Features Podcasts Family Video Comics Music Tech Science Books Film & TV Games ✚

Jill

Rucker's Postsingular is a free, CC download!

Cory Doctorow at 2:46 am Fri, Nov 2, 2007

— FEATURED —

Book Review

The Man Who Laughs: grotesque Victor Hugo potboiler was the basis for The Joker

Feature

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

Book Review

The Twelve-Fingered Boy - mesmerizing YA horror novel

— FOLLOW US —

Boing Boing is on Twitter and Facebook. Subscribe to our RSS feed or daily email.

 

— POLICIES —

Except where indicated, Boing Boing is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution

 

— FONTS —

Tweet
Kindle
Rudy Rucker has posted his kick-ass, weird-ass post-cyberpunk novel Postsingular to the net as a free, Creative Commons-licensed download. I reviewed Postsingular when it came out earlier this month:
In Postsingular, a mad scientist creates a race of nants -- nanites -- that digest the planet and turn it into a computational simulation of Earth, called Vearth. However, an autistic child memorizes a long string of numbers that poisons the nants and causes them to reverse themselves (luckily, they're engaged in reversible computation) and put the planet back. That's the setup.

Some time later, another race of benign nanos are released on the earth, the Orphids. Orphids are mezzoscale computers that organize themselves into an intelligent global network, tapping into every human brain and giving people access to outboard cognition facilities, so that anyone can drop out, tune in, and become hyperintelligent. The orphidnetters are haunted by spooks from a parallel dimension, who seek to prevent them from using the smarts of the orphidnet to develop interdimensional travel.

This is one of the most fun, strangest, most thought-provoking sf novels I've read, and it's fantastic to have it show up on the net, ready to be copied and shared. Link

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE:  Book

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

  • vorpalsword

    I started reading it this morning… It’s excellent.

  • Comstock

    What?

  • Hadrien

    For those of you using e-ink devices, it’s available on Feedbooks: http://www.feedbooks.com/discover/view_book/1918

    Also available in .epub, the new standard for e-books (http://www.idpf.org/).

    Just added this book on my Sony PRS-500, sounds fun and there’s a sequel coming soon (2008).

  • Teresa Nielsen Hayden / Moderator

    How what? What kind what?

  • Chan Lee Meng

    Looks like it is a continuation / expansion of his 2006 story “Chu and the Nants” which I found very entertaining. Am looking forward to reading “Postsingular”.