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August 14, 2002
Los Gatos, California Since 1881 |
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Photograph by Spaceland
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What looks like an eye on the cover is in
fact the invisible eye that the main
character sprouts after he becomes a part of
the fourth dimension.
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Local writer visits the fourth dimension
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Shari Kaplan
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A slim man with warm brown eyes and
salt-and-pepper hair sits at a small table,
gazing at his laptop computer and drinking a
cup of coffee. At his feet is a leather
bookbag filled with a scattering of papers.
He could be any of the Los Gatos Coffee
Roasting Company's hundreds of daily
customers, the majority of whom seem to find
computers—or at least personal digital
assistants—as important to the coffee shop
experience as their daily fix of espresso,
latte or chai.
This man, however, is not just another java
junkie. He is Rudy Rucker—a mathematician,
computer scientist, San Jose State
University professor and prolific writer. And
his unassuming little laptop is the gateway
to the fourth dimension.
Or at least it was the portal to that
intangible plane of existence—back when the
Los Gatan was using it to write
Spaceland, his newly published
hardcover novel that blends sci-fi with a
dash of fantasy and a generous helping of wit
and satire.
Not only did he write a good portion of it
while sitting in the Los Gatos Coffee
Roasting Company, he even featured his
habitual haunt in the book. Only in
Spaceland, the venue is called Los
Perros Coffee Roasting—dubbed, of course, as
a play on Los Gatos' feline name.
His inspiration for the book, Rucker says,
came from Flatland, a novel by the
late Edwin A. Abbott set at the turn of the
millennium. "It's about a two-dimensional
creature that goes into the third dimension
and learns about our dimension," Rucker
explains. "I thought it would be interesting
to have a person go from the third dimension
into the fourth."
Rucker set his novel at the cusp of what many
alarmists thought would be a momentous new
year—to say the least. "I wanted to do
something fantastical about Y2K," he says,
grinning. "So this guy meets a
four-dimensional creature called Momo on New
Year's Eve."
"I also wanted to do something dealing with
the whole dot-com bubble, before it burst,"
he adds. Hence his protagonist, a Silicon
Valley middle manager named Joe Cube who goes
from a self-centered, three-dimensional nerd
to a worldly, four-dimensional hero in just
300 pages.
Perhaps Momo can explain it better, as she
does to Cube: "You must help me change your
world. You'll speak to your fellows of the
fourth dimension, Joe, and with my guidance,
you and your adherents will develop a
miraculous technology. You will prosper. My
mission is to help you change your
world—which we call Spaceland. I want to do
something very special to inaugurate the
onset of your new millennium."
With dozens of written works under his belt
and more on the way—including science
fiction, historical fiction, nonfiction,
software packages and scholarly articles—it
might seem as though Rucker will run out of
material. Although he still has his teaching
career and his high-tech work, he doesn't
anticipate quitting his writing career
anytime soon.
"At this stage, my favorite thing to do is
write novels. It's sort of 'unfettered,' " he
says. "If I'm writing a computer program,
there's a lot of drudgery to do and problems
to solve. But in a novel, if you want to
create something, you just write it."
Spaceland is available at Amazon.com and
at some bookstores. For more information,
visit Rucker's website at
www.mathcs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker.
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