The Ware Tetralogy

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Genuinely sui generis novelists operate at an inherent disadvantage, and all the more so in any so-called genre.

Genre is that dubious bargain whereby the reader is offered (for our present purposes) a novel, a form whose very name promises a new experience, but offers, in genre, the implicit and crucial promise of the repetition of previous pleasures.

Rudy Rucker has never trafficked in that repetition, and while he unabashedly loves the genre in which he tends to be marketed, he transcends it, or perhaps engulfs it, in his singularity. You’ll see this said about all too many science fiction writers, given novelty’s supposed (and largely spurious, in my view) importance to the genre, but of Rudy it’s quite literally true. He is one splendidly odd duck, balanced between pure mathematics on the one hand and spontaneous bop prosody on the other, while uncounted further hands (or paws, in some cases) flicker in from their individual Hilbert spaces, bearing cups, wands, alien sex toys, artifacts out of Roadrunner cartoons, terrible jokes, gleefully fell dooms, and lubricating dabs of mentholated ichor.

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