Rucker, Rudy 1946-

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RUCKER, Rudy 1946-

(Rudolf v.B. Rucker, Rudolf von Bitter Rucker, Rudy v.B. Rucker)

PERSONAL: Born March 22, 1946, in Louisville, KY; son of Embry Cobb (an Episcopal priest) and Marianne (a potter and artist; maiden name, von Bitter) Rucker; married Sylvia Bogsch (a teacher), June 24, 1967; children: Georgia, Rudolf, Jr., Isabel. Education: Swarthmore College, B.A., 1967; Rutgers University, M.A., 1969, Ph.D., 1973. Religion: Episcopalian.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Four Walls Eight Windows, 39 W. 14th St., Room 503, New York, NY 10011.

CAREER: Mathematician, computer scientist, software/freeware developer, author. State University of New York College at Geneseo, assistant professor of mathematics, 1972–78; University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, West Germany, von Humboldt research fellow, 1978–80; Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, VA, associate professor of mathematics, 1980–82; freelance writer, 1982–86; San Jose State University, San Jose, CA, professor of mathematics and computer science, 1986–2004; freelance writer, 2004–. Autodesk, Sausalito, CA, software programmer, 1988–92.

MEMBER: American Mathematical Society, Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA), Honorable Order of the Kentucky Colonels, and Church of the SubGenius.

AWARDS, HONORS: Philip K. Dick award for Software, 1982, Wetware, and Freeware.

WRITINGS:

AS RUDY RUCKER; UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED

Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension, Dover (New York, NY), 1977.

(As Rudolf v.B. Rucker; editor) Charles H. Hinton, Speculations on the Fourth Dimension: Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton, Dover (New York, NY), 1980.

White Light; or, What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem? (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1980, HardWired (San Francisco, CA), 1997.

Spacetime Donuts (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1981.

Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite, Birkhauser (Boston, MA), 1982, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NY), 1995.

Software (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1982.

The Fifty-seventh Franz Kafka (stories; includes "The Man Who Ate Himself," "Inertia," "The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics," and "The Indian Rope Trick Explained"), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1983.

The Sex Sphere (novel), Ace Books (New York, NY), 1983.

Light Fuse and Get Away (poems), Carp, 1983.

The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality, foreword by Martin Gardner, illustrated by David Povilaitis, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1984.

Master of Space and Time (novel), Bluejay Books (New York, NY), 1984.

The Secret of Life (novel), Bluejay Books (New York, NY), 1985.

Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality, Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 1987.

(Editor and contributor) Mathenauts: Tales of Mathematical Wonder (stories; includes "Message Found in a Copy of Flatland"), Arbor House (New York, NY), 1987.

Wetware (novel), Avon Books (New York, NY), 1988.

The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia, William Morrow (New York, NY), 1990.

Transreal! (novel), WCS Books (Englewood, CO), 1991.

All the Visions: Space Baltic: The Science Fiction Poems, 1962–1987, Ocean View Books (Mountain View, CA), 1991.

(Editor, with R. U. Sirius and Queen Mu) Mondo 2000: A User's Guide to the New Edge,, HarperPerennial (New York, NY), 1992.

Artificial Life Lab, Waite Group Press (Corte Madera, CA), 1993.

The Hacker and the Ants (novel), William Morrow (New York, NY), 1994, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2002.

Live Robots: Two in One Volume of Software/Wetware, Avon Books (New York, NY), 1994.

Freeware (novel), Avon Books (New York, NY), 1997.

Seek!: Selected Nonfiction, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 1999.

Saucer Wisdom (novel), Forge (New York, NY), 1999.

Realware (novel), EOS (New York, NY), 2000.

Gnarl! (stories), Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2000.

Software Engineering and Computer Games, Addison Wesley (New York, NY), 2002.

Spaceland (novel), Tor (New York, NY), 2002.

As above, So below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, Forge (New York, NY), 2002.

Frek and the Elixir (novel), Tor (New York, NY), 2004.

