LOS GATOS-BASED science fiction author Rudy Rucker has a new book out called Mathematicians in Love (Tor Books; $24.95) and only he would come up with the following passage: "'Two to the eighty-sixth is the largest power of two that doesn't have any zeros when you write it out in decimal,' said the other cockroach, who'd flopped down on his belly to goggle at Paul, still lying on his surfboard. 'Lemme ask you this. What's the biggest Mersenne prime you got? I'm only asking for the lizard's sake, mind you. My name's Osckar and I'm a hierophantic logician from—whaddya, whaddya, call it Galaxy Z.'"

For 20 years now, Rucker has been tapping out fiction and nonfiction from the Los Gatos Hills, but his work goes all the way back to the late '70s, when he, along with a few other mutant futurists, came up with the "Cyberpunk" subgenre of science fiction. And more than a few times now, he's placed San Jose, Los Gatos and Santa Cruz in his books.

The body of work this dude has produced would take pages to even attempt to describe. Yours truly first accosted Mr. Rucker when he was still at San Jose State University, hacking in C++ and teaching classes in software development. I had an idea for a novel in mind and wanted to consult a freak show of professors to get advice. It was pretty much hanging and talking shop with Rucker that made yours truly want to find a way to utilize my warped multifaceted background and get paid to write about it all.

Three years ago, I penned a cover story for Metro about a rerelease of his book The Hacker and the Ants, where he sets scenes all over downtown San Jose and Los Gatos. The dumpy apartments lining San Salvador Street across from the university are actually in the book, as is Super Taqueria on Tenth Street, as is the Wells Fargo on North Santa Cruz Avenue in Los Gatos.

We also talked about San Jose in general and used a mathematical artificial-life puzzle called Conway's Game of Life to analyze San Jose's redevelopment strategies for downtown. I don't think there exist two other people on Earth who could have collectively come up with that except Rudy and myself.

But Silicon Alleys this week is not about yours truly, it's about Rudy, as he is reading from Mathematicians in Love on Thursday, Jan. 11, at the Capitola Book Café (1475 41st Ave., Capitola), and you should make the trip over the hill. It's worth it. At least the Santa Cruz area can support an independent new bookstore (several, actually)—something San Jose just can't. In these days, when San Jo likes to make it as difficult as possible to run any independent business, whether it's a nightclub or whatever, Santa Cruz should be celebrated, and the town shows up all throughout Mathematicians in Love.

As with all of Rucker's writings, Mathematicians in Love contains eight zillion different things going on all at the same time, a quality that I share and probably owe to him personally. In this book, you've got deep mathematics, helicopters, time warps, cone shells, punk rock, bat wings, cockroaches, Natural Bridges State Beach, Sanskrit, parallel words, Tarot cards and number theory. And that's just in one freakin' chapter. Which was always the best thing about Rucker's novels anyway: you'd find deep high-tech physics right amid LSD, '60s beatnik radicalism, the counterculture and four-dimensional jellyfishes. Or something like that.

With Mathematicians in Love, he takes what's essentially a zonked-out romantic comedy and runs it through the usual Ruckeresque loony mill. No one else can combine Santa Cruz surf culture with cutting-edge mathematics and find some way to ridicule Republicans, all in the same paragraph. And you don't at all have to understand the math to enjoy the story. Rucker is out of town for the holidays, so I didn't want to bug him on his cell, but he would gladly have talked about Java Applets, electric eels, Japanese porn, beach trips, the Pixies, marijuana, the fourth dimension and Los Gatos yuppies—all in the same conversation. All I can do in his behalf is thank him for his inspiration.

Contact Gary Singh or send a letter to the editor about this story.