Books by Rudy Rucker

ICE CREAM MAN-- the critically acclaimed, best-selling anthological comic book series--continues here with four more unfortunate, enervating episodes of descent: a plane falls from the sky; a man climbs to the bottom of his family tree; Oscar's blood pressure dips below 90/60! It's a compendium of come-downs carefully calibrated for curious and crestfallen content-consumers...so come join us below.

Return to the Hollow Earth is Rucker’s second steampunk novel featuring Mason Reynolds. In 1850, Mason and his wife Seela embark upon a perilous trip around Cape Horn to San Francisco. Their ship sinks, but they're saved by a tentacled, flying nautilus—who carries them to meet Edgar Allan Poe. Poe leads them on a return voyage to the Hollow Earth, passing through the throat of a thousand-mile-deep maelstrom at the North Pole. Within the Hollow Earth, they learn that the god-like woomo sea cucumbers mean to send them them on a epic mission across space and time. The initial stage of this mission brings them to Santa Cruz, California—in the year 2018. And then things get gnarly.

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!

All of Rudy Rucker's science-fiction stories, a trove of gnarl and wonder in two volumes. Volume One includes stories from 1976 through 2004, ranging from the cyberpunk to the transreal. As well as Rucker's solo stories, we have collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, and John Shirley.

All of Rudy Rucker's science-fiction stories in two volumes, a trove of gnarl and wonder. Volume Two includes stories from 2005 through 2020. As well as Rucker's solo stories, this volume has collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, John Shirley, Terry Bisson, and Eileen Gunn.