Rudy Rucker, two-time winner of the prestigious Philip K. Dick Award, is one of SF's most inventive and irreverent authors, exploring artificial life, chaos theory, and hacker culture. White Light, Rucker's 1979 novel about a university math instructor and his existential beetle friend who get lost in a multidimensional astral universe of warped time-scales and fractal-landscapes, launched the author to cult-hero status.