Spaceland

Mathematician, computer scientist, and two-time winner of the Philip K. Dick Award, Rudy Rucker is also the author of the popular science classic, The Fourth Dimension. He combines all his strengths in Spaceland, a wild novel about contact with the beings who inhabit the fourth dimension.A rousing hard-SF homage to the famous Flatland, Edwin Abbot's classic math fiction about A. Square, a two dimensional being who learns about our third dimension, Spaceland is one of the year's significant SF novels and one of the most entertaining.Joe Cube is employed by a Silicon Valley startup and on New Year's Eve takes home an experimental machine. His marriage is shakier than he realizes, he's sort of a loose cannon himself, and now, when he turns the machine on, he's frightened to be contacted by Momo, a woman from the fourth dimension. She promises to make him rich if he'll help her with a project. The four-dimensional vision she gives him does come in handy at the blackjack tables in Vegas. His wife likes that a lot, but she's also starting an affair with another guy from the lab, and Momo's scheme turns out to have angles they couldn't have imagined. Suddenly the fate of life here in Spaceland is at stake. This is mind-blowing SF at its best, and a special treat for mathematics geeks.