It's New Year's Eve, 1999, and Joe Cube is anxious. Not only is he seriously worried about the Y2K bug turning the world upside down, but he's trying to see that his attractive and demanding wife, Jena, has a good time. Fortunately, no computer-crashing chaos erupts, but his plans for the night don't exactly go off hitch-free. For one thing, the prototype of the 3Set—an experimental television that projects three-dimensional images—which he's brought home from his job in Silicon Valley as a "surprise" for Jena is kind of a dud. Or is it?

It's through this intriguing bit of technology that Joe is contacted by Momo, a being from the fourth dimension who wishes to enlist the midlevel manager for her cause. Augmenting Joe with a layer of fourth-dimension skin and with a third eye that allows him to see into four-dimensional space (and therefore through anything in his three-dimensional world, or "Spaceland"), Momo introduces the Spacelander to her reality, the All.

It appears that what Joe knows as the universe serves as a "thin" divider between Momo's realm of Krupdom and Dronia, another four-dimensional world inhabited by the demonic-looking Wackles, who, as Momo tells Joe, are forever trying to sneak into the Kruppers' world to steal grolly, a plant-like food source that Momo's family has exclusive harvesting rights for.

Not really able to say no, Joe agrees to help Momo by activating some fourth-dimension technology she's going to give him for use in Spaceland mobile phones, which Momo claims will make Joe a very rich man and at the same time provide her and her family with a defense against the Wackles. But Joe suspects that Momo isn't being completely honest with him, and, on top of that, he suspects his wife is having an affair with a nose-ringed punk techie from his office named Spazz. As if starting up an IPO wasn't hard enough!

Perhaps one dimension too many

An homage to Edwin A. Abbott's mathematically-minded 19th-century classic, Flatland: A Parable of Spiritual Dimensions (in which a square is contacted by an entity from the third dimension), Rudy Rucker's hard-science-fiction satire puts some smart—that is, imaginative and witty—spins on the notion of communication between beings with drastically different points of view. In the end result, however, the novel contains too many unequal vectors.

The accounts Rucker (a mathematician and computer scientist in addition to an award-winning author) gives of 3-D individuals experiencing the world of 4-D are interesting and mind-bending enough, but readers will likely get the idea long before the narrative is through telling them about it, again and again. The novel also possesses an (over-)abundance of themes, a number of them offhandedly raised and subsequently underdeveloped.

And while some politico-socio-economic commentary can be found in the author's knowing look into the world of biz-tech dotcommers (to say nothing of fourth-dimension society), Spaceland doesn't nearly match Flatland's ingenious parabolic force. It's also frequently difficult to tell where Spaceland is trying to be satirical and where it's taking itself (very and sometimes too) seriously, which for readers may lead at best to ambivalent confusion and at worst to downright goofiness.

The detailed ins and outs (or "vinns" and "vouts" if talking about four-dimensional space) of starting up a new technology company don't always make for the most compelling reading in the world, but perhaps Spaceland's most unappealing aspect is the love quadrangle that comprises much of the story. Composed of Joe, Jena, Spazz and Spazz's girlfriend, Tulip, this drama plays out like a dull, annoying and even obnoxious Silicon Valley geek soap opera. The effect is that there's very few characters that are easy to like or care about for long, if at all, in Spaceland. It's a wonder that the Wackles, perhaps the novel's most appealing characters, with their devilish, Rastafarian-Beat-surfer cryptic fourth-dimensional way of speaking, can stand to pass through a place like Spaceland at all.