Book Review | Juicy Ghosts by Rudy Rucker

Juicy Ghosts has been sitting on my Kindle for about eighteen months, and I’d earmarked it for this year’s J in the Alphabet Soup Challenge. A nice weird conclusion, really! I got it in a storybundle and then got some more of Rudy Rucker’s books, although I wasn’t sure that was a good idea when I first started. I’m now looking forward to them greatly 🙂

Juicy Ghosts

by Rudy Rucker

“Juicy Ghosts” is a fast-paced adventure novel, with startling science, engaging dialog–and a happy ending. The novel treats near-future versions of telepathy and immortality. It’s also a redemptive political tale, reacting to the chaos of the 2020 US presidential election. The tone is hip, bright, and darkly comic, with generous helpings of Rucker’s SF surrealism. Romances interweave the tale. [goodreads]

My review

I was a little lost to start with. There’s a lot of technobabble of the type people complain of in Star Trek engineering, but in this case were talking about fungus-type of sharing information through chemical exchange with the brain, or somewhere else. And telepathic thought transfer and storage in what is shortened as the ‘teepuniverse’ or ‘teepspace’. But I soldiered on. It made about as much sense as The Unwinding and I enjoyed that once I’d got into it.

And so it was here. Rudy Rucker has constructed a clever story in the form of about eight short stories, looking at the same event and its continuation, and its final outcome, from the points of view of different characters. It’s well constructed, and mostly the characters are well-formed with definitely different personalities. Although Molly, who both starts and ends the sequence, seemed a little less defined by the end. There could be valid reasons for that, though.

This is a sort of biochemical political sociological science fiction, and I think it will appeal to many of my readers. Just don’t be put off by having to learn a new language at first–the later stories aren’t as heavy. By the time I was halfway through I was loving it: so much imagination went into this book!