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!

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

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! At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied. 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! ### Amazon.com Review 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* ### From Publishers Weekly 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.