Rudy Rucker obviously has something up his sleeve. Throughout his literary career, he has explored a huge variety of times and places, and his speculative skills are honed to the point that I’m starting to think that they aren’t speculation: Rudy Rucker is a dimensional wanderer, able to explore the possibilities of the past, present and future on a whim.

Submitted for your perusal: POSTSINGULAR, Rucker’s latest novel. Science-fiction enthusiasts will be familiar with the concept of the Singularity, a technological change so swift and drastic that it makes society completely unrecognizable to those living before it came to pass. This concept is pretty much a double-dog dare to any futurist worth his salt, because the gist of it is that nobody (not even you, Rucker) can imagine such an event. Rucker is one of the very few authors – along with Vernor Vinge and Charles Stross – to shoulder this challenge and completely succeed.

This summary makes POSTSINGULAR sound like a thriller, but it’s not, really. The pace of the prose is like strolling down a country lane, but there are really great insights and ingenious bit of knowledge and scientific magic around every bend. The characters’ lives are fully examined, and this really makes it feels like they are acting on their own impulses rather than the author’s.

POSTSINGULAR is not about gadgets or robots or incredibly large guns shooting incredibly small nanobullets. It’s about humans, flawed and heroic, and how their flaws and strengths adapt to a society that changes literally overnight. Rucker can obviously see the future (or at least an alternate future), and thankfully, he has deigned to share it with the rest of us.

The key to Rucker’s POSTSINGULAR singularity are nanomachines. After the world is nearly consumed by them at the book’s opening, a scientist involved in the project takes proactive steps to ensure that such a quasi-apocalypse can never occur again. In doing so, he utterly transforms the way humanity views itself and the world in which they live, and attracts the attention of giants from another dimension who would really prefer that he not ever again mess around with world-destroying nanomachinery.

As the plot become clear, he, his autistic son and a mismatched group of postsingularity misfits with varied agendas and neuroses become aware of the threat of a new nano-Armageddon, and it’s up to them to thwart both an evil madman and their own selfish, petty human instincts to save the future. –Ryun Patterson

Buy it at Amazon.

OTHER BOOKGASM REVIEWS OF THIS AUTHOR:
• MATHEMATICIANS IN LOVE by Rudy Rucker