Spaceland : A Novel of the Fourth Dimension | 
 enlarge | Author: Rudy Rucker
Category: Book
List Price: $24.95
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Rating:  16 reviews
Sales Rank: 149085
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 304
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.8 x 1.1
Publication Date: June 1, 2002
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Amazon.com
The product manager for a Silicon Valley startup, Joe Cube thinks the best way to enter the new millennium is to stay safely home with his wife and watch the year 2000 come in on an experimental television/interactive device "borrowed" from work. His wife, however, is less than pleased. And after Jena passes out from too much New Year's imbibing, Joe discovers the undertested device has opened a gateway to a new universe: he is contacted by a fourth-dimensional woman named Momo.... Usually, tribute novels are like movie remakes: a bad idea. However, this tribute to Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel Flatland works wonderfully. This is because Spaceland is written by Rudy Rucker, a Silicon Valley professor of mathematics and computer science who is also a hard-SF writer with the most gonzo sensibility in science fiction.--Cynthia Ward
Product Description
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!
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| Customer Reviews: Read 11 more reviews...
 Not quite top-drawer Rucker, but clever and fun. 4.6 stars January 22, 2006
Peter D. Tillman (Taos, NM USA)
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
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This is a clever takeoff on Flatland, starring Joe Cube, done up in the inimitable Rucker style. Joe, an employee of a Silican Valley startup, gets a visit from Momo, a pushy broad from 4D Klupdom, with a business proposition that he absolutely, positively can't refuse. Momo gives Joe an enhancement, a third eye that can see in the fourth dimension -- and a whole stack of hyperspace cellphone antennas. Can you guess that Momo doesn't have Spaceland's best interests at heart?
Not quite top-drawer Rucker, but clever and fun. Recommended.
Book's HP: http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker/spaceland.htm
CAUTION: heavy SPOILERS
Happy reading--
Peter D. Tillman
Provides an intuitive sense of the fourth dimension August 3, 2003
Diego Banducci (San Francisco, CA United States)
4 out of 6 found this review helpful
After reading Seek! Selected Nonfiction, a collection of non-fiction essays, I wrote to Rucker to say how much I enjoyed it, as well as his other non-fiction books (on infinity and the fourth dimension). I also mentioned that not being a science fiction fan, I had not read his works in that area.
He wrote a nice note in reply, suggesting that I read "Spaceland," which I have just finished. I wasn't particularly interested in the plot (which does a fine job of taking Silicon Valley to task), but thought that his description of the fourth spatial dimension (as opposed to time) was excellent. Using both diagrams and narrative, and drawing on Abbott's "Flatland," he does an fine job of providing the reader with a sense of what it would be like to look at our world from the fourth dimension. Along the way, he provides similar views of one and two-dimensional worlds.
All in all, a fascinating and entertaining book.
Nice mix of math with humor and saving the universe June 22, 2002
booksforabuck (Dallas)
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Joe Cube's marriage is in trouble and he's frustrated with his life. On the turn of the Y-2-K, none of his fantasies of disaster are coming true. What does happen, however, is even weirder. A fourth dimension woman slides into his life, gives him a fourth dimension skin and a third eye at right angles to the three dimensions of "spaceland" and sets him up with a can't lose business opportunity--cellphones that can communicate without interference by transfering their messages through fourth dimension space. Even with his marriage down the tubes, Joe thinks he is on something. Better, with his third eye, he can see the upcoming cards in Las Vegas blackjack. The opportunities are without limit. Joe soon learns that the fourth dimensional actors are far from united. The three dimensional Spaceland of normal space separates two fourth dimension universes that would war on one another if the Spaceland barrier were to vanish. Meanwhile, back on earth, Joe is having trouble finding another woman, and gangsters are after him. Author Rudy Rucker has created a light and fun novel with a bit of a message, a bit of math, and some intriguing drawings of Flatland space and linear space. Joe, with his worries about his marriage and women, his dreams of making millions in an IPO, and his increasing addiction to a fourth dimension drug makes a sympathetic anti-hero who is finally given a chance to save the universe--and trundled off to jail for doing so. SPACELAND is a thought-provoking and amusing tale with a bit of a slanted--maybe even fourth dimension--moral to it.
strange satirical science fiction June 8, 2002
Harriet Klausner
6 out of 11 found this review helpful
To add spice to his sagging marriage on the millennium's New Year's Eve, hi tech middle manager Joe Cube plans a special night with his increasingly discontented wife. He brings food, drink, and an experimental TV. However, Joe's idea of fun fails to match that of Jena, who prefers a night of hot sex than watching another of her husband's electronic gadgets.While Jena finds solace in the arms of Joe's engineering buddy, the three dimensional TV he brought home thrusts Momo, a siren from the fourth dimension, into our world. Momo tricks Joe into assisting her people the Kluppers in the fight with their mortal enemies the Dronners as the techie "controls" the three-dimensional reality of SPACELAND that separates the warring races. SPACELAND is a strange satirical science fiction tale that successfully mixes humor with mathematical theory in order to slice the sacred technological icons of modern society. The story line simply asks at what prices do we sell our souls to the Gods of technology, but does so with humor. Using mirth and irony, Rudy Rucker provides a powerful indictment of the technological damning of all of us. Harriet Klausner
A Masterpiece. December 17, 2002
Andres Baca (USA)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Rudy Rucker's Spaceland is a masterpiece. I must admit that I haven't read the classic Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott which inspired it, but nevertheless Spaceland is one of the weirdest most mysterious books I've ever read. Thanks to Mr. Rucker and his mathematical savvy, 4+ dimensions are a bit less mind boggling to me now.
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