The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I've just noticed that the brilliant writer Rudy Rucker has released an ebook of his complete short stories. It's available from Amazon here. Rucker is one of the best and cleverest living writers. In fact he's one of the best and cleverest writers in the history of humanity. He's an authentic genius, a genuine ideas writer (quite a rare thing these days) with a comprehensive and profound understanding of mathematics, metaphysics, futurology, artificial intelligence and the paradoxes of space, time and geometry.

My first introduction to Rucker's work was back in the 1980s when I read one of his non-fiction books, The Fourth Dimension, which was an extension of the ideas that I had recently encountered in Edwin A. Abbott's seminal Flatland. In his own book, Rucker adapts and extends Abbott's scenario in an attempt to help the reader visualise (as far as is possible) the fourth spatial dimension. I happily recall hours spent studying Necker Cubes and flipping their perspectives in my mind until they were in both states simultaneously. After that, of course, it became difficult to concentrate on any set of lines that vanish to a distant point (such as the corner of a room) without also seeing that point as being closer than the rest of the shape...

Why use psychedelics when you have hyperspatial geometry... And why read substandard writers when you have Rudy Rucker!