Joe Cube wants to be a Silicon Valley hotshot but is failing to make an impression. He wants to revive his failing marriage but his wife is more interested in a booze bottle than in him. It is New Year's Eve 1999 and in an attempt to catch his wife's interest he brings home a new product from work.

The attempt fails and they go out to find a pub to bring in the New Year. So far this story is as unremarkable as a Dilbert cartoon but when Joe has put his wife to bed Momo, a visitor from the fourth dimension, visits him. This visitor augments Joe so that he can travel into this fourth dimension and begins Joe's adventures - which culminates in Joe battling against the Kluppers to save Spaceland, our 3D world.

This book is in the same tradition as Edward A Abbott's novel, ‘Flatland’. They both use the foundations of Science Fiction to build up and explain a theory of mathematics. I have not read ‘Flatland’ and so cannot tell how much ‘Spaceland’ is influenced by or based on this book.

However, I can say that there were times reading this novel that I felt I was missing out on something - like that party guest who has walked in one minute after the punch-line has been told. This was enhanced by the sneering tone of the novel towards the characters, meant to create a direct bond between reader and author but it just left me feeling disconnected from the whole book.

This isolation from the novel was also created by the ideas explored in ‘Spaceland’ - particularly when dealing with the fourth dimension. I had to constantly re-read passages to understand what was going on and even then I felt that the meaning excluded my grasp. Like the pot at the end of the rainbow, I felt that understanding was a target I could never reach.

Re-reading this review it feels more like a review of my inadequacies than a critique of ‘Spaceland’. Yet that is the main problem I have with ‘Spaceland’. I have no problem with novels that challenge my world view or makes me think hard about the world around us, however there was nothing in this book for me to connect with.

The language seemed remote, the characters were mere vehicles for Rucker to explore ideas or to mock stereotypes and there was no shared ground between the reader and the narrator of the novel.

I worked hard to find a way into this book but found no reward in reading it. In fact, the novel made me feel like a kid sister hanging around her big sister's friends: excluded, mocked and ultimately bored.

Katie McGivern