About the book

Author: Rucker, Rudy v. B. (Rudy von Bitter), 1946-

Title: Master of space and time

Publication: New York : Baen, 1984. ISBN 978-1433207693.

DAISY audio format narrated by John Ihrig. CELA library call number DC05893. 229 pages; 5hrs., 15mins. as a recorded book.

About the story

This CELA book was transferred from the original audiocassette. This means that there is no DAISY navigation beyond the 90-minute bookmarks, which bear no relation to the contents. Among other things, this means you can’t skip the table of contents and publication information, and you will need to insert manual bookmarks if you ever want to find anything again.

So, I know the book was written in 1984, but it’s still a bit shocking to read the way that women are described, treated and portrayed. Like, not shocking in a nice or fun way. I guess it reminds us how far we have come (…until recently, it seems. So maybe it’s topical after all).

The story was fine, in a bit sexist and non-inclusive sort of way. A guy invents some kind of mind-probing device that gives him access to a selection of worlds, depending on how many gluons he has. A gluon is a particle, described in this book as coming in three colours (only they don’t, of course, but … willing suspension of disbelief and all that), and each colour is rarer than the previous one, so it only permits a certain number of “wishes”.

Some interesting devices: parallel universes, infinite regression, particles, etc., but on the whole I only finished it because I started it, and this is – after all – an RA exercise. (That’s “reader’s advisory” for you non-librarians in the crowd.)

I can’t say I enjoyed it, but at least it was short. As an author, Rucker is important as one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement.

Because it was transferred from tape, the quality was not as high as the more modern recordings, and the temporal dialect was a real blast from the past. The narrator, John Ihrig, did a good job, though.

People who did enjoy this book use words like “zany hijinks” and “madcap adventure”. Many people do enjoy it. I did not.