El hacker y las hormigas v2.0

by Rudy Rucker, Pedro Jorge Romero (Translator)

Un examen a la agitada vida de un hacker empeñado en realizar su "Gran Obra": el desarrollo de robots autoreplicantes; una ojeada al complejo futuro de la realidad virtual y los robots; una mirada al ajetreado mundo de los hackers.
La nueva novela de culto de los informáticos del siglo XXI.

Genres: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Fiction, Technology, Novels, Science Fiction Fantasy

288 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre. He is best known for his Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which won Philip K. Dick awards. Presently, Rudy Rucker edits the science fiction webzine Flurb.

Reviews

[Peter Jones]

What in the Larry Niven-ish fuckscape am I even reading!?

…I’d unzip my fly. Nga would sigh and put her tiny little hands on my penis…

What the SHIT??
What happened to the goddamn cyber ants!? Where’s all the cool stuff?


DNF at page 108.
I’ve entertained this deeply personal and quite troubled erotic fantasy enough.


As if that wasn’t bad enough, the author does a reverse uno of “show, don’t tell” and overloads you with details, explanations and examples. It’s not only “tell, don’t show”, this book is “show, then tell, then explain the abbreviations, give a generalized outline, insert a lengthy user analogy just to be safe, assume the reader is a complete moron… oh, and explain it all again, just to be sure. Oh, and remember to give a lengthy summary of the UI to top it off”.

I had CAD explained to me, in detail… CAD!
Along with a bunch of other stuff that’s commonplace these days (and even back then in the mid-90s).


Author is a horny teen or something, writing out his pathetic fantasies.

Jesus fucking Crisco… I want my three hours back.


PS: if you want something that does what this book is trying to do, watch the Black Mirror episode “Plaything”. Does it a LOT better!

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

The whole plot is driven by what an obnoxiously horny creep the narrator is. Kind of a persistent Rudy Rucker problem.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
Rudy Rucker's The Hacker and the Ants
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - January 14, 2015

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

Woah. I'm glad I read this back-to-back w/ Rucker's Master of Space and Time from 10 yrs before. Rucker's come a long way since then. Master of Space and Time was fun but in a somewhat 'light-weight' kind of way. The Hacker and the Ants is far more immersed in computers & much more detail oriented AND it's still completely entertaining. & The Hacker and the Ants references Master of Space and Time: "He could even speed up and slow down time, or run time backward—he was the master of space and time." (p 238)

I started studying computers way back when in the days of flow-charts & the like in 1973 but back then I certainly didn't have access to a computer at home - computers were most likely to be found in big businesses & at universities. Thru my neoist connection Boris Wanowich I at least got to see home computers in the mid-80s (see his early computer animations here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPYjS... computers on an almost daily basis.

& then, in late 1994 or early 1995, my friend "Sarmad" Brody sent me a Mac SE to use so I finally had my own. In 1997, my friend John Berndt sent me an even more recent Mac & I was set. Since then computers have become much more familiar household items for me but in some respects I still don't know shit. One might say that the amt of exercise I've gotten since 1997 has diminished considerably as I've sat more & more in front of one. I'm sitting at one now in order to write this review.

The point of this blather being that anyone whose life has interfaced w/ computers to the extent that mine has is likely to read The Hacker and the Ants in the context of that timeline - if only by 'comparing notes'. The Hacker and the Ants was copyrighted in 1994 & 1st published by AvoNova in 1995 - nicely overlapping my 1st ownership of the primitive Mac SE. If I'd read it then I might've found it very futuristic. Reading it now, it just seems prescient of things that've come to pass - Rucker was aware of what was happening w/ computers, of what might happen w/ them in the near future - he was teaching computer science.

In the novel it's the age of digital tv. As I recall, the switchover to digital tv in the US began on Saturday, June 13, 2009 - 25 yrs after the novel's copyright date. As a part of Ian Page's End of Television project, my group HiTEC (Histrionic Thought Experiment Cooperative) was broadcasting on analog tv right around the time of the changeover (there's a short movie from the night here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsncOO... ).

