Frek and the Elixir
Apr. 22nd, 2004 08:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcirvinOK, this is much better: now I'm reading Rudy Rucker's new novel Frek and the Elixir. This seems to be his attempt at a young-adult novel, which is to say that the protagonist is twelve and there's no explicit sex in it (so far, at least: I'm less than halfway through), but otherwise it's like any Rudy Rucker novel: breezy, wildly imaginative and very, very strange (in a good way). So far, the story seems to hang together better than that of some of his recent books; it has a fantasy-quest structure that works well in this context—Frek actually has something to do rather than being the sort of aimless slacker-hippie that Rucker writes a lot.
Like 3001, Frek takes place about a thousand years from now, only in this case you can believe it. Most technology has been replaced by tweaked living organisms, giving the world a Flintstones-esque quality; these are produced by an all-powerful company/government called NuBioCom, which has intentionally wiped out all non-engineered life forms with a virus that also prevents people from reproducing without buying a license for the proprietary wetware to circumvent it. It is a world of trees that can play video, little people in the woods who are just heads with limbs, a substance that can temporarily make your left arm disappear, and a government that is a hierarchy of giant parasitic worms.
Then the young hero flees into space with an alien cuttlefish to find the Elixir that will restore Earth's lost species, and it starts to get weird.
(Update: Spelling of Frek's name corrected.)
Like 3001, Frek takes place about a thousand years from now, only in this case you can believe it. Most technology has been replaced by tweaked living organisms, giving the world a Flintstones-esque quality; these are produced by an all-powerful company/government called NuBioCom, which has intentionally wiped out all non-engineered life forms with a virus that also prevents people from reproducing without buying a license for the proprietary wetware to circumvent it. It is a world of trees that can play video, little people in the woods who are just heads with limbs, a substance that can temporarily make your left arm disappear, and a government that is a hierarchy of giant parasitic worms.
Then the young hero flees into space with an alien cuttlefish to find the Elixir that will restore Earth's lost species, and it starts to get weird.
(Update: Spelling of Frek's name corrected.)
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Correction
Date: 2004-04-23 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-23 07:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-04-24 10:57 am (UTC)--Adam Tierney