Saucer Wisdom

Author Rudy Rucker offers a one-of-a-kind “history” of the future in this staggeringly inventive metafictional novel involving UFOs and time travel.

Frank Shook, who lives in the hills of California outside Silicon Valley, is a UFO abductee, communicating with extraterrestrial beings who take him on wild flying saucer rides, zig-zagging through time to give Frank vivid looks into the future of humanity.

Frank’s bizarre claims are intriguing to author Rudy Rucker, who agrees to transcribe Frank’s notes from his journeys. The result? A fascinating, and illuminating account of the forthcoming evolution of humankind. From telepathy to time travel to transhumanity, from hardware to software to wetware, Saucer Wisdom, spanning two millennia, is a profoundly creative work of truly speculative meta-fiction, a catalog of the future as only Rudy Rucker (the award-winning real-life author, that is) could tell it.

Night Shade Books’ ten-volume series with Rudy Rucker collects nine of the brilliantly weird novels for which the mathematician-turned-author is known, as well as a tenth, never-before-published book, Million-Mile Road Trip. We’re proud to collect in one place so much of the work of this influential figure in the early cyberpunk scene, and to share Rucker’s fascinating, unique worldview with an entirely new generation of readers.

Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism, often including himself as a character. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Praise for Saucer Wisdom

“A wild and exhilarating ride through the next 2,000 years of human history, throwing up enough bizarre concepts to sustain two or three careers of SF writing . . . A pop-science book like no other.” —Locus

“We have seen the future and it crawls, swims, teems with billions of soft, sentient piezoplastic beasts—a brave new biotech world where Rucker-revealed secrets of immortality, space travel and congress with aliens are as readily available as mushroom pizzas or a bigger hard drive. Saucer Wisdom soars.” —Nick Herbert, author of Quantum Reality

“Saucer Wisdom is absolutely one of the best books of the year. Rucker has . . . grown up, elucidating the wild-eyed, gonzo ideas of his youth with the clear-eyed, well-honed craft of a mature writer at his creative peak.” —NOVA Express

“Brilliantly funny, prescient, and as fully engaging as a coffee-fueled late-night conversation with a slightly manic genius . . . It seems that ‘the William S. Burroughs of cyberpunk’ can’t help but write good books.” —Amazon.com

Praise for Rudy Rucker

“Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gödel and Lenny Bruce might start to approximate full-on Ruckerian warp-space, but without the sweet, human, splendidly goofy Rudy-ness at the core of the singularity.” —William Gibson

“Rucker’s writing is great like the Ramones are great: a genre stripped to its essence, attitude up the wazoo, and cartoon sentiments that reek of identifiable lives and issues. Wild math you can get elsewhere, but no one does the cyber version of beatnik glory quite like Rucker. ” —New York Review of Science Fiction

“For some two decades now, since the publication of his first novel, White Light, Rucker has combined an easygoing, trippy style influenced by the Beats with a deep engagement with knotty (or ‘gnarly,’ to employ one of his favorite terms) intellectual conceits, based mainly in mathematics. In the typical Rucker novel, likably eccentric characters—who run the gamut from brilliant to near-certifiable—encounter aspects of the universe that confirm that life is weirder than we can imagine. ” —The Washington Post

“Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today. ” — Charles Stross, author of The Laundry Files

“Reading a Rudy Rucker book is like finding Poe, Kerouac, Lewis Carroll, and Philip K. Dick parked on your driveway in a topless ’57 Caddy . . . and telling you they’re taking you for a RIDE. The funniest science fiction author around. ” —Sci-Fi Universe

“Rucker [gives you] more ideas per chapter than most authors use in an entire novel. ” —San Francisco Chronicle