Rucker's character hates tv, something that I can always identify w/ - even tho I've been on tv a few times I don't watch it. "Everything on TV enraged me, because everything on TV was the same: the ads, the news, the shows. In my opinion, all TV was all part of the huge lying Spectacle that the government kept running to oppress us all. Data compression had brought us a thousand channels, but they all sucked same as ever." (p 12) Have you ever sat in a motel rm flipping thru the channels just for the sheer novelty of accessing what you don't usually have access to or care to have access to? The main thing amazing about it for me is the sheer quantity of same-old, same-old. It's like having the ability to get a dump truck of junk mail empty itself into yr living rm every day instead of just the usual handful of paper-waste.

"Thinking of Hungary and the police made me wonder if our own USA would ever be free. Would we ever get rid of the earth-raping, drug-warring social oppressors who'd made the public treasury their own latrine and hog wallow? Well, the Hungarians had gotten rid of the Communists, hadn't they? Some day the Revolution was going to come to America, too. One of the secondary reasons why I worked on ants and robots was that I hoped they could help bring down the Pig.

"Tonight the ants had ruined television. There could be no more important step in crippling the Pig. I started grinning. the GoMotion ants had done a good thing. I was proud of them." - p 128

I was contacted by the SciFi channel way back in 1999 by someone who sd that they'd heard that I was the guy whose work they wanted. In other words, they wanted free samples. After I sent the guy a perfumed letter telling him how glad I was to be finally reunited w/ my separated-at-birth conjoined twin (or something like that) & sending him a DVD-R of some brief snippets of work of mine & telling him that I didn't really believe that I was the guy whose work they wanted I was, indeed, rejected. Did I say something wrong? Well, yes - & I did it deliberately - but I knew there was no way they were interested in work that wasn't about outer-space-monsters-threatening-Earth-w/-lots-of-CGI.

"Over my walls and in the far background I would see whatever landscape I was currently hottest for—in those days it was a swamp with simmies that looked like dinosaurs and pterodactyls. It was called Roarworld; I'd gotten it off the Net." - p 9

I'm reminded of Second Life, a user-created online world, something in wide use today (except by people like myself whose computers are too old to support the software or, again, people like me, who aren't computer savvy enuf to work around their computer's limitations).

"When I toggled on the mighty Roarworld sound module, it was more than awesome, GAH-ROOOOONT!" - p 9

Ha ha! Over a decade ago, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History was seeking someone to design a dinosaur sound to "scare the kids" who wd do campovers there. I submitted an 'outrageously' long resumé of my 'sound art' experience & claimed that I cd make a sound to "scare the kids" but that, of course, I didn't think that was what they really wanted.

There's GPS, not so-named, too:

"While I was driving 280 across town to East San Jose, I fished out the scrap of paper that Nga's cousin had given me—5778 White Road. I flicked on the electronic map attached to my dash and told it Nga's address.

"Intense green lines appeared, showing a diagram of San Jose, with a highlighted path indicating the best route from satellite-calculated current location to Nga Vo's." - p 104

People take GPS for granted now but that was hardly the case in 1994. The 1st time I ever used it was when I was a passenger in Lizard's RV driving cross-country to my 1st & last Burning man in 1999.

"Even though I typed in thin air, it felt as though I was touching something, for my gloves had tactile feedback. Woven in with the Spandex were special piezoplastic touchpads that could swell up and press against my hand. The touchpads on my fingertips pulsed each time I pushed down on a virtual key." - pp 9-10

When I read about Virtual Reality & think about the technical limitations of my own home set-up I have to be honest & realize that if I were a little more ambitious in this direction I cd have something like this going to for very little money. I remember when video artist Alan Price made a VR headset in a very clever & efficient way in the early 1990s for something like less than $150 out of commonly available parts. That's the way to go.

Is this a pioneering Cyberpunkspace novel? Weeelllllll.. not as much so as William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) or G. C. Edmondson & C. M, Kotlan's The Cunningham Equations (1986) or Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (1988) (to name a few I've read) but I found its technical explications more accessible - maybe just b/c the lingo is actual in-use lingo.

