Twelve-year-old Frek lives on the Earth of 3003, with his mother Lora and his sisters Geneva and Ida. But Frek's Earth is one that none of us in the 21st century would recognize. In the Great Collapse of 2666, all baseline species were deliberately wiped out and the Earth's ecology was remade in simpler, handier form, signaling the start of the NuBioCom era. Frek's world is one of 256 species only: housetrees and anyfruit bushes, rugmoss and suckapillas. To Frek, it's all quite normal, but a bit boring. Only the virtual-reality Toons offer him any escape. Frek longs for the old days of ecological diversity, and he dreams of restoring the ancient biome. Little does Frek realize when the novel quietly begins that his idle daydream will become a perilous quest that will take him across our phantasmagoric galaxy and beyond.

Frek's missing father was a rebel named Carb, and the authorities of Gov, the political arm of NuBioCom, have an eye trained on Frek for similar suspicious behavior. So when the first alien spaceship ever to visit Earth materializes under Frek's bed, the boy is instantly in trouble. Captured and brain-probed, Frek is left mentally damaged. Yet the authorities intend to remove even more of his sentience. Escaping their grip, Frek goes to ground with the Grullos, a despised mutant form of humanity. The Grullo named Gibby becomes his friend and helper, restoring Frek's mind. Along with Frek's talking dog, Wow, the three companions eventually reconnect with the aliens—Orpolese—and escape Earth. Now matters become truly weird.

The Orpolese and a rival race, the Unipusks, have an interest in Earth for only one reason: They want to enroll humanity as their clients in the galactic community. But the mentor-client relationship is a one-way street: The masters get to use the humans as mentally controlled slaves for entertainment purposes. Behind this arrangement are the branecasters, a race that live down below the Planck level of existence and who provide the links between clients and voyeurs. And somewhere in this deal is the wild-card agent known as the Magic Pig. Worst of all, Frek has been arbitrarily designated as the sole legal representative of Earth. Should he sign a contract with the Orpalese or the Unipusks? Which is the lesser of two evils? And what about his missing father, his family back on Earth, and the charming young girl named Renata who has been similarly kidnapped? Can one ingenious, good-hearted boy—even aided by his dog, a Grullo and an army of Toons—save Earth's bacon? Yes, if he's truly an anointed hero.

A mythic narrative of domestic reality

With this book, Rudy Rucker seems to have boldly ascended a new peak in his career, providing us with a story that's subtly different in tone and intent from any of his previous work, yet one that arises organically out of all that's gone before. Fans of Rucker's work will find here all his hallmark wildness of conceptualization, his irreverence, anti-authoritarianism and zest for life. But the package is encoded in a new type of character. Frek is a protagonist unlike any other in Rucker's canon, not a compromised adult but an innocent kid. The setting of the book is far removed from Rucker's general near-future milieus. And the structure of the book—deliberately patterned after Joseph Campbell's famous Monomyth—is less shambolic than his usual plots. All in all, then, Rucker has sacrificed nothing of his genius and gained much.

Frek is utterly believable and empathy-inducing from the first page of the tale, where he's being chivvied into cleaning up his room. He makes adolescent mistakes and sometimes takes too long to figure things out. But his heart and motives are pure, and he always recovers—though not without suffering certain realistic costs. His relations with his family, with Wow and Renata, are totally engaging as well. The supporting cast is limned with immense zest and delight. The aliens are truly otherworldly, speaking and thinking in hilariously unconventional ways. And Frek's fellow questers are all nicely individuated as well.

Both the Earth environment and the outre galaxy of 3003 are filled with more wonders than half a dozen other average SF novels combined. Rucker never stops pushing his ideational conceits. Just when you think he's revealed all, he delivers more. For instance, strange as the Orpolese reveal themselves to be at the outset, we later learn that they are sun-based organisms and come in two species. This endless unfolding of wonder is summed up when Frek tells his vista-stunned father, "There's always more, a little farther. ... It never ends." And of course, all the beloved touchstones that Rucker has formerly relied on surface here, from Phildickian motifs (once "decohered," one of the characters turns to a handful of paper sheets with images on them) to Sheckleyan absurdity (the image of the Magic Pig as demiurge).

Finally, by fastening on the cosmic template of the Monomyth, Rucker guarantees that his tale will resonate with the hard-wired symbolism within us all, evoking both rueful laughter and happy tears. Frek remains both a conquering hero and a 12-year-old boy, showing us that we all may contain avatars bigger than our shells.

This book is Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit—Will Travel (1958) with the vacuum tubes replaced by wetware and all the knobs turned up to 11.