The novel “Juicy Ghosts” by Rudy Rucker was published for the first time in 2021.
The U.S. President Ross Treadle is about to end his second term and intends to be re-elected by exploiting a virus that will infect the minds of the voters. There’s an informal opposition from the countermovement of the freals, but the election theft to the detriment of his opponent Sudah Mareek and the entire nation seems like a done deal.
In a world where there are forms of immortality that can be virtual or through the use of clones, even the most extreme strategies must be thought out with extreme care. Maurice Winch is a freal who intends to exploit all the possibilities that technology offers him to kill Ross Treadle.
Many literary works, or of other kinds, report a phrase that warns that any resemblance to real facts and people is purely coincidental. On the contrary, “Juicy Ghosts” is explicitly inspired by real events, so it’s normal that reading even just a blurb makes you think of Donald Trump.
Rudy Rucker started writing this novel in 2019 and ended up self-publishing the first short story. Two more short stories followed, and then the rest of what became the definitive version of this work, which is peculiar even by the standards of an author who is in many ways unique. In parallel, he also wrote a series of notes on the various phases of this work that he later published on his website.
This type of inspiration isn’t surprising if you consider that Rudy Rucker was one of the founders of the cyberpunk movement and that he developed it in a personal way, also following what he calls transrealism, which tells about real life, even that of the author himself, in a fantastic way. In this novel, the protagonists include Molly Santos, who is a descendant of the philosopher Georg Hegel, just like Rucker.
The circumstances behind the development of “Juicy Ghosts” make it a bit fragmented, divided into chapters that follow different characters who tell their stories in the first person. These stories don’t form a sequence from a chronological point of view, but different points of view of the American situation. This means that the narrative tends to go back and forth in time with stories that can intertwine in various ways.
In this chaos, Rudy Rucker develops a story of strong political satire that has Ross Treadle at its center, a president who is incompetent but has rich and powerful supporters who can ensure him a third term. All this is part of a story with strong cyberpunk connotations, a genre to which several works written over the decades by this author belong.
The mix of elements and the type of development make reading “Juicy Ghosts” an experience in which, in my opinion, the best thing is to let yourself be carried away by that sort of narrative current composed of the various protagonists’ stories. The fast pace and sparkling dialogue can make reading this novel very funny.
Precisely because of the novel’s characteristics, I think it’s better to wait until you’ve finished reading it to go back to the food for thought connected to politics, technology, and that world of social media that is similar and different from ours at the same time. Reading it in 2025, after the political developments of recent years, shows certain transrealistic inspirations even more markedly.
“Juicy Ghosts” is a story that offers hope for a future in which it’s possible to get rid of charlatan politicians even when they have access to technologies that offer potential immortality. Rudy Rucker’s approach to cyberpunk always has a certain optimism that makes it ideal for readers who are interested in these issues but don’t want to get depressed. It’s available on Amazon USA, UK, and Canada, or you can just read it on the author’s website.