Since Rucker won the Philip K. Dick prize twice & since he's based in California (as Dick was) & since the writing's very 'readable' as was Dick's fluid pulp, it's 'inevitable' that Rucker be compared to him. What I find comparable is the dysfunctionality of Rucker's characters love lives. Dick was married 5 times & Rucker's primary character is going thru a divorce & gets involved in 2 other problematic relationships.

Rucker's description of women, like those of writers like Raymond Chandler before him, is of the variety of women-can-fuck-you-up:

"The phone rang.

""Hello, Mr. Rugby?" A woman's brisk, aggressive voice.

""Yes."

""This is Louise Calder from Welsh & Tayke realty. Do you mind if I bring a client by in half an hour? They're quite interested in the property."

""I'm very busy today. I don't want to show the house."

"The voice was instantly, unforgivingly venomous. "I'll pass that along to the owner, Mr. Rugby. Good-bye."" - p 6

There's much more to the Dick connection than just that: "we liked to test it in a full-size simmie-house that we called Our American Home. We had simmies of a family who supposedly lived there: clumsy Walt and Perky Pat Christensen, with son Dexter and daughter Baby Scooter." (p 17) While Rucker doesn't explicitly mention Dick this is clearly an homage to people who've read Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964) (a personal favorite):

"Perky Pat Layouts were the biggest thing going in the extra-Terran colonies. Entire artificial worlds for a miniature golden-tressed doll and her muscular, artificial boyfriend—beginning with landscapes, and complete to every detail down to topless bathing suits." - inside front cover blurb of the Book Club edition of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

"He was Walt. He owned a Jaguar XXB sports ship with a flatboat velocity of 15,000 miles an hour. His shirts came from Italy and his shoes were made in England...

"It was always Saturday.

"In the bathroom he splashed his face with water... staring into the mirror at his familiar features, he saw a note tacked up, in his own hand.

"THIS IS AN ILLUSION. YOU ARE SAM REGAN, A COLONIST ON MARS. MAKE USE OF YOUR TIME OF TRANSLATION, BUDDY BOY. CALL UP PAT PRONTO!" - back cover blurb of the Book Club edition of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

It seems that many or most or ALL of the fictional bks I read & like & identify w/ have underdogs for protagonists. I suppose that's a pretty cliché trope but I still much prefer it to 'Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous'. The Hacker and the Ants starts off w/ the beleaguered hero being harassed by real estate agents. This is banal, sure, but these things pick away at a person's spirit:

"Monday morning when I answered the door there were twenty-one new real estate agents there, all in horrible polyester gold jackets. They came swarming in and scattered to every corner of my great dry-rotted California manse. Several of them had video cameras. What a thing to wake up to." - p1

Now this guy's hardly the underdog that he cd be, he's a middle-class guy w/ a well-paying job that he gets to do from home - something certainly more common now, thanks to computers, than it was when this was written. Nonetheless, his life proceeds to go down the drain BIG TIME & the resultant struggle is quite the engaging tale.

One of the most fun things about reading this for me was the didactic introducing of computer jargon & slang. I either knew most of it already or cd easily figure out its meaning b/c the etymology is so transparent but to have it laid out in such a brisk entertaining fashion helped reinforce it all for me:

"An exceedingly hostile or schizophrenic e-mail message is called a flame. Even though Russ and I were still exchanging scientific information, we were at the same time in the throes of a flame war." - p 172

"The simulated objects of cyberspace were known as simmies. My hand images were simmies, as was the virtual phone in my cyberspace office." - p 7

"But what was cyberspace? Where did it come from? Cyberspace had oozed out of the world's computers like stage-magic fog. Cyberspace was an alternate reality, it was the huge interconnected computation that was being collectively run by planet Earth's computers around the clock. Cyberspace was the information Net, but more than the Net, cyberspace was a shared vision of the Net as a physical space." - p 8

"How did I look? Like most users, I owned a tailor-made simmie of my cyberspace body. Cyberspace users called their body simmies tuxedos." - p 14

"The funny thing about the "cyber" prefix was that it had always meant bullshit.

