We start out with something of a backstory prologue. Two teen boys, Jeff Luty and Carlos Tucay, are about to launch a model rocket, on a certain day not too far into our future. But their experiment goes mortally awry and Tucay is killed, leaving Luty to grow up an embittered and monomaniacal genius.

We now cut to quite a few years later, when Luty is running a corporation that intends to transform the planet Mars into a Dyson sphere of computational self-reproducing nanomachines—nants. Working for Luty is a fellow genius named Ond Lundquist, who has doubts about the wisdom of this scheme. Sure enough, after assimilating Mars the nants turn their omnivorous jaws on Earth, and our home planet is on the point of being virtualized—antilife Luty's intention all along—when Ond uses his autistic son Chu to save the world.

Cut again to three years later. Luty is on the lam and in hiding from a vengeful populace, and Ond has created orphids: benevolent "smart lice" (actually invisible nanoscopic creatures) that will protect against future nant incursions. He releases them onto the world, thus creating the orphidnet, a sentient web of global connectivity, with humans plugged automatically in.

All this occupies merely the first 50 pages of the book. After that, things really get weird.

The sensory upgrades provided by the orphids reveal the eternal presence of the Hibraners, intermittent visitors from another dimension. The orphidnet gives birth to beezies, artificial intelligences that culminate in the Big Pig, the most major beezy of all. Humanity is wired into a panopticon existence, where all sights and sounds and knowledge are instantly available to everyone. A class of "kiqqers" arise, humans who use the orphidnet and Big Pig to amplify their native intelligence. Asian girl Thuy and Latino boy Jayjay are two such. While Thuy focuses on writing her metanovel Wheenk, Jayjay searches for an entry to the Hibrane dimension and stumbles on teleportation along the way.

It sounds like a potential utopia. But Luty, the Hibraners and the Big Pig all have competing apocalyptic plans of their own, and humanity is just a trivial bump in the road to be smoothed out—unless Thuy and Jayjay can "unroll the lazy eight."

Clarke's Third Law confounded

The Singularity, of course, or "the Rapture of the nerds," is currently one of the hottest tropes in SF. But all too often it's used as mere window dressing for nigh-magical plots, a la Arthur C. Clarke's famous observation that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Or writers will simply throw their hands up at portraying the intimate "unfathomable" details of a post-human world and focus on those mortals left behind or excluded from the transcendence. Only a few writers—Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, John Barnes to some extent—have been brave enough to seek to actually depict the ineffable existence that would follow the conjoined ramping up of the cybersphere and our species into new levels.

Of course, Rudy Rucker, as we might predict, based on his rigorous yet gonzo past work, would be one of the bold visionaries who might accept the challenge. And indeed, his novel's stark and simple title throws down the gauntlet he means to accept. He will follow unflinchingly and with keen extrapolative genius exactly what it means for human intelligence to attain new plateaus. He will inhabit from the inside the minds of those who undergo such a phase-state transition.

Rucker does this by blending eternal human qualities—love, lust, greed, incompetence, ambition, jealousy, self-doubt—with the new miraculous abilities and powers and potentials. His two interlocked families—Ond and Nektar and Chu Lundquist, as well as Craigor, Jil, Momotaro and Bixie Connor—are like some kind of Updike suburban wife-swapping dyad. And the Big Pig Posse that includes Jayjay and Thuy is a group of recognizable freegan/anarchists one might encounter today in their native San Francisco, where much of the novel occurs. So this empathetic characterization supports the elaborate scaffolding of mind-boggling post-singular tech that Rucker ingeniously elaborates.

This book is densely written, requiring the reader to fully participate in the intellectual games, yet also captivatingly plotted for sheer narrative verve and laced with plenty of humor and suspense. Walking a tightrope between information overload and thriller action, the book captures the heady zip, zest and buzz of the post-singular milieu, a world where miracles are commonplace but structured logically to provide real challenges, risks and triumphs.

Until the real post-singular age dawns, Rucker's emulation is the nearest we'll get to experiencing a metanovel.