Mathematicians in Love
Author: Rudy Rucker
Publisher: Tor
ISBN-10: 0765320398
ISBN-13: 978-0765320391
Rating: 8/10
We all know romance works in mysterious ways. Some people are attracted to slobs, others neat-freaks. Still others spend entire lifetimes pining for love-outside the bedroom as well as inside. But what would happen if we could deliberately manipulate the fabric of the universe so that our crush or childhood sweetheart fell in love with us? That is the crux of Rudy Rucker’s novel “Mathematicians in Love”, a zany middlebrow rollercoaster that inspires untold amounts of laughter-and serious thought, of course.
When the book opens, we come face to face with Bela Kis, a mathematics-make that mathemagic- student who attends Humelocke, a college town on an alternate Earth that he assures us is “a close match for your Berkeley”. He has a roommate, Paul, who he’s on good terms with, and a girlfriend, Alma, who thinks the world of him. When he stumbles on a bizarre project his mentor is working on, things go from bad to worse in less time than it takes to create a wormhole in a basement somewhere. He gets passed over by employer after employer in favor of his friend, his girlfriend leaves him, and on top of that he’s blogging for a corrupt alumna to make ends meet-and that’s all in the first two chapters! Just when it seems that life has dropped a massive dump on him, he decides to turn it around-with some outside help, of course-creating a maze of unintended consequences that led to a interesting climax.
The size of the book doesn’t help the slow, ponderous nature of the plot. Events move slowly but just like a TV series, there are enough twists and turns to keep it interesting. Unlike many novels that take place on alternate Earths, there is little need to keep up with names and dates and key battles-eliminating the need to go back to college and get a degree in history just to finish it. It would be nice, though, if we knew more about Bela’s world in relation to ours.
Occasionally Rucker will get on a soapbox and editorialize, Mark Twain style, about whatever irks him-whether it’s politics or pop culture. That rarely happens. Overall, Mathematicians in Love is a fun read. A long read. But a fun read nevertheless.
John Winn
Staff Writer
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