Turing & Burroughs

“Rucker’s ‘Beatnik SF Novel’ deftly combines historic characters and wild flights of imagination in a spin-off of our world’s history . . . an SFnal tour de force.” —Faren Miller, Locus

What if Alan Turing, founder of the modern computer age, faked his suicide to escape assassination by the secret service? What if he then became the lover of Beat author William Burroughs?

And what if they then mutated into giant shapeshifting slugs, fled the FBI agents tracking them, raised Burroughs’s wife—killed in a tragic drunken mishap—from the dead, and, finally, tweaked the H-bombs of Los Alamos to use them for a very different purpose?

Turing & Burroughs is a wild beatnik adventure: compulsively readable, hysterically funny, with insane warps and twists—and a bad attitude throughout.

Night Shade Books is proud to present new editions of influential mathematician-turned-author Rudy Rucker’s brilliantly weird novels, sharing Rucker’s fascinating and unique approach to science fiction with an entirely new generation of readers.

Rudy Rucker is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty 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.

Praise for Turing & Burroughs

“Rucker’s ‘Beatnik SF Novel’ deftly combines historic characters and wild flights of imagination in a spin-off of our world’s history . . . an SFnal tour de force . . . The prose in Turing & Burroughs can flow like a drug-stoked dream. —Faren Miller, Locus

“A surreal romp through postwar England, Tangier, and America that combines the eerie black humor of William Burroughs, the garish carnival colors of a 1950s science fiction movie, and Rucker’s unique voice.” —The Turing Centenary

“An angle of attack reminiscent of the Thomas Pynchon of Gravity's Rainbow and the Terry Southern of The Magic Christian . . . Turing & Burroughs is all of that and more. Much more. It is Rudy Rucker’s most ambitious novel . . . Rucker being Rucker, the central story line is not even half the bizarre, fascinating, scientific, sexual, and historical content of this delightfully humorous yet somehow thematically serious novel.” —Norman Spinrad, Asimov’s

“A delightful alternative history romp set in the middle of the 1950s. Rucker immerses the reader in the beat milieu, with the added twist that here they really are pod people, and loving it. … This novel engages the reader to such an extent that it's easy to overlook the extensive research that went into making it authentic, not just superficially, but in depth.” —John Walker, Fourmilog

Praise for Rudy Rucker

“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

“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

“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

“Rudy Rucker is the most consistently brilliant imagination working in SF today. ” — Charles Stross, author of The Laundry Files

“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

“Rucker [gives you] more ideas per chapter than most authors use in an entire novel. ” —San Francisco Chronicle