White Light

Author Rudy Rucker offers a unique vision of life, death, and the infinite worlds that lie beyond in this thought-provoking, inspiring, romantic—and funny as hell—mathematical SF novel.

Young prof Felix Rayman spends his days in another world. Between teaching indifferent students, pondering his theories on infinity, napping, and worrying about his wife, he’s barely here.

But when his dreams separate him from his physical body, Felix plunges headfirst into a transfinite universe that looks a lot like the afterworld—complete with angels, demons, and the restless souls of the dead. And it only gets stranger, as his trials and tribulations—in the company of a giant talking beetle—send Felix up other-worldly peaks that range past infinity to the zone of the White Light, where Nothing and Everything are the same.

Night Shade Books’ ten-volume series with Rudy Rucker collects nine of the brilliantly weird novels for which the mathematician-turned-author is known, as well as a tenth, never-before-published book, Million-Mile Road Trip. We’re proud to collect in one place so much of the work of this influential figure in the early cyberpunk scene, and to share Rucker’s fascinating, unique worldview 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 White Light

“White Light is a good, intelligent, powerful novel, and the most auspicious debut in the SF field since I don’t know when.” —Thomas M. Disch, Fantasy & Science Fiction

“In White Light Rucker commandingly synthesizes mysticism, pop imagery, the Devil Himself, Jesus Christ, the great mathematicians and their ideas, ‘head culture,’ and even voodoo into a novel that takes us on a wild journey to infinity, to the Absolute, and back again. As for sheer writing, there’s probably no one like him.” —John Shirley

“A marvelously inventive and lunatically logical story, where not only is the scaling of infinity a mad, convincing adventure, but where ordinary human happiness matters too movingly.” —Ian Watson, Vector

“An adventure through time and space, the likes of which only a collaboration between Umberto Eco and Lewis Carroll could attempt . . . each turned corner of White Light is another gleeful surprise, another celebration of cleverness and imagination.” —Amazon.com

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