Rucker, Rudy

(US, 1946– )

Rucker is a professor of mathematics and a founding father, with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson, of ‘Cyber-punk’ science fiction. He has published eight novels (and several works of non-fiction that operate in that imaginatively fertile area in which higher mathematics, particle physics, and relativity part company with common sense). He won the Philip K. Dick award for both Software (1982) and Wetware (1988), the first two parts of a wonderfully insane comic novel sequence in which sentient robots (Boppers) blend with humans (Meat-Bops) to create all manner of crazy miscegenated hybrids with attendant sexual, political, and philosophical problems. Rucker is no respecter of taboos, or proprieties (fictional or otherwise), and pushes science fiction into areas H. G. Wells could only have imagined in his most Freudian nightmares. You will either love him or loathe him.

William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Philip K. Dick  MH