Spaceland: A Novel of the Fourth Dimension - Hardcover

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On the eve of the millennium, Silicon Valley researcher Joe Cube brings home an experimental machine that unexpectedly connects him with the fourth dimension. When Joe meets one of its inhabitants, a curious woman named Momo, she offers to show him the wonders of life beyond the confines of his three-dimensional realm a proposition Joe accepts despite indications that Momo's intentions are not as benevolent as they seem. The author of Realware gives an appreciative nod to Edward Abbot's Flatland, a classic tale of two-dimensional adventure, in this 21st-century allegory of progress and its foibles. As always, Rucker laces his hard science with ample doses of humor to create an sf adventure for the dot-com generation. A good choice for most sf collections.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Like a Mbius strip, that mathematical curiosity in which one surface is produced by twisting judiciously then joining two ends of a ribbon, Rucker's new hard SF satire tweaks the dot-com Y2K subculture into a hilarious tribute to Edwin Abbott's Flatland (1884). Kencom techie Joe Cube fatally miscalculates how his increasingly dissatisfied, yuppie, dingbat wife, Jena, really wants to celebrate the millennial New Year's Eve. Joe should have remembered that Jena likes sex even better than he does. Instead he brings her two Dungeness crabs, a bottle of Dom Perignon and some really cool electronics, an experimental three-dimensional TV. This indigestible combination fizzles Joe's stab at romance, but the electronics sizzle, hurling Jena into the arms of Joe's skuzzy engineer pal, Spazz, and propelling Momo, a siren-voiced denizen of the fourth dimension, into Joe's life. For her own nefarious purposes, Momo cons Joe into helping her people, the Kluppers, against their mortal enemies, the Dronners. Only Joe's three-dimensional reality, Spaceland, separates the two warring races. Combining valid mathematical speculation with wicked send-ups of Silicon Valley and its often otherworldly tribespeople, Rucker achieves a rare fictional world, a belly-laugh-funny commentary on the Faustian dilemma facing a lumpish 21st-century tech-addicted everyman: What is the real price in human relationships, in love and friendship and compassion, of those cutesy little user-friendly gadgets that happen to materialize so innocently on our desks?
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Rucker gives his conception of a fourth dimension of physical extension--a classmate of left-and-right, up-and-down, and backward-and-forward--fictional reality in a romp set in the recent past. At Y2K time in Silicon Valley, manager-type high-techie Joe Cube is visited by Momo from the fourth dimension, or at least half of it, since it is divided by our world, three-dimensional Spaceland. Momo gives Joe some fourth-dimensional capacities, such as being able to see the insides as well as the outsides of three-dimensional stuff, in exchange for making him rich. How? By giving him fourth-dimensional circuitry enabling worldwide clear-channel phone links that bypass phone-company-owned facilities. Business is set up, a funding angel is hooked, and all systems are go--well, except Joe's marriage, spoiled by his hardware specialist's hot bedroom manners with Joe's wife--when it turns out that Momo is double-crossing big-time: we're talkin' end-of-Spaceland here! Rucker spiffs up predictable plot developments with slangy dialogue and catchy descriptions of the second as well as the fourth dimension. Roland Green
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