Gnarl!

by Rudy Rucker

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.

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Fiction

576 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2000

About the author

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre. He is best known for his Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which won Philip K. Dick awards. Presently, Rudy Rucker edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.

Reviews

[Jacque wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

CAKE!

[Steven]

If you read online reviews for this, you'll find an interesting spread... a number of people who think Rucker is just amazing, and then many people who rather like him, and yet think this collection is rather "meh." Place me somewhat in the latter. It's not that his stories aren't amusing, and definitely have a "thoughtful" edge, it's just that there's nothing here that ever blew me away, or really challenged my understanding of things. Even the apparently innovative Kafka-clone piece isn't, say, all that innovative, I think.

I always hate to be a critical pedant -- certainly I can't write stories like this. But I think I've just been reading too many other people lately who DO blow me away, whereas this collection is really more just, say, high-brow sci-fi.

[Frank · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and creative cyberpunk short stories. Loved it. In the back of the book, Rucker includes notes for each story's conception and publishing info.

One of my favorite authors.

[Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mostly a pretty good bunch of shortstories. But, I really like Rudy Rucker. He's trippy. He's also a big math geek. Not a lot of Science Fiction talks about math much. He did a good job with it, too.

I didn't know that Rucker lived in Lynchburg, VA for a long time, though. He obviously didn't like living in a town pretty much run by Christian Fundamentalists. I'd have made a large bet about that before reading this. He often used a town named "Killeville." Consider the words "Lynch" and "Kill". He wasn't complimentary about Killeville. Like all the buildings were Pizza Hut restaurants. The buildings were covered in mold. The sky was grey. Everyone was ugly, but thought each other weren't ugly.

[Paul McKee · Rating 4 out of 5]

These stories have a really wide range from historical (science) fiction to math fiction (left as an exercise or koan to the reader)not
. They all leave you with a sense of how fluid reality can be. Many of the goofy premises seem to have real physics underpinnings. If you can call quantum mechanics "real". It ends up feeling a lot like Phillip K Dick only not so schizophrenic.The Philip K. Dick Reader

[Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

The authorial notes at the end are nice. I especially enjoyed the stories with various Beats (Burroughs, Kerouac, Neal) and scientists (both actual and fictional) as characters. Most of these stories are quite funny, only a few are sad (the saddest one being about Andy Warhol).

Makes me want to read more of Rucker's works (both fiction and non-).

[Benjamin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wacky SF stories--generally about sex, drugs and physics. Good fun.

[Kestrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Trippy sci-fi ala Rucker. It took me awhile to read. His stories all follow the same style heavily. Some of these were great gems.