"Back in the 1940s, the story went, MIT doubledome Norbert Weiner had wanted a title for a book he'd written about the electronic control of machines. Claude Shannon, also known as The Father of Information Theory, told Weiner to call his book Cybernetics. The academic justification for the word was that the "cyber" root came from the Greek word for "rudder." A "kybernetes" was a steersman or, by extension, a mechanical governor such as a weight-and-pulley feedback device you might hook to your tiller to keep your sailboat aimed at some fixed angle into the wind. The practical justification for the word was contained in Shannon's advice to Weiner: "Use the word 'cybernetics,' Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will put you at an advantage in arguments."" - p 19

This is obviously a pet peeve for Rucker b/c he also referred to it in Master of Space and Time 10 yrs before. In my review of that I wrote:

""Cybernetics. That was a word Harry and I had always laughed about. Nobody had any idea what it means, it's just some crazy term that Norbert Wiener made up." - p 13

"Really? Paul Pangaro has this to say:

""What does the word “cybernetics” mean?

""“Cybernetics” comes from a Greek word meaning “the art of steering”.

""Cybernetics is about having a goal and taking action to achieve that goal.

""Knowing whether you have reached your goal (or at least are getting closer to it) requires “feedback”, a concept that comes from cybernetics.

""From the Greek, “cybernetics” evolved into Latin as “governor”. Draw your own conclusions.

""When did cybernetics begin?

""Cybernetics as a process operating in nature has been around for a long time.

""Cybernetics as a concept in society has been around at least since Plato used it to refer to government.

""In modern times, the term became widespread because Norbert Wiener wrote a book called “Cybernetics” in 1948. His sub-title was “control and communication in the animal and machine”. This was important because it connects control (a.k.a., actions taken in hope of achieving goals) with communication (a.k.a., connection and information flow between the actor and the environment). So, Wiener is pointing out that effective action requires communication.

""Wiener’s sub-title also states that both animals (biological systems) and machines (non-biological or “artificial” systems) can operate according to cybernetic principles. This was an explicit recognition that both living and non-living systems can have purpose. A scary idea in 1948." - http://www.pangaro.com/definition-cyb..."

Note that in the The Hacker and the Ants incarnation of this pet peeve Rucker 'quotes' a conversation between Shannon & Weiner. Really? Was that somewhat incriminating conversation recorded in the 1940s? I think not. Rucker is putting forth someone's imagined version of a hypothetical conversation. It may be very accurate - but it's probably not an actual quote. Naughty, naughty, Rudy.

Rucker seems to have other pet peeves. In The Hacker and the Ants an annoying character is described thusly: "He was a lawn dwarf, five-foot-two with full beard, bald pate, and long greasy locks, he was (I would soon learn) a vegetarian, a pagan, a libertarian, and
a deep thinker with a dozen crackpot opinions, all furiously held." (p 97) Now cf that to his description of "Professor Baumgard" (I take "Baumgard" to be a parody of "tree-hugger" since a German-to-English translation of this name might be "Tree Guard"): "The guy was a real square. He had long, greasy gray hair and a beard. A microcomputer in the pouch of his sweatshirt. And—ughBeatles music playing softly on his radio." (p 136 of Master of Space and Time)

"In the Valley these days, phreaks were youths who cobbled together their own approximation of a decent cyberspace deck and used it for weird cyberspace pranks. Cryps were phreaks who'd turned professional and gone into the employ of companies involved in industrial espionage. If you broke into someone's company machines often enough, they were likely to hire you as a cryp to break into other companies, or they might use you as a security consultant to keep out the other cryps. It was a vicious circle—the cryps' security-cracking escapades created a demand for the services they could provide." - p 90

When I see "phreaks" I think of "phone-phreaks" & I think of the magazine "2600" whose name references the frequency of the whistle used by phone phreak Captain Crunch to make free calls on pay phones. Anyone interested in my own feeble connection to phone phreakery might enjoy this TESTES-3 movie from 1979: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0toRU... .