Author of foreword, Fourfield: Computers, Art, and the Fourth Dimension, by Tony Robbin, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1992; contributor to anthologies and to periodicals, including Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, PKDS Bulletin, SFWA Bulletin, and Washington Post Book World.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Lifebox, The Seashell, and the Soul, Four Walls Eight Windows (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS: Rudy Rucker, who exercises his curiosity about mathematics in both fiction and nonfiction, "blends the vulgarity of underground comics with some of the hardest ideas in philosophy and physics," asserted Charles Platt in the Washington Post Book World. "He also writes elegantly and captures the subtlety of human relationships in a realistic context." Sometimes credited with popularizing his subject, Rucker brings humor and originality to his technical studies of infinity, the fourth dimension, and mathematic thought as well as his science fiction stories. According to Michael Dirda, writing in the Washington Post Book World, "Rucker is an artist well worth discovering, reading, and keeping up with."

Much of Rucker's writing is science fiction with a mathematical foundation. His novel White Light; or, What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem? features a mathematician trying to solve a problem regarding degrees of infinity. Rucker mixes black comedy, satire, religion, drugs, and metaphysics in the story of the mathematician's adventures in other worlds and dimensions. Reviewing the book for the Times Literary Supplement, Andrew Hislop deemed White Light amusing and educational but judged that "for the layman there are too many dimensions or at least the vital one is missing." He felt the book lacked "the sustained dramatic force of the best science fiction." Thomas M. Disch of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, admired Rucker's unusual use of pure mathematics as the basis for an alien world, concluding that "White Light is a good, intelligent, powerful novel, and [an] auspicious debut in the SF field."

The novels Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere also include mathematical concepts. In the former, Rucker experiments with the geometry of space in rendering a plot described as "thoroughly original" by Peter Nicholls in the Washington Post Book World. Depicting a utopia in which drugs and three-dimensional television entertain humanity while a computer rules, the story contains the idea that if a person shrinks enough he becomes gigantic. Nicholls described it as "a racy and entertaining tale, cheerfully full of bad language and bad taste." The Sex Sphere focuses on a highly sexual multidimensional alien trapped in a three-dimensional world. Charles Platt, in a Washington Post Book World review, hailed The Sex Sphere as "an example of science fiction's noble tradition of exploring eccentric ideas for their own sake, regardless of their commercial potential."

Some of Rucker's science fiction departs somewhat from his math orientation. Software, for instance, examines the implications of artificial intelligence in robots. Having achieved a measure of equality with humans, self-replicating robots seek to dominate men by taping their brain patterns and promising to immortalize this "software." Master of Space and Time centers on a scientist who invents a machine that for two hours enables him to travel through time, visit other universes, and grant wishes. The book's humor prompted critics to compare Rucker with mathematician-writer Lewis Carroll. John Sladek described it in the Washington Post Book World as "a retelling of the old three-wishes fable," adding that "what makes it new here is that each wish is really a chance at absolute mastery of space and time … that the wisher is well aware of the history of three-wishes fables, and that the author knows how to have fun with all of this."

In The Secret of Life, Rucker concentrates more on characterization and less on mathematics, reported Pascal J. Thomas in the Fantasy Review. Rucker's story revolves around a 1960s teenager who believes he is an alien in disguise. He remembers nothing from before the age of ten, possesses strange powers, and thinks he is on Earth to learn the secret of life. Thomas wrote that instead of relying on "his mathematical bag of tricks," Rucker depicts the youth in depth. The novel "loses some of Rucker's originality," Thomas observed, "while developing more traditional writing qualities." Tom Easton of Analog Science Fiction and Fact wrote that "with The Secret of Life, Rucker makes a bid to be the J.D. Salinger of the 1980s. His meat, as in Catcher in the Rye, is the pain of growing up, of coming to terms with reality, of fitting in. And he handles it well, in the process showing those of us who need showing that SF has all the potential of the mainstream, and is besides better suited to modern times."

Rucker's nonfiction, dealing with many of the same topics as his fiction, endeavors to make mathematical and scientific concepts accessible to the lay reader. Whereas White Light addresses infinity in a fictional setting, Infinity and the Mind: The Science and Philosophy of the Infinite shows the real calculations, paradoxes, and logic of serious inquiry into the subject. Easton felt the material would be difficult for the nonmathematician, who might question its relevance, but acknowledged that it "is beautiful for the hobbyist of numbers."

The Fourth Dimension: Toward a Geometry of Higher Reality explains the complexities of its subject "in the most painless possible way," marveled Sladek. Rucker uses well-known analogies to introduce his discussion, relating how a three-dimensional object would look as it passed through a two-dimensional world, for example, and extending the analogy to a four-dimensional object in a three-dimensional world. He explores his own variations as well, imagining a spherical two-dimensional world and a door between parallel two-dimensional worlds. Throughout, noted Timothy Ferris in the New York Times Book Review, the work serves to "enhance rather than diminish our curiosity." The critic judged it "an invigorating book, a short but spirited slalom for the mind."

