fundamentalist Virginia to witness the clash between religious fanatics and drug-addled and sex crazed youth, this collection is a one-of-a-kind examination of reality according to Rudy Rucker.

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.

All of Rudy Rucker's science-fiction stories in two volumes-a trove of gnarl and wonder. Volume Two includes stories from 1996 through 2011, with fifteen previously uncollected tales. As well as Rucker's solo stories, this volume features collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn.

All of Rudy Rucker's science-fiction stories, a trove of gnarl and wonder in two volumes. Volume One, includes stories from 1976 through 1995, ranging from the cyberpunk to the transreal. As well as Rucker's solo stories, we have collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw.

In Rucker's last novel, "Postsingular," the Singularity happened. Life on Earth has been transformed by the awakening of all matter into consciousness and telepathic communication. The most intimate moments of your life can be experienced by anyone who cares to pay attention, or by hundreds of thousands of anyones if you are one of the Founders who helped create the Singularity.
The small bunch of Founders, including young newlyweds Thuy, a hypertext novelist, and Jayjay, a gamer and brain-enhancement addict, are living a popular live-action media life. But now alien races that have already gone through this transformation notice Earth for the first time, and begin to arrive to exploit both the new environment and any available humans. Some of them are real estate developers, some are slavers, and some just want to help. But who is to tell the difference? Someone has to save humanity from the alien invasions, and it might as well be reality media stars Thuy and Jayjay. They have the problems of soap opera stars, and are still propelled through adventures in time and in other universes, a long strange trip indeed.

In the year 3003, nothing in the world is the same, except maybe that adolescents are still embarrassed by their parents. Society and the biosphere alike have been transformed by biotechnology, and the natural world is almost gone.
Frek Huggins is a boy from a broken family, unusual becaise he was conceived without technological help or genetic modifications. His dad, Carb, is a malcontent who left behind Frek's mom and the Earth itself several years ago.
Everything changes when Frek finds the Anvil, a small flying saucer, under his bed, and it tells him he is destined to save the world. The repressive forces of Gov, the mysterious absolute ruler of Earth, descend on Frek, take away the Anvil, and interrogate him forcefully enough to damage his memory. Frek flees with Wow, his talking dog, to seek out Carb and some answers. But the untrustworthy alien in the saucer has other plans, including claiming exclusive rights to market humanity to the galaxy at large, and making Frek a hero.
"Frek and the Elixir" is a profound, playful SF epic by the wild and ambitious Rudy Rucker.

Peter Bruegel's paintings---a peasant wedding in a barn, hunters in the snow, a rollicking street festival, and many others---have long defined our idea of everyday life in sixteenth- century Europe. They are classic icons of a time and place in much the same way as Norman Rockwell's depictions of twentieth-century America. We know relatively little about Bruegel, but after years of research, novelist Rudy Rucker has built upon the what is known and has created for us the life and world of a true master who never got old.
In sixteen chapters, each headed by a reproduction of one of the famous works, Rucker brings Bruegel's painter's progress and his colorful world to vibrant life, doing for Bruegel what the best-selling Girl with a Pearl Earring did for Vermeer. We follow the artist from the winding streets of Antwerp and Brussels to the glowing skies and decaying monuments of Rome and back. He and his friends, the cartographer Ortelius and Williblad Cheroo, an American Indian, are as vivid on the page as the multifarious denizens of Bruegel's unforgettable canvases.

Here is a world of conflict, change, and discovery, a world where Carnival battles Lent every day, preserved for us in paint by the engaging genius you will meet in the pages of As Above So Below.

Joe Cube is a Silicon Valley hotshot--well, a would-be hotshot anyway--hoping that the 3-D TV project he's managing will lead to the big money IPO he's always dreamed of. On New Year's Eve, hoping to impress his wife, he sneaks home the prototype. It brings no new warmth to their cooling relationship, but it does attract someone else's attention.

When Joe sees a set of lips talking to him (floating in midair) and feels the poke of a disembodied finger (inside him), it's not because of the champagne he's drunk. He has just met Momo, a woman from the All, a world of four spatial dimensions for whom our narrow world, which she calls Spaceland, is something like a rug, but one filled with motion and life. Momo has a business proposition for Joe, an offer she won't let him refuse. The upside potential becomes much clearer to him once she helps him grow a new eye (on a stalk) that can see in the fourth-dimensional directions, and he agrees.

After that it's a wild ride through a million-dollar night in Las Vegas, a budding addiction to tasty purple 4-D food, a failing marriage, eye-popping excursions into the All, and encounters with Momo's foes, rubbery red critters who steal money, offer sage advice and sometimes messily explode. Joe is having the time of his life, until Momo's scheme turns out to have angles he couldn't have imagined. Suddenly the fate of all life here in Spaceland is at stake.

Rudy Rucker is a past master at turning mathematical concepts into rollicking science fiction adventure, from Spacetime Donuts and White Light to The Hacker and the Ants. In the tradition of Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel, Flatland, Rucker gives us a tour of higher mathematics and visionary realities. Spaceland is Flatland on hyperdrive!

From a two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick award, and one of the founding fathers of cyberpunk comes a novel about a very modern nightmare: the most destructive computer virus ever has been traced to your machine. Computer programmer Jerzy Rugby spends his days blissfully hacking away in cyberspace aiding the GoMotion Corporation in its noble quest to create intelligent robots. Then an electronic ant gets into the machinery ... then more ants .... then millions and millions of the nasty viral pests appear out of nowhere to wreak havoc throughout the Net. And suddenly Jerzy Rugby is Public Enemy Number One, wanted for sabotage, computer crime, and treason a patsy who must now get to the bottom of the virtual insectile plague. Rudy Rucker warms the cockles of my heart ... I think of him as the Scarlet Pimpernel of science fiction. Philip Jose Farmer