What starts as a mundane Y2K New Year’s Eve, despite the hype, turns out to be the beginning of a strange romp through the fourth dimension for Joe Cube in “Spaceland” by Rudy V.B. Rucker.

Joe takes home a truly 3-D TV set — a prototype being developed by the Silicon Valley company he works for — to watch the festivities of the New Year. Hoping to impress his wife with the slick invention, the “3set” instead attracts the attention of a four-dimensional creature named Momo.

Momo contacts Joe with the intent of giving him technology from the fourth dimension, a business proposal she forces him into accepting.

Vinn and vout are the two new dimensions Joe has to deal with, and after Momo augments his body with a four-dimensional skin and eyestalk, he goes to Las Vegas with his wife and new business partner Spazz to get seed money for a company to market the new technology.

After winning a million bucks in Vegas (the eyestalk allows him to see everything around him in detail, including the underside of playing cards) and losing his wife to Spazz, Momo takes Joe on a tour of the fourth dimension.

Our three-dimensional world turns out to be a “flat” screen between two sides of the fourth dimension, one on the vout side (Klupdom, or Momo’s world), and one on the vinn side, called Dronia. Each has its respective strange creatures, and the Dronian creatures, according to Momo, are evil.

In Klupdom Joe meets Momo’s strange family, finds he can flap his “flat” body to maneuver, and receives a box of crystals that have antennae sticking into the fourth dimension, which are interference-free sending and receiving devices for a cell phone and a method of keeping the Dronians on their side of Spaceland.

Upon his return home from Spaceland, Joe has to start up a new company, patch up things with his wife, and weed out information from conflicting sides of the newfound fourth dimension to save the Earth from blinking out of existence.

Based on a book by Edward J. Abbott called “Flatland,” the premise of “Spaceland,” despite being complicated and abstract, endows the novel with a quirky abstract mood.

Rucker is more than adept at explaining the difficult mathematical concepts of four-dimensional space, and several comical pictures sprinkled throughout the novel help solidify his elucidations.

Though the fourth dimension is defined conceptually, the physical descriptions of the world left me without a good picture of what was going on. Instead of laying down a rich solid image, Rucker simply describes the way something tasted or looked, forgetting the other senses that really put the reader in the novel with the characters.

The pace of the novel was frustrating. Some scenes, especially those involving sex, weren’t fully developed: “She spent the night with me in my room. I woke early… “while other scenes dragged on needlessly.

Not much of the novel is devoted to giving the characters depth: I found the characters to be rather two-dimensional (pun intended). Rucker tries to paint a psychological portrait of Joe as an emotionally dependent and unstable person, but many of his actions defy the nature he is supposedly imbued with.

Also, some of the descriptions were oddly misplaced. For instance, right in the middle of an action-intense scene in which one of the characters may die, Rucker inserts a lengthy tangential anecdote about death. “I knew Death a bit from seeing my mother’s brother Vick die of a stroke at Thanksgiving dinner one year … “

On the upside, “Spaceland” is hectic and fast-paced, conflict having no minor role in Joe’s life. In a few instances, there were four or five things going on that needed to be resolved, but I never got confused and always had empathy for the characters involved.

Rucker’s imagination is endless — the worlds he creates are mathematically prosaic yet fantastically mind-boggling. Although I was frustrated with Rucker’s writing style in particular instances, “Spaceland” is an extremely engaging work of science fiction.

Never boring and continually suspenseful, I was thoroughly entertained, and my knowledge of the mathematics concerning different dimensions was itself brought to another dimension.