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Overview
In the year 3003, the world is a biotech utopia. The tweaked plants and animals are quite wonderful, but there are only a few dozen of the old species left. Nature has been denatured by the profiteers of NuBioCom. And the arbitrary, all-powerful, and mysterious Gov runs the pervasive NuBioCom and everything else. It's up to Frek Huggins, a lad from dull, sleepy Middleville, to venture out into the galaxy to fetch an elixir to restore Earth's lost species. At least, that's what a friendly alien cuttlefish tells him the elixir will do. But can you really trust aliens? Frek finds himself in the midst of a galactic struggle for humanity's freedom, accompanied by his talking dog, Wow, the down-home mutant, Gibby, and an asteroid-raised girl named Renata. The final liberation depends on freeing Frek's long-lost father with the help of a benevolent alien called the Magic Pig. Rudy Rucker has been creating brilliantly inventive works of imagination for well over two decades. Winner of two Philip K. Dick Awards, he ranges the worlds of science and culture with freewheeling originality and wit, in this case playing with both biotechnology and the monomyth outlined by Joseph Campbell. Frek and the Elixir moves us with its evocation of humanity's struggle against impossible odds not just to survive, but to find happiness and love in a confusing universe.Synopsis
In the year 3003, nothing in the world is the same, except maybe that adolescents are still embarrassed by their parents. Society and the biosphere alike have been transformed by biotechnology, and the natural world is almost gone.
Frek Huggins is a boy from a broken family, a misfit because he's a natural child, conceived without technological help or genetic modifications. His dad, Carb, is a malcontent who left behind Frek’s mom and the Earth itself several years ago.
Everything changes when Frek finds the Anvil, a small flying saucer, under his bed, and it tells him he is destined to save the world. The repressive forces of Gov, the mysterious absolute ruler of Earth, descend on Frek, take away the Anvil, and interrogate him forcefully enough to damage his memory. Frek flees with Wow, his talking dog, to seek out Carb and some answers. But the untrustworthy alien in the saucer has other plans, including claiming exclusive rights to market humanity to the galaxy at large, and making Frek a hero.
Frek and the Elixir is a profound, playful SF epic by the wild and ambitious Rudy Rucker.
Publishers Weekly
Welcome to suburban life in 3003, after NuBioCom collapsed the biome in 2666 and destroyed the last of Earth's original animal species (and every DNA record needed to re-create them), replacing them with company-designed "kritters." Frek Huggins, the 12-year-old hero of this wry tale of cosmological hijinks from Rucker (Space Land), plays with his talking dog, Wow, argues with his sisters, forever resists his mom's attempts to get him to clean his room and daydreams of making it big someday as a toonsmith, the 31st-century equivalent of a video-game designer. Then Frek discovers the mysterious Anvil, a small UFO, hiding under his bed, and the toons on the wall start telling Frek he's going to save the world. Certain that the Anvil has something to do with his missing father, Carb (a social misfit who ran away years earlier to Sick Hindu, a space colony on an asteroid), Frek manages to escape with the spaceship only to find himself caught up in an alien plan to market humanity's thoughts and experiences to the rest of the universe. Bent on rescuing his father, and Earth, from the machinations of a vast multidimensional and extraterrestrial entertainment machine, Frek has to rely on a little help from his friends. Rucker successfully combines sharp-edged satire with old-fashioned pulp sensibilities to create a frantic tale of dirty double-dealing and high adventure. Readers in search of something "different" need look no further than this droll saga of the future. (Apr. 10) FYI: Rucker's last book, As Above, So Below (2003), was a historical novel about the Flemish painter Peter Bruegel. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewRudy Rucker's newest offering -- a unique blend of George Orwell's 1984 and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland -- is a brilliantly wacky cautionary tale about the homogenization of society as only Rucker can envision it.
Fans of Rucker's cyberpunk masterpieces (Wetware, Software, The Hacker and the Ants, et al.) are in for a treat. The hero of this techno-organic fable -- set on a dramatically transformed Earth in the year 3003 -- is 12-year-old Frek Huggins, an ordinary boy who lives in his family's bio-tweaked house tree in the sleepy hamlet of Middleville. In a technologically advanced, ecologically friendly society ruled by the enigmatic Gov, fitting in and not causing any trouble is a way of life. Frek knows all too well what happens to people who question Gov: His father left Earth a year ago for the sanctuary of space after being targeted as a malcontent. But when a tiny alien ship enters Earth's atmosphere and lands underneath Frek's bed, the naïve youngster quickly becomes an outlaw revolutionary on the run for his life. Thus begins his epic quest to find an elixir to restore Earth's biome and to somehow destroy Gov. Before all is done, Frek's quest will take him to the ends of the universe and to the very center of the galactic core.
Profound. Astonishing. Irreverent. Anyone who doesn't cherish this richly described and wildly imaginative novel overflowing with weird aliens, outrageous technologies, and a future Earth with uproarious colloquialisms and a disturbingly closed-minded monoculture is absolutely gollywog gurpy. Paul Goat Allen
From the Publisher
"Oh, excellent! I love books that play with physics - branes and so forth - and this is godzoon googly indeed as Frek would say, and darned exciting. . . . a splendid book."-Diana Wynne Jones on Frek and the Elixir"This book is Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit-Will Travel with the vacuum tubes replaced by wetware and all the knobs turned up to 11!"-SF Weekly on Frek and the Elixir