"I don't think you can know where modern commercial SF writing has gotten to if you don't know about Rucker," wrote Algis Budrys in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Blending imaginative ideas reminiscent of H.G. Wells with humor and mathematical whimsy recalling Lewis Carroll, Rucker has carved his own niche in the realms of speculative fiction and popular science. In Platt's opinion, his writing is "science fiction as it should be: authoritative and tightly linked with our real lives and our real future."

These last several books were written during a period when Rucker left academia to concentrate on his writing, but after he accepted a position teaching at San Jose State University in 1986, his output accelerated, and he wrote a great many well-received books.

Rucker once told CA: "I view myself as a 'transrealist,' using science fiction tools to get at deep archetypal truths. The idea is that the tools of science fiction serve as concrete symbols for subtextual realities. My novels The Secret of Life, White Light, and The Sex Sphere form a kind of transreal autobiographical trilogy covering my life between the ages of seventeen and thirty-four.

"I work back and forth between science fiction and science writing, sometimes using science fiction for thought experiments. My math research gives me ideas for stories, and my stories serve as laboratory tests for some of my ideas. Eventually I hope to get all my books, journals, letters, and so forth on a gigabyte laser disk, along with software that allows the reader to interrupt at any time and say, for example, 'Can you give me the science on that, Rudy?' or 'What was going on in your life when you wrote that?' or 'Where else do you mention Donald Duck?'"

Showing how mathematics studies the world in terms of numbers, space, logic, infinity, and information, Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality is "about thinking," in Sladek's opinion. In addition to mathematical thought, Rucker comments on transcendental meditation, archetypes, and Chinese philosophy, earning high marks for originality from Los Angeles Times reviewer Lee Dembart. Both Dembart and Sladek, however, deemed the book hard to follow and questioned the relevance of some of its parts. Dembart explained that "some of it is crystal clear, and some of it is opaque, and the two are inextricably interlaced." At least, Sladek allowed, Rucker "does not talk about mathematics in a boring classroom manner." George Johnson of the New York Times Book Review found the book "fascinating" and "dazzling," concluding that Rucker "provides an interesting and rigorous argument for his belief that there will never be an explanation for the universe that is any less complex than the universe itself."

When Rucker first began teaching math at San Jose 1986, he was urged to teach computer science, about which he knew next to nothing, but he was soon teaching courses, primarily computer graphics and game programming, and in 2002, he published Software Engineering and Computer Games. Computer science had infused his writing, as well. His novels became flush with time travel, space aliens, future technologies, and computer-generated science. His collection, Gnarl! provides a good sampling of his writing since the 1970s, with three dozen stories that the Library Journal contributor Edward B. St. John remarked, "combine hard science with a gonzo 'sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll sensibility.'" St. John felt the best stories to be those written after 1986, when Rucker moved to California, including those for which he collaborated with Bruce Sterling and Marc Laidlaw. He felt that two Rucker-Laidlaw surfer stories stand out, "Probability Pipeline" and "Chaos Surfari."

In reviewing Spaceland in the New York Times Book Review, Gerald Jonas commented that Rucker's "usual protagonist is a horny Silicon Valley nerd whose social ineptitude lands him in difficulties that would try the ingenuity of Lewis Carroll's Alice." In this story, however, the central character, Joe Cube, has two women to worry about—his wife, Jena, and Momo, a woman from the fourth dimension with an offer he can't refuse. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that with Spaceland, Rucker "tweaks the dot-com Y2K subculture into a hilarious tribute to Edwin Abbott's Flatland 1884)." Abbott called the novel "a bellylaugh-funny commentary on the Faustian dilemma facing a lumpish twenty-first-century tech-addicted everyman."

As above, So below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, is something entirely different for Rucker, who spent years researching the life of the sixteenth-century, politically subversive Flemish master. Each of the sixteen chapters focuses on a single painting and point in the artist's life, and the story is set against the horror of the Spanish Inquisition. A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "Rucker's fictionalized life of Bruegel draws its readers into a teeming world of politics, art, love, sin, and loss." Characters include the homosexual mapmaker, Abraham Ortelius, part-Native American Williblad Cheroo, and Bruegel's much-loved young wife and business manager. Donna Seaman said in a Booklist review that "Bruegel's great gift was his perception of the sacred in the earthy, and Rucker follows suit in this vital portrait of a sweet-natured disciple of life's fecund beauty in a time of cold-blooded tyranny."

