GNARL!

Three dozen stories—almost Rucker's entire output, 1976–99, and, except for the five most recent yarns, all previously collected in two paperback collections, The Fifty-Seventh Franz Kafka and Transreal! Included also are collaborations with Bruce Sterling, Paul di Filippo, and Marc Laidlaw. Featured, along with the Rucker trademarks—wacky aliens, math and physics jokes, the recurring characters Joseph Fletcher and Harry Gerber, and rather sophomoric ruminations on sex—are more seriously probing ideas: tailored diseases as an instrument of social control, or the problems of funding basic science. Not to mention cerebral, challenging explorations of the quantum universe and its paradoxes and singularities. Not to everyone's taste, but well worth browsing.