Rudy Rucker's started to build the site for his forthcoming novel, "Frek and the Elixer." Rucker is one of the most intimidatingly well-organized writers I know, approaching his fiction with the attentiveness to detail of an engineer: he writes tens of thousands of words' worth of notes about his work, and once the book comes out, he puts all that material online. It's awe-inspiring.
I got a copy of the "Frek" manuscript this week (nyah nyah nyah) and I got to reading it last night — and couldn't put it down. I was up for hours reading it, laughing aloud and marking passages of language so fluid and funny that I wanted to stick them up on a cork board over my desk.
Frek and the Elixir is a profound, playful SF epic. The central theme is human individuality vs. the homogeneity of monoculture.
It's 3003 and the biotech tweaked plants and animals are quite wonderful — but there are only a few dozen of the old species left. Nature has been denatured by the profiteers of NuBioCom. It's up to Frek Huggins, a lad from dull, sleepy Middleville, to venture out into the galaxy to fetch an elixir to restore Earth's lost species. At least that's what a friendly alien cuttlefish tells him the elixir will do. But can you really trust aliens?
Frek finds himself in the midst of a galactic struggle for humanity's freedom, accompanied by his talking dog Wow, the down-home mutant Gibby, and an asteroid-raised girl named Renata. The final liberation depends on freeing Frek's long-lost father from an all-seeing alien known as the Magic Pig.
Frek and the Elixir is an archetypal saga reminiscent of The Lord of the Rings, the Harry Potter books, and Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials series — enlivened by Rudy Rucker's trademark originality and wit.
Ages 12 and up. Length 166,000 Words. The novel will be published by Tor Books in Spring, 2004.
