Transreal Cyberpunk

by Rudy Rucker, Bruce Sterling

Nine wild, weird and wondrous stories, written together by Rucker and Sterling. What do you get if two cyberpunk masters spend thirty years writing tales about transreally warped versions of themselves? A unique perspective on giant ants, flying jellyfish, Soviet rocketeers, runaway genomics, Silicon Valley, and the death of the Universe. With notes by the authors and an introduction by Rob Latham.

Genres: Cyberpunk, Fiction, Science Fiction

Audiobook

First published November 19, 2015

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

[Florin Pitea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sur-realist. Intense. Funny. Enjoyable. Recommended.

[Steve Garriott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely love cyberpunk! From the moment I first read Sterling's Islands in the Net, I was hooked. Then came William Gibson, and I was a goner, no turning back. Insert Rucker's Ware tetralogy and give it a nice frappe, and there ya go. So, when the opportunity to contribute to the Kickstarter to produce this story collection appeared, it was a no-brainer. What a rush! This is the perfect example of how collaboration extends beyond the sum of its parts. Rucker and Sterling have developed over the years the kind of combative relationship that ignites a blast of creativity rather than destruction. The stories bounce off the walls like balls of psychotic flubber. There's enough techie fodder to seat their ideas in a steaming bath of scientific fact yet the authors don't let that stop them. These gentlemen produce throwaway ideas anyone would love to use. I recommend spending some time with Sterling and Rucker's other works prior to tackling this one. But realize even then you won't be in Kansas anymore. I plan on re-visiting this one in the future.

[Nigel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nice to be reminded that my first blast of true sci fi sensawunda came from stories like these, not big bold space opera, but strange twisted, weird and often hilarious stories that could end in utter global catastrophe and still somehow feel cheerful about it.

Spanning thirty years of collaboration, these stories remain amazingly fresh and sharp and challenging and delightful, with no regard for the conventional boundaries of reality or normality while somehow remaining grounded enough in both to deliver satisfying coherent narratives no matter how deeply strange the stories themselves truly get. Each story features recognisable stand-ins for the author themselves in various guises, which shouldn't work so well so often, but they do.

6/4/23 Just to note my reading of another of their transreal wetware slime-mould-jelly-phone post-pandemic climate change futures, Fibonacci's Humors (sic), once again a lot of fun with the addition of a distinct Italian flavouring to its ruined-Austin setting.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two classics present a tale of 30 years of friendship and on/off collaboration, with a dash of madness and conceptual remixing of many moving (and static) tidbits you would expect in science fiction. Quite a cocktail.

WARNING: do not expect noir, rainy megacities, evil corporations, and edgy youths using computers to break into private data caches.

If you're ready to embrace many more ideas under the umbrella of 'cyberpunk', you will be fine.

[John Ohno · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of supremely weird stories. If you liked Semiotext(e) SF, this is a good companion.

Despite the title, not a lot here can be described as "cyberpunk" -- it's probably called this because it's the collaboration between two figures most closely identified with the cyberpunk movement. Instead, this ranges from gonzo biopunk to bizarro.

[Richard Hutchinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

WILD AND ZANY FUN AS RUCKER AND STERLING MERGE THEIR IMAGINATIONS IN NINE STORIES
Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling are both among my favorite authors, two of the original cyberpunks along with William Gibson in the Eighties. Their collaborations are even wilder and zanier than what they write on their own. This collection, published on Rucker's own Transreal Books imprint, includes all nine of their stories, written from 1985 to 2015. I had read two of the stories previously -- "Storming the Cosmos" in the Sterling collection "Globalhead" (1992), and "Junk DNA" in the Sterling collection "Visionary in Residence" (2006) -- and so I had an idea of what fun was in store.

Transrealism is Rucker's concept, a type of fiction that draws on the author's own life and experience. In the case of these collaborations, the main characters in each story are based on Rudy and Bruce, though often not recognizably so if we did not know this. And as Rudy tells us, "What's the overarching subject of our nine tales? ... They're about Bruce and me, about our friendship, and about what it was like to be working as SF writers over the last thirty years. It's been as awesome run."

There is an introduction by Rob Latham, and following each story are notes by both authors on the story on how it came to be written. This is fantastic! They apparently plan no further collaborations, based on the final notes. The last story was written just for this volume.

Here are the stories, which the book presents in chronological order of their writing and publication:

Storming the Cosmos
Big Jelly
Junk DNA
Hormiga Canyon
Colliding Branes
Good Night, Moon
Loco
Totem Poles
Kraken and Sage

The stories range from the Soviet space program and the Tunguska Event to a Silicon Valley startup based on artificial jellyfish, to an escape from the LAPD into a hidden ant dimension which alters both space and time, to ecological catastrophe with Kraken mud monsters, to a couple of bloggers/lovers on the eve of the collapse of the Universe.

Better than a gonzo trip, it's nine gonzo trips!

[KillDeer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like the ideas but some of the stories just seem so far fetched.