As I've pointed out in at least one previous review, references that are of keen familiarity to the reader make sd reader identify w/ the bk more. If I read a reference to Jackson Mac Low or the music of Morton Feldman in an SF novel (wch I'm fairly sure I have before) I feel 'right at home'. In this case, the reference is to SRL:

"The man who actually built our physical robot models was called Ken Thumb. Ken was a slim blue-collar type; soft-spoken, brilliant, implacable. Before signing on as GoMotion's machinist he'd worked with the Survival Research Lab art/robotics group putting together his big crazy machines out of parts he would find in abandoned factories and warehouses." - pp 21-22

Then there's a reference to an entomologist known to & loved by all entomologists (well, so it seems from my superficial entomology POV): "fitting our shapes to official E.O. Wilson entomological data." (p 66) I 1st heard of Wilson from my friend Irene Moon, the entomologist/noise-performer. I've also read Wilson's novel Anthill (see my review here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6... ).

Probably somewhat thanks to Wilson there's some nice entomology in here as well as computer nerdiness: "Biological anthills usually contain a wide range of the myrmecophilous or ant-loving creatures who live in the colony as parasites, symbiotes, or as the ant pets collectively known as as myrmecoxenes or symphiles. There is a certain small beetle, for instance, which is kept and fed by the ants simply because the ants enjoy licking tasty waxy secretions from the beetle's antennae." (p 72) Myrmidon snacks, anyone?

& then there's the Church of the SubGenius:

""That's too gnarly, Dirk. Why can't you make the control be . . . " I looked over at the businessman figure with his pipe clenched between the teeth of his shit-eating salesman grin. I now recognized the figure as the old underground culture icon known as "Bob" Dobbs. "Give my clown a copy of the pipe of 'Bob' Dobbs."" - p 214-215

Now Rucker's not the 1st to reference SubGenii. John Shirley's 1988 SF novel Black Hole of Carcosa has this passage: ""Don't fuck with me, 'Bob,'" Stang snarled." (p 133) Of course, it all pales in comparison to 'real' life: http://youtu.be/FfDCnTR03dg . & then there's Robert Anton Wilson. What's w/ all the Wilsons? My mother's maiden name was Wilson.

[Sergi Escolano · Rating 4 out of 5]

El mejor Rudy Rucker, el más loco y desmelenado, es el de Señores del tiempo y del espacio. Esta no está nada mal pero quizás tenga demasiados detalles técnicos para los no informáticos

[Rachel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the first Rudy Rucker book I read, when it was brand new. Reading it initiated my love for his writing. He tends to have the same characters and plot: start with some slightly-or-totally slacker dude (or maybe a kid) and his more-together girlfriend or wife (or parent) and a tone of sometimes-slapstick comedy; then something math-related (usually a differently-dimensional creature) turns everything malleable, things get permanently surreal, and then the characters work with that to make their lives happier in a totally changed world, while foiling any part of the changes that would destroy the world (or whatever). As I recall, although he had earlier books, this one is kind of a prototype for that. Or not, but this is the first one I read.

It's set in Los Gatos, CA (with a slightly disguised name, Los Osos?), and the characters work in high tech in Silicon Valley. I lived in Los Gatos in the mid-1980s and worked in high-tech in Silicon Valley. I found the depiction of the place and time spot-on and hilarious; plus it was validating for me, because he was accurate about both the brilliance and the hypocrisy/shallowness of the local culture. Loved the plot and the characters, and followed Rucker's books from then on.

[Cristian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Divertido pero extrañamente anacrónico. Rucker escribe una historia sobre hackers (en el sentido estricto de la palabra), vida artificial y autoreplicación, donde mezcla conceptos del cyberpunk (su ciberespacio es una mezcla de cómo lo concebía W. Gibson con la red existente en la época en que escribió esta novela - un espacio tridimensional y virtual al cual se conectan vía telefónica, almacenamiento de datos y video en Cd) con algunas ideas acerca de cómo los virus informáticos - o por lo menos algunos de los que se escribieron hace más de una década, representan los primeros pasos en la creación de vida artificial. Especialmente disfrutable para los ñoños del tema.

[richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

First Rudy Rucker novel I've read, stumbled on it. Glad I read it, and it was a pretty 'light' read so not too time-consuming. Seems to be the same AI fears as today, only roll back two decades before smart phones. Vaguely twisted but familiar perspectives on California at the time rounds out the entertainment (a real estate agent conspiracy, for instance). The characters are not always consistent; the narrator is somewhat unpredictable; the plot line takes some unlikely twists in order to achieve resolution. But I enjoyed the narration and some of the development around AI.

