The earlier project served as source material for my transreal SF novel, The Secret of Life. But it was far from being a best-seller like On the Road! The resulting book appeared from a small press, Ocean View Books, and All the Visions remains in print from Transreal Books. The typed scroll was about eighty feet long when I was done. I rigged up the roll on a length of broomstick propped up behind my good old rose-red IBM Selectric typewriter. To fully mimic Kerouac, I wrote All the Visions on a single long roll of paper. My work towards The Secret of Life began with a Kerouac-style memoir-novel called All the Visions-which depicts my alter-ego Conrad Bunger’s life up until the point when I typed out the Visions. The Secret of Life sparkles with deadpan wit and a natural storyteller’s flair, blending mathematical speculation, such concepts as Hilbert space, rock’n’roll, drugs, and sex with imaginative ideas worthy of H.G.Wells. Rucker is an artist well worth discovering, reading, and keeping up with. You can browse an online version of The Secret of Life here. A different slant on the material in Secret of Life appeared in Rucker's Kerouac-scroll-style autobiographical novel, All The Visions. The Secret of Life is one of Rucker's first transreal novels. Transrealism is about transmuting your ordinary life into SF. Why did youth rebel in the 60s? This transreal book will help you understand how it happened, and what the underlying feelings were.

And this is important because government snipers are out to kill him. He can change his face, shrink to the size of a thumb, fly around the Eiffel tower-and hand out joints to everyone at his college’s annual student assembly. As Conrad Bunger faces his true nature, he takes on a series of awesome powers. SummaryĪ 60s college student learns he’s a saucer alien. See Rucker's other nine Night Shade books. Paperback: Night Shade Books, November, 2019, 4th Edtion, with introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson.Įbook: Transreal Books, 2016, 3rd Edition.Įbook: Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Transreal Books.

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