Like many other stories and novels by Rudy Rucker, “Jack and the Aktuals” is a wild and wooly dramatization of certain principles of higher mathematics, with added talking animals, sentient pencils, and orders-of-infinity nested within one another like Russian dolls. No description can ever encompass the mind-bending experience of reading a Rudy Rucker story.

Among Rudy Rucker’s many novels are the Ware tetralogy (Software, Wetware , Freeware, and Realware); White Light, Spacetime Donuts, Mathematicians in Love, and Postsingular. His nonfiction includes such works as Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension and The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul: What Gnarly Computation Taught Me About Ultimate Reality, the Meaning Of Life, and How To Be Happy. He is the great-great-great grandson of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.