[Craig · Rating 2 out of 5]

The most dominant thing about this book is that it kept making me sleepy. The techy talk stuff was boring as was everything else. The guy had an attitude / mind of some 8th grader obsessed with pot, girls and video games and hacking. Only read about 50 or 60 pages, then jumped around some and said goodbye. Even the goodreads reviews were boring.

[Rob · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't remember much about it except that it was lame and poorly written.

[Hex75 · Rating 2 out of 5]

la storia di per se non sarebbe male, anche se alla fin fine ha un sapore di deja-vu fortissimo: diciamo che fa un po' blockbuster americano con qualche deriva più intelligente, più la solita variante del mito del golem che si ribella. ma troppi tentativi di spiegazioni tecniche che spezzano il ritmo (magari necessarie nel 1994 in cui è stato pubblicato ma spesso ridondanti in questo 2011) e un personaggio non esattamente campione di simpatia fanno naufragare il romanzo.

[Daniel Salvo · Rating 1 out of 5]

No lo pude terminar. La idea daba para una historia con más suspenso y "acción", pero el autor prefirió la opción del "drama personal", que no le añadía nada a la historia de ciencia ficción. De un problema con inteligencias artificiales pasamos a una disputa laboral, las vida amorosa del protagonista... le perdí el rastro a todos los personajes. Al final, el protagonista regresa con su mujer.

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

The practical justification for the word was contained in Shannon's advice to Weiner: "Use the word 'cybernetics,' Norbert, because nobody knows what it means. This will always put you at an advantage in arguments."

[Andrés Pérez Figueroa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesante. Me costó mucho meterme en el libro a pesar de ser muy propenso a la temática y hasta la mitad del mismo no pude avanzar con cierta fluidez. Al final mereció la pena.

[TheOldWoman&TheSea · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book tells the story of Jerzy Rugby (all characters in the book have interesting names), a computer programmer in Silicon Valley. Jerzy is working for a company called ‘Go Motion’. His job is to use genetic algorithms to come up with the best possible AI for a robot the company wants to start selling to families in the very near future.

Jerzy is a typical hacker (interesting point : all programming/’hacking’ is done in Virtual Reality) and so it comes as no surprise that things aren’t going so well in his personal life. He is still trying to get over the separation from his wife and kids, and on top of that, a very persistent realtor is trying to make him leave the old family house.

Then, one day, Jerzy notices a Virtual Reality ant crawling about on his computer.
And things begin to go really bad really fast …
There are many reasons I found this book ‘strange’ and entertaining.
“The Hacker and the Ants” is a sci-fi book written in the nineties. The world described in the book is definitely futuristic for that time, but so many of the technical accomplishments Rudy Rucker describes in the story have become an every day reality. So the story almost reads as if it is taking place in real-time. Weird.

There are tons of great references to computer science and mathematics woven throughout the story ; I just happen to love this kind of stuff. I also liked his creative use of names as a means of describing people, companies, etc. And finally, I really enjoyed the high level of (good) ‘absurd’ present in the book.

[Dmitry Petrov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rudy Rucker is smart and the consequence is that he always has a bunch of ideas to throw into the book and sometimes it's just too much and this book is a good example. Given that original book was published somewhere around '93 author had a vision for a lot of things that came into mainstream only decades later, like good navigation, online games, virtual reality, ai, robots etc. This book was in a way his attempt to describe how he saw the world with all this. In addition to that main person is a hacker and hence we get a lot of descriptions of programming related moments.

Taking into account all this a good portion of the book consists of descriptions of things mentioned that are sometime naive and sometimes so precise that it makes them really boring. E.g. at one moment author describes a toolbar of icons main hero sees, how they look like etc.

The other not so good part is about characters in the book. While some of them are more or less well thought, others are not really consistent and change their behaviour/character or slang throughout the book and are not complicated at all.

Even with all that the general storyline is great IMO and again reflect concerns that are being raised years later (see rather recent wave of fear of AI). I have a feeling that Rudy Rucker could have done better, but it's still worth reading if you read his Software cycle and like it.