Rucker planned to retire from teaching in 2004, after thirty years in academia, to give all of his attention to his writing.

INTERVIEW: CA interviewed Rucker by telephone on October 23, 1986, at his home in Los Gatos, California.

CA: There's a fine symbiotic relationship between your books on mathematics and your science fiction. How did it evolve?

RUCKER: A lot of my life I've been employed as a mathematics professor. It's natural for me to care a lot about mathematics. But also I've always been inter-ested in developing the other half of my brain, as it were. The right half is the half that dreams tales, and the left half does proofs. I like to work back and forth between them. What I like best is to get interested in some weird idea and do a math book about it to break the ground, and then go back and use what I found out with proofs in my science fiction. I use the science fiction as a thought experiment, so I can look at something weird and say, what if it were really an experiential thing? The two main themes I've written about are infinity and higher dimensions.

CA: You said in the introduction toInfinity and the Mind that you were writing it for the average reader. Do you find that the books on math attract a lot of general readers?

RUCKER: Infinity and the Mind is certainly my hardest book, but over the years it's probably had the best sales. It has to be hard, given the subject matter, but people appreciate the effort that I've gone to, to make it understandable.

CA: Do the two readerships overlap; are there readers who like both the science fiction and the math?

RUCKER: I think the overlap is growing. People are finally realizing that I've done both these different things, and they're beginning to see my work as a unity. There was a period I think when mathematicians were very uptight, and my science fiction was not something they would read. And on the other side, science fiction people were just wanting their little stories and not reading the math. But it's blending across the lines now, and my standing as a writer is improving. It's like in the game Go, where two groupings link up to encircle a large area.

CA: Math once had a rather bad reputation among people who were more interested in literature. Is that going away?

RUCKER: There's some improvement, but the two areas certainly are very different. As I say, it's almost like a right brain-left brain split. My feeling is that since we do each have both brains, it's nice to use them both.

CA: We're early given the idea that if we're good on one side of the brain, we're not good on the other.

RUCKER: That's it, yes. Particularly if you have siblings. Parents sometimes will apportion out to children what they're allowed to be good at. They'll say, "Your brother's good in science, and you're going to be good in art."

CA: Were you a science fiction reader early?

RUCKER: I read it a lot when I was a kid. There's an old joke about the Golden Age of Science Fiction: that's when you're thirteen. I definitely went through that. I grew up in Louisville, and there was maybe one shelf of science fiction in the library. I read it all and really liked it. Then when I got to college in the late sixties and on into the early seventies, I lost touch with science fiction. Looking back, that was kind of a dead period in science fiction. In the mid sixties there was what they called a New Wave movement, but that petered out, and the field really just did nothing all through the seventies like so many things. But then at the beginning of the eighties I got back into science fiction, and it began getting very exciting again. There's a lot going on in science fiction. There are a lot of younger writers who are pretty influential now; they call themselves the cyberpunks. I'm the father of the cyberpunks.

CA: Then you mix with other science fiction writers a lot?

RUCKER: Yes, and over the years that's given me a lot of pleasure. The world of academia less so now, but particularly back in the seventies, when I was getting into it, it was very closed. There weren't enough jobs. If you told somebody, "I'm writing a book on infinity," it threatened them. There was so much competition; they didn't want any more. But I'd go and talk to science fiction writers, and if I said, "Hi, I'm a new science fiction writer," they'd say, "Great! I hope you write something really weird!" So I've had a lot of friends in the science fiction world. Just moving out to California well, you can meet science fiction writers easily. It's like being in a trade in the Middle Ages. I can go anywhere and I'll look up the local science fiction writers and they're glad to see me. They're very nice. In science fiction, there's some objectivity because there's the market, the dollar. If your book is decent, people will buy it. In small-time academia, it's all on somebody's say-so whether or not you can be a teacher or whether you can do research. But now I've plunged back into academia.

CA: Are you teaching full time again?

