Gnarl! : Stories

by RUCKER RUDY VON B.

• ISBN13: 9781568581590
• ISBN10: 1568581599
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-05-08
• Publisher: Perseus Books Group

Summary

Though he is also a mathematician, computer scientist, and essayist, Rudy Rucker is best known for his ground-breaking science fiction. The companion volume to Seek!, Rucker's selected nonfiction, Gnarl! brings together three dozen of the writer's best science fiction short stories. His first major story collection in 17 years, the volume includes a number of previously unanthologized stories, including tales cowritten with Marc Laidlaw, Paul Di Filippo, and Bruce Sterling. Classics such as "The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka," a timely meditation on the paradoxes of cloning, are side by side with works of pseudomemoir like "The Indian Rope Trick Explained." The Rucker formula - cutting-edge physics, a wild but perversely logical imagination, and a decidedly punk attitude - illuminates this new collection.

Author Biography

Rudy Rucker is professor of computer science at San Jose State University.

Table of Contents

Author's Note	vii
Jumpin' Jack Flash	1	(20)
Enlightenment Rabies	21	(4)
Schrodinger's Cat	25	(20)
A New Golden Age	45	(8)
Faraway Eyes	53	(12)
The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka	65	(5)
The Indian Rope Trick Explained	70	(18)
A New Experiment With Time	88	(3)
The Man Who Ate Himself	91	(14)
Tales of Houdini	105	(7)
The Facts of Life	112	(17)
Buzz	129	(11)
The Last Einstein-Rosen Bridge	140	(8)
Pac-Man	148	(11)
Pi in the Sky	159	(13)
Wishloop	172	(2)
Inertia	174	(37)
Bringing in the Sheaves	211	(9)
The Jack Kerouac Disembodied School of Poetics	220	(9)
Message Found in a Copy of Flatland	229	(11)
Plastic Letters	240	(2)
Monument to the Third International	242	(8)
Rapture in Space	250	(13)
Storming the Cosmos (Written with Bruce Sterling)	263	(47)
In Frozen Time	310	(7)
Soft Death	317	(17)
Inside Out	334	(24)
Instability (Written with Paul Di Filippo)	358	(15)
The Man Who Was a Cosmic String	373	(6)
Probability Pipeline (Written with Marc Laidlaw)	379	(18)
As Above, So Below	397	(15)
Chaos Surfari (Written with Marc Laidlaw)	412	(25)
Big Jelly (Written with Bruce Sterling)	437	(44)
Easy As Pie	481	(11)
The Andy Warhol Sandcandle (Written with Marc Laidlaw)	492	(32)
The Square Root of Pythagoras (Written with Paul Di Filippo)	524	(24)
Notes on the Stories	548