Rudy Rucker
White Light
Introduction by John Shirley

"A genius … a cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers." — San Diego Union-Tribune

"Rucker is a mathematician bewitched by the absurdity of the universe implied in quantum theory, and a writer possessed of a brilliantly witty pen." — Publishers Weekly

"Rucker's sense of fun is rare indeed. He has been compared to Lewis Carroll, and the comparison is not presumptuous. Like Carroll, Rucker is a mathematician who not only enjoys paradoxes, but can propagate that enjoyment as pure lunatic humor." — Washington Post Book World

Rudy Rucker is some kind of mad genius. Novelist, mathematician, computer scientist, essayist — over the years he's shown he can do it all. And not only can he do it all, but he does it all with a flair and a sense of jaunty good-humor that continually boggles the mind.

White Light is no exception. In it, the "Godfather of Cyberpunk" takes on subjects as hefty as Kafka, Cantor, and Albert Einstein, while making time for digressions on such truly important matters as Halloween, Chiclets, and Donald Duck. Originally published in 1980, White Light tells the story of Felix Rayman, a mathematics professor who has become frustrated with life at the fringes of academia. As Rucker himself once did, Rayman teaches math at an upstate New York university. His battles to comprehend the nature of infinity are constantly compromised by his demanding wife, April, as well as the (seemingly infinite) minutiae required of his brain-dead students. Then one day he loses his grip on reality altogether and slips headfirst into a multidimensional universe beyond the limits of time and space — the place of White Light. With a jumbo-sized beetle by his side, Felix sets out on a journey like no other in contemporary science fiction.

A comic masterpiece influencing everyone from Bruce Sterling to Jonathan Lethem, White Light is one of the smartest, strangest, and most surreally-funny novels to come out of the early cyberpunk movement.

Rudy Rucker is professor of computer science at San Jose State University. He has lived in Silicon Valley since 1986. Born in 1946, he earned his Ph.D. at Rutgers. He has won two Philip K. Dick Awards for best paperback novel of the year, for Software and Wetware. He has written four nonfiction books, ten works of fiction, and one "pseudo fictional memoir."

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