RUCKER: Yes. I'm teaching computer science at San Jose State. I had four years off; the last four years I was freelancing in Lynchburg, Virginia. I did five books in four years, and I was getting maybe a little burned out. Also, the money wasn't coming quite fast enough; I have three kids just starting to go to college. So suddenly I'm back into academia. But it's really nice out here. It's a state school and it's all totally objective.

CA: Does the schedule make it difficult for you to write, or do you have a good mixture of writing and teaching?

RUCKER: I'm heading toward an ideal mix. I've only been here about three months, and it's really not fine-tuned yet. The way it is now, I can write on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I can see that it would take me a long time to finish a novel. I'm working on something right now, but I can't really be sure yet how it's going to work because I'm just getting started.

CA: How do you think computers are affecting the study of math?

RUCKER: They're having a tremendous effect on it. That's in fact one of the reasons I wanted to come back and teach computer science. I really want to master it. It's like ruler and compass constructions were for the Greeks. We've got these incredible machines, and there are gorgeous things being done: fractal graphics, cellular automata, chaotic graphics. You can just fill the screen up with these gorgeous colored things. Mathematics is becoming more empirical; people can make a conjecture and then run the program through a million computation steps and have something to look at. If you've coded it properly, you can summarize a million steps in one picture. It's great! Mathematics is going to go through an explosion.

CA: It sounds as if math could become more fun with these developments, because there's something to see, some visible proof.

RUCKER: Yeah. Not having that was something that always bothered me. I wrote a science fiction story about it once. If all musicians could do was write down scores like composers, they'd get very little publicity. But there's this wondrous thing, the orchestra, that turns the music symbols into sensations so the average person can get something out of it and have an opinion of it. Mathematics has always been lacking that. We've had the wonderful scores, but we haven't had an orchestra that could play them. Eventually the computer can become sort of an orchestra to play mathematics for the average person.

CA: It's very interesting how your math books really get beyond math and into philosophy.

RUCKER: Mathematics is a very rich and exact language. There's an immense vocabulary for certain rarefied concepts like infinity. You can write a whole book about the different views of infinity in mathematics. Math is particularly good at things that are very abstract. When you get to a certain level of abstraction, you're further removed from the physical plane of immediate need and gratification; you're getting closer, as close as we can get, to ultimate reality. So mathematics is certainly very efficacious on the road to metaphysics.

CA: Has Infinity and the Mind provoked a lot of response?

RUCKER: I've gotten a lot of mail on that one. I guess on the average I get a letter a week on it. Of course, now I've moved and nobody knows where I live anymore! I used to show the letters to my wife and say, "Another nut heard from." But a lot of them were great. People really come out of the woodwork when you write about infinity.

CA: All kinds of people, or mainly scientific types?

RUCKER: All kinds of people, including artists. The first fan letter I ever got was after White Light came out. I'd just moved back to America after we'd been in Germany. And so I get this letter from Leavenworth Prison. Somebody had gotten the book from the prison library. What he'd done was to smear the sole of his foot with ink and jump on a piece of paper. He had this wrinkle that was shaped like a pentagram, and he wanted me to coauthor a book about this star wrinkle on his foot. I'm thinking, I spent years perfecting this intellectual feast, and here some convict puts ink on his foot and jumps on a piece of paper, and he thinks we're at the same level.

CA: That's truly funny but maybe it wasn't funny to you.

RUCKER: It was, but I was glad he wrote me in care of the publisher.

CA: Have you heard from many people in other countries about the books?

RUCKER: Oh sure. They've been translated in just about every country.

CA: How do you feel about the way your books have been reviewed? Do you think reviewers have treated you fairly in both fields you write in?

RUCKER The reviews I've gotten have by and large been good. I got one bad review for The Sex Sphere, but that was to be expected. It was deliberately an extremely radical book. But I certainly don't think I've gotten the recognition I would like. I've written twelve books and I'm broke! That doesn't seem right sometimes. My books are just a little bit different, to the point that they haven't caught on the way I imagined they would. It takes a lifetime anyhow. When you start out writing, you think you're going to do one book and be an overnight sensation. But what's the rush? I think in the long run I'll probably get a lot of recognition. After I'm safely dead.

CA: Do you like to shake people up with the science fiction, make them look at things in a new way?

RUCKER: Absolutely. Don't forget, I'm a beatnik sixties radical. I quoted Patti Smith in White Light: "Within the context of neo-rock we must seize and rend the veil of smoke which man calls order." That's cyberpunk.

