Recently I decided it would be nice to make some of my older books readily available. So I got in touch with my one-time editor John Douglas, and we agreed to reissue Spacetime Donuts and The Sex Sphere in electronic book and in print-on-demand formats.
Initially I'd thought I might leave Spacetime Donuts essentially untouched, preserving the historical document intact. But I found I couldn't resist tweaking the text. I'm a writer after all, and revising novels is what I do. I wanted to make this new edition as easy as possible to enjoy.
So I smoothed the prose without overly diluting the attitude. The book remains a wild ride through the philosophy of science, and one of the very first cyberpunk novels.
Special thanks to my daughter, Georgia Rucker, for designing the cover for this edition, based on a new painting that I made.
—Rudy Rucker
Los Gatos, California,
August 19, 2008
Events strung themselves together in such a way that I was writing a Ph.D. thesis in set theory at Rutgers in 1972. Rutgers is near Princeton, where the great philosophical genius Kurt Gödel lived. I met him a couple of times and was profoundly affected. The meetings are described in Chapter Four of my pop philosophy book, Infinity and the Mind (Birkhäuser Boston, 1982).
Infinity and the Mind also contains (in Chapter One) my attempt at an explanation for Spacetime Donuts' main science gimmick: circular scale. The idea is sort of to take the Golden Age story "He Who Shrank," and print it on a roller towel where the two ends connect. I had a vision similar to Vernor's of the circular scale while perched in a tree near our apartment in Highland Park, New Jersey, in 1972.
One hard-science point which should be addressed is my use of miniature black holes. Recent theoretical work seems to indicate that such objects are unstable and cannot exist. But Holeflaffer's 2038 technique of magnetic monopole injection will, for all practical purposes, eliminate this difficulty.
My wife Sylvia and I saw the Rolling Stones play in Buffalo in 1976, the week before I started writing Donuts. Someone scalped tickets to us outside, and we ended up in the third row. It had a big effect on me . . . the great thing was that the music was so loud you couldn't tell, after a while, what the song was. Another big musical influence on this book is Frank Zappa, especially his album, Apostrophe'.
A less apparent borrowing is from Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, which deals with, among other things, a certain symbol, a sort of muted postal horn looking like this:
The plot of Spacetime Donuts is, to a certain extent, based on this symbol. More precisely, the plot looks like this:
Parts I and II of Spacetime Donuts were published in Unearth (issues 7 and 8, respectively). They were forced to stop publishing before Part III could appear. But now here it is at last, complete and unexpurgated, the underground neo-SF classic, step right in!
—Rudy Rucker
Lynchburg, Virginia,
May 7, 1981