Joe Cube is a Silicon Valley hotshot--well, a would-be hotshot anyway--hoping that the 3-D TV project he's managing will lead to the big money IPO he's always dreamed of. On New Year's Eve, hoping to impress his wife, he sneaks home the prototype. It brings no new warmth to their cooling relationship, but it does attract someone else's attention. When Joe sees a set of lips talking to him (floating in midair) and feels the poke of a disembodied finger (inside him), it's not because of the champagne he's drunk. He has just met Momo, a woman from the All, a world of four spatial dimensions for whom our narrow world, which she calls Spaceland, is something like a rug, but one filled with motion and life. Momo has a business proposition for Joe, an offer she won't let him refuse. The upside potential becomes much clearer to him once she helps him grow a new eye (on a stalk) that can see in the fourth-dimensional directions, and he agrees. After that it's a wild ride through a million-dollar night in Las Vegas, a budding addiction to tasty purple 4-D food, a failing marriage, eye-popping excursions into the All, and encounters with Momo's foes, rubbery red critters who steal money, offer sage advice and sometimes messily explode. Joe is having the time of his life, until Momo's scheme turns out to have angles he couldn't have imagined. Suddenly the fate of all life here in Spaceland is at stake. Rudy Rucker is a past master at turning mathematical concepts into rollicking science fiction adventure, from Spacetime Donuts and White Light to The Hacker and the Ants . In the tradition of Edwin A. Abbott's classic novel, Flatland, Rucker gives us a tour of higher mathematics and visionary realities. Spaceland is Flatland on hyperdrive! “Science fiction author-hero Rudy Rucker is an oddity and a treasure . . . . In these days of neat little marketing categories, few writers attempt to cover so much ground.” ― Wired “His work links the largest possible cosmic view with the trivia and tribulations of everyday life . . . . He portrays thoroughly real, everyday people grappling with some far-fetched phenomenon . . . with comic results.” ― Fantasy & Science Fiction. “A hilarious tribute to Edwin Abbott's Flatland . . . combining valid mathematical speculation with wicked send-ups of Silicon Valley and its often otherworldly tribespeople . . . belly-laugh funny.” ― Publishers Weekly (starred review) Rudy Rucker  is a writer and a mathematician who worked for twenty years as a Silicon Valley computer science professor. He is regarded as contemporary master of science-fiction, and received the Philip K. Dick award twice. His thirty published books include both novels and non-fiction books. A founder of the cyberpunk school of science-fiction, Rucker also writes SF in a realistic style known as transrealism. His books include Postsingular and Spaceland . Spaceland A Novel of the Fourth Dimension By Rucker, Rudy Tor Books Copyright © 2003 Rucker, Rudy All right reserved. ISBN: 9780765303677 1   New Year’s Eve     My idea for handling December 31, 1999, was that Jena and I should fix a nice meal, drink champagne, watch TV, and stay clear of the Y2K bug. I bulldozered over Jena’s gently voiced objections. I figured that at midnight the power would go out and the rioting would start. We’d lock the door and light some candles, and Jena would smile at me and kiss me and say I’d been right to make us stay home. In my mind, that’s what was going to happen. And, hey, even if I was wrong about the rioting, we’d miss a Millennial traffic jam. My secret hope was to get Jena in bed before midnight so we could be in each other’s arms right at the moment of the Big Flip, all those nines rolling over to zeroes and the two of us close as close could be. That was the right way to usher in a new Millennium! Yes! Not that I came out and told this to Jena, as I knew very well that she would have preferred to go somewhere complicated and expensive. Jena liked sex even more than I did, but she didn’t like for me to make assumptions about when we’d do it. It was always supposed to be some kind of surprise. A spontaneously occurring romantic impulse. A force of Nature, unpredictable as an earthquake or a hurricane. When in fact it was inevitably every one to four days. One of the ways I passed my time at work was to update an Excel spreadsheet tracking our sex frequency. I had a formula in one of the cells to compute what I called the DBS index. A rolling average of the days between sex acts. When the DBS rose above three, it was time to turn on the charm. Buy flowers, talk about Jena’s problems, do like that. Not that I always did. To tell the truth, a high DBS was my fault as often as it was Jena’s. Even though I talk a good game, I’m not the most highly sexed guy around. Thanks to a stressful Christmas visit with Jena’s mother and stepfather back in Prescott, Arizona, the DBS was up to 4.1. I should