CA: What do you enjoy reading?

RUCKER: I like some of the new science fiction; Lew Shiner's Frontera was good. I like Edgar Allan Poe; I've been reading his collected works. I still dip into [William] Burroughs and [Jack] Kerouac. I read Scientific American and math books. I used to read Nugget every month, in Lynchburg.

CA: You're working, you've said elsewhere, on a book called This Hollow Earth, which you described as a historical science fiction novel. That description seems paradoxical on the surface. Can you talk about the book?

RUCKER: There's an old theory that the earth is hollow, that there's sun inside and people there. I've always liked that. Actually, in Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, they get to the entrance to the hollow earth and Poe loses it; the book stops. My ancestors lived near Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830s, in Richmond, Virginia. I want to go back through time mentally and write a story set in the 1830s about a guy who hooks up with Poe. The guy and Poe make a journey to the inside of the Hollow Earth. I'm just starting.

CA: Beyond that, are there new kinds of things you'd like to write, and maybe new areas of math you'd like to explore?

RUCKER: I just finished a book called Mind Tools, on the history of mathematics from the viewpoint of information. I'd like to do a book on what I call unified information theory. I want to find out a lot about information theory. That's my main interest these days, information, chaos, fractals, cellular automata; it's great, being a scholar. You can always come back and there's always another mountain to climb. It's good exercise (end of interview).

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, 3rd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1991.

PERIODICALS

Analog Science Fiction and Fact, June, 1982; September, 1982; March, 1983; April, 1985; May, 1985; December, 1985; January, 1989, Tom Easton, review of Wetware, p. 178; January, 1991, Tom Easton, review of The Hollow Earth: The Narrative of Mason Algiers Reynolds of Virginia, p. 304; November, 1994, Tom Easton, review of The Hacker and the Ants, p. 167; November, 1999, Tom Easton, review of Saucer Wisdom, p. 136.

Booklist, May 1, 1997, review of Freeware, p. 1483; July, 1999, David Pitt, review of Saucer Wisdom, p. 1925; June 1, 2002, Ray Olson, review of Spaceland, p. 1698; November 15, 2002, Donna Seaman, review of As above, So below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel, p. 569; April 1, 2004, Regina Schroeder, review of Frek and the Elixir, p. 1357.

Book Watch, April, 1994, p. 2.

Fantasy Review, January, 1985; September, 1985.

Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2002, review of Spaceland, p. 778; November 1, 2002, review of As above, So below, p. 1563.

Lambda Book Report, January, 1993, p. 48.

Library Journal, May 15, 1997, p. 105; June 1, 2000, Edward B. St. John, review of Gnarl!, p. 206.

Los Angeles Times, May 26, 1987.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, April 21, 1985; October 6, 1985.

Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July, 1981, Thomas M. Disch, review of White Light; or, What Is Cantor's Continuum Problem?; June, 1982; October, 1983; December, 1984.

New York Times Book Review, December 2, 1984, March 10, 1985, April 19, 1987, George Johnson, review of Mind Tools: The Five Levels of Mathematical Reality; July 10, 1994, p. 30; May 4, 1997, p. 26; June 16, 2002, Gerald Jonas, review of Spaceland, p. 18.

Publishers Weekly, June 7, 1999, review of Saucer Wisdom, p. 66; May 1, 2000, review of Gnarl!, p. 54; June 5, 2000, review of Realware, p. 78; April 29, 2002, review of Spaceland, p. 47, "PW talks with Rudy Rucker" (interview), p. 48; November 25, 2002, review of As above, So below, p. 43.

Science and Technology, April, 1994, p. 5.

SF and Fantasy Review, April, 1984.

Stardate, Volume 3, number 4, 1987.

Times Literary Supplement, November 28, 1980, Andrew Hislop, review of White Light.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL) June 30, 1985; January 3, 1993, p. 2.

Village Voice, January 26, 1993, p. 81.

Voice of Youth Advocates, October, 2004, Suzanne Elizabeth Reid, review of Frek and the Elixir, p. 97.

Washington Post, April 6, 1987.

Washington Post Book World, January 24, 1982, March 28, 1982, December 25, 1983, February 24, 1985, June 30, 1985, December 22, 1985, July 26, 1987.

Wilson Library Bulletin, September, 1994, pp. 100-101.