Rucker and Sterling's new story: "Goodnight Moon" on Tor.com

Rudy Rucker and Bruce Sterling’s latest fiction collaboration, “Goodnight Moon,” is up on Tor.com. It’s got all the hallmarks of a great collaboration: while it’s a little incoherent in spots, you can really tell that the authors were engaged in a competition to see who could outweird the other. The result is a madcap, hilarious, crazy-pants story about two Hollywood dream sculptors coming to grips with the advent of nanogoo that can make dreams into reality:

Schwarz’s Deli had fed generations of Hollywood creative talent. The gold-framed celebrity photos on the walls were clustered thick as goldfish scales. The joint’s historic clientele included vaudeville hams, silent film divas, radio crooners, movie studio titans, TV soap stars, computer game moguls, and social networkers. The augmented-reality mavens were memorialized by holographic busts on the ceiling. Business was in the air, but it was bypassing Morse and Ganzer. Especially Ganzer.

“We’ve got our own problems,” admitted Morse.

With a practiced gesture, Ganzer formed a vortex in the deli’s all-pervasive bosonic fluxon entertainment field. Then he plucked a lint-covered fabule from the pocket of his baggy sports pants. “Check out my brand-new giant paramecium here.”

Ganzer’s creation oozed from the everting seahorse-valleys that gnarled the fabule’s surface.

Morse rotated the floating dream with his manicured fingertips, admiring it. “I can see every wiggly cilia! This dream is, like, realer than you, man.”

Good Night, Moon

(via Beyond the Beyond)