Million Mile Road Trip
Page 39
Regarding locale, I like to fold my real surroundings into my SF novels—it’s what I call transrealism. SF that’s set in the real world. This time around, my transreal world includes flying saucers—and they’re not boring machines, no, they’re live beings made of meat. The aliens don’t ride in flying saucers, dude, they are flying saucers. I don’t understand why more people don’t realize this! Be that as it may, you can’t really have flying saucers in a novel without a full-on “Attack of the Flying Saucers.” And what better setting for such a scene than—the annual graduation at our local Los Gatos High School! I’ve been to quite a few graduations there.
I love the classic gimmicks of SF in the same way that a rock guitarist loves power chords. The trick is to bring fresh life to the fab old tropes. Given that we don’t exactly see mappyworld floating around in our space, I needed to stash it in a parallel world. By way of revitalizing this very old notion, I brought in some little-known facts about the higher-dimensional geometry of tunnels between parallel worlds. Real math! And my deal about having some of the saucers turn inside out—that’s an example of a detail I arrived at by thinking about my science explanation for what’s going on. I did my best to explain the 4D stuff with words and scenes and line drawings, but if you want to go deeper, check out my non-fiction book, The Fourth Dimension, or my 4D novel, Spaceland.
And for more information about Million Mile Road Trip, including my writing notes, see the book’s home page, www.rudyrucker.com/millionmileroadtrip
In closing, I want to thank Marc Laidlaw for reading and discussing early sections of the novel. And Jeremy Lassen for acquiring the book for Night Shade Books—after a memorable conversation at the Locus magazine holiday party at Ysabeau Wilce’s house in December, 2016. Hats off to my agent John Silbersack for closing the deal. Special thanks to Cory Allyn of Night Shade for his inspired and kindly job in shepherding my book through production. A shout out to Bill Carman for his terrific cover art. And I’m grateful to my Kickstarter backers for enhancing my advance—their names appear on the novel’s webpage. Hugs to my dear wife Sylvia, and thanks for being amused by the unending flow of unseen fantastical critters that I bring into our life.
Most of all, I thank my readers, whether you’ve been with me for years, or whether you’re just now joining the merry band. Welcome, friends!
Rudy Rucker
December 4, 2018
Los Gatos, California
About Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. (Shown above in 1967.) He is regarded as a contemporary master of science fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His forty published books include both novels and non-fiction books on the fourth dimension, infinity, and the meaning of computation. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism, often including himself as a character. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. For up to date info, see Rudy’s Blog at www.rudyrucker.com/blog
THE NIGHT SHADE SERIES
Night Shade Books’ ten-volume Rudy Rucker print series reissues nine brilliantly off-beat novels from the mathematician / author, as well as the brand-new Million Mile Road Trip.
Conceived as a uniformly-designed collection, each release features new artwork from award-winning illustrator Bill Carman and an introduction from some of Rudy’s most renowned science fiction contemporaries. We’re proud to make trade editions available again (or for the first time!) of so much work from this influential writer, and to share Rucker’s fascinating and unique ideas with a new generation of readers.
The Night Shade titles are: Turing & Burroughs, Mathematicians in Love, Saucer Wisdom, White Light, The Big Aha, Spacetime Donuts, Jim and the Flims, The Sex Sphere, and The Secret of Life. Available in print from Night Shade, and in ebook editions from Transreal Books.
For more info on these new editions, see www.rudyrucker.com/nightshade
BOOKS BY RUDY RUCKER
===Novels===
White Light
Spacetime Donuts
The Sex Sphere
Master of Space and Time
The Secret of Life
The Hacker and the Ants
Saucer Wisdom
Spaceland
As Above, So Below: Peter Bruegel
Frek and the Elixir
Mathematicians in Love
Jim and the Flims
Turing & Burroughs
The Big Aha
Million Mile Road Trip
The Ware Tetralogy
Software
Wetware
Freeware
Realware
Postsingular
Hylozoic
The Hollow Earth
Return to the Hollow Earth
===Story collections===
The 57th Franz Kafka
Mad Professor
Complete Stories
===Non-Fiction===
Infinity and the Mind
The Fourth Dimension
The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul
Nested Scrolls: A Writer’s Life
PRAISE FOR RUCKER’S BOOKS
“Rudy Rucker should be declared a National Treasure of American Science Fiction. Someone simultaneously channeling Kurt Gödel and Lenny Bruce might start to approximate full-on Ruckerian warp-space, but without the sweet, human, splendidly goofy Rudy-ness at the core of the singularity.” —William Gibson
“One of science fiction’s wittiest writers. A genius…a cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers.” —San Diego Union-Tribune
“Rucker’s writing is great like the Ramones are great: a genre stripped to its essence, attitude up the wazoo, and cartoon sentiments that reek of identifiable lives and issues. Wild math you can get elsewhere, but no one does the cyber version of beatnik glory quite like Rucker.” —New York Review of Science Fiction
“What a Dickensian genius Rucker has for Californian characters, as if, say, Dickens had fused with Phil Dick and taken up surfing and jamming and topologising. He has a hotline to cosmic revelations yet he’s always here and now in the groove, tossing off lines of beauty and comic wisdom. ‘My heart is a dog running after every cat.’ We really feel with his characters in their bizarre tragicomic quests.” —Ian Watson, author of The Embedding
“The current crop of sf humorists are mildly risible, I suppose, but they don't seem to pack the same intellectual punch of their forebears. With one exception, that is: the astonishing Rudy Rucker. For some two decades now, since the publication of his first novel, White Light, Rucker has combined an easygoing, trippy style influenced by the Beats with a deep engagement with knotty (or ‘gnarly,’ to employ one of his favorite terms) intellectual conceits, based mainly in mathematics. In the typical Rucker novel, likably eccentric characters—who run the gamut from brilliant to near-certifiable—encounter aspects of the universe that confirm that life is weirder than we can imagine.” —The Washington Post
“Rucker stands alone in the science fiction pantheon as some kind of trickster god of the computer science lab; where others construct minutely plausible fictional realities, he simply grabs the corners of the one we already know and twists it in directions we don't have pronounceable names for.” —SF Site
“Reading a Rudy Rucker book is like finding Poe, Kerouac, Lewis Carroll, and Philip K. Dick parked on your driveway in a topless ’57 Caddy…and telling you they’re taking you for a RIDE. The funniest science fiction author around.” —Sci-Fi Universe
“This is SF rigorously following crazy rules. My mind of science fiction. At the heart of it is a rage to extrapolate. Rucker is what happens when you cross a mathematician with the extrapolating jazz spirit.” —Robert Sheckley
“Rucker [gives you] more ideas per chapter than most authors use in an entire novel.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Rudy Rucker writes like the love child of Philip K. Dick
and George Carlin. Brilliant, frantic, conceptual, cosmological…like lucid dreaming, only funny.” —New York Times bestselling author Walter Jon Williams
Table of Contents
1: First Kiss
2: Magic Ladder
3: Villy’s Family
4: Zoe’s Mom
5. Augmented Whale
6: Unny Tunnel
7: Cruising Van Cott
8: Night Market
9: Saucer Hall
10: Three Zoes
11: Leaving Town
12: Weird Dream
13: Borderslam Inn
14: Nunu’s Father
15: Maisie
16: Thuddland
17: Surf World
18: Beach Party
19: Riding the Ridge
20: Not Mom
21: Harmony
22: Stratocast
23: Wand
24: Lady Filippa
25: Zeppelin
26: Flat Cow
27: New Eden
28: Going Home
29: Cosmic Beatdown, Part 1
30: Cosmic Beatdown, Part 2
Afterword
About Rudy Rucker