Being at least a decade older than the rest of our cyberpunk cohort, we were both veterans of (ahem) 'the Sixties'. I found him unsettling in another way as well, though that was not so much about him as about something we had in common. He seemed starry-eyed with the sheer joy of forgetting the brakes entirely. As I was secretly attempting to negotiate my own life and literary career with the emergency brake on, this made me complexly uneasy. He also frightened me because, though generally convivial, he seemed to me to teeter atop an angelic pinhead of purest Random, causing me the constant apprehension that he might at any second do or say literally anything at all. I knew from the very start of our acquaintance (from before, actually, as I read him before I met him) that he habitually, effortlessly, visited realms I was literally incapable of envisioning, let alone visiting. In part, no doubt, because he's the only higher mathematician I've ever known, while I am myself virtually an innumerate. Scarily bright, and a card-carrying Holy Fool who's managed to fall off every cliff but the only really wrong ones, he used to frighten me. He is one splendidly odd duck, balanced between pure mathematics on the one hand and spontaneous bop prosody on the other, while uncounted further hands (or paws, in some cases) flicker in from their individual Hilbert spaces, bearing cups, wands, alien sex toys, artifacts out of Roadrunner cartoons, terrible jokes, gleefully fell dooms, and lubricating dabs of mentholated ichor. You'll see this said about all too many science fiction writers, given novelty's supposed (and largely spurious, in my view) importance to the genre, but of Rudy it's quite literally true.

Rudy Rucker has never trafficked in that repetition, and while he unabashedly loves the genre in which he tends to be marketed, he transcends it, or perhaps engulfs it, in his singularity. Genre is that dubious bargain whereby the reader is offered (for our present purposes) a novel, a form whose very name promises a new experience, but offers, in genre, the implicit and crucial promise of the repetition of previous pleasures. Genuinely sui generis novelists operate at an inherent disadvantage, and all the more so in any so-called genre. 'Sui Generis: A Testimony' by William Gibson etware: Avon Books 1988 and Avon Books 1997. Software: Ace Books 1982, Avon Books 1987, and Avon Books 1997. Past publication history of the included novels. For more information see Rucker's Ware Tetralogy page. Paperback and ebook copies of the Prime Books edition of The Ware Tetralogy can be purchased at Amazon and other book-sellers. Paperback and ebook editions published by Prime Books.

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