[Chilly SavageMelon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is conflicting: some great sci-fi ideas and descriptions on cyberspace and robotics, but some lame pulpy writing and plot contrivances. So let's call it 3.5 stars, shall we...
Read it like PK Dick (which you are very much encouraged to...) realizing the plot and characters are only a bamboo framework to showcase bigger ideas about VR and robotics. And how sad, a decade and a half after the writing, VR and robotics haven't come further than the author undoubtedly guest they would have by now. Much of the setting is also rather cliche mid 90's "cyberpunk" - oh, the Californian hacker smokes pot, didn't see that coming. But if the tone borrows a bit from Gibson/Stephenson flash-bang style games, Rucker seems to also maintain some tongue-in-cheek distance from it all and is having fun. Sure, let the geek protagonist have some unrealistic sex scenes and duck away to Switzerland on a forged passport for a weekend, what the hell? The title of this novel won't, or shouldn't, have anyone confusing it with art. But it's a fun, quick fulfilling ride.

[Karl Kindt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rucker reads like Philip K. Dick would have had PKD had an editor to keep him fully coherent and to make him do several drafts of his novels. This is the second Rucker novel I have read, and I am impressed. This could have been so much better than it was, so much potential to what is really a simple story. The drug use and really awkwardly described sex could have been removed. In its place, Rucker could have planted seeds of foreshadowing and thought that would have led to the narrator's denouement at the end. The last two paragraphs are great, but they come out of the blue with no development really. Had the narrator been growing to the point at which he ends up rather than just getting there in the end, this could have been great literature with robots.

[Max Lybbert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Between the gratuitous mention of 1990s-era computer science topics and the constant "and then I got stoned" passages, I really had a hard time finding a story in this book. As a programmer I did enjoy some of the 1990s-era computer science topics, and I did appreciate the fact that the descriptions were actually accurate, but I kept wishing that they had been introduced more deftly.

The story isn't bad. There are actually a few gems hidden in there -- including the origin of ROBOT.LIB and Coolidge's motivation for firing Jerzy. But I wouldn't recommend paying full price for this book. Get a copy used. Or skip it altogether and read William Gibson's "Burning Chrome" or Tad Williams' Otherland series.

[manuti · Rating 1 out of 5]

Uno de los libros que me dejé sin comentar, pero nunca es tarde, incluso para comentar un libro como éste. El libro es muy malo, sobre todo en los personajes que parecen sacados de un telefilme barato. Solo se salva (lo digo por la estrella que le he puesto) la parte informática del asunto, aunque a un especialista seguro que le parecen chorradas. Lo dicho, un libro prescindible, al menos en mi opinión.

[Guy Ferguson]

One of RR's earliest works I think? All in with that idea of AI.
*** Just re-read. Whilst doing a Computer Science degree, his musings are as relevant today as they were then. I love his SuperC/Kwirkey compiler, so true. Better on second read, and with some programming experience under my belt. And thanks to Rudi for helping to inspire me into that course.

[Joe Masilotti · Rating 3 out of 5]

A campy trip following a robot software developer's life as he get's framed for ruining TV. Starts off a little over the top and ends way over the top. Also, that ending didn't need to work out THAT well, did it? Come for the unrealistically realistic cyberspace representations but don't stay much longer.

[Tim Heywood · Rating 3 out of 5]

took a while to get into the universe - strange as it is so like our own it could well have been. not quite as enjoyabe as white light, althoguh only read the once, as opposed to a number of times for the latter.

[Aaron Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a wonderful trip down memory lane. Fire up you're old computer and marvel at the dusty CRT display. Maybe send some slow email or install web services off a CD. Shut er down and let the midnight toaster display run. Wonderfully early nineties nostalgia.

[Jake Good · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fast paced, geeky, and fun to read.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a fun book but it helps to be a geek to fully enjoy it and "get" all the jargon. It is meant to be a thriller but it did not really hook me until the last half.

[Shannon Hubbell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Highly original, hilarious and uneven. Not Rucker's best work, but a great read.

[Yian · Rating 3 out of 5]

The universe is strangely appealing, but I can't say the characters are quite as good.

[Intersection · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd file this under enjoyable fluff - you'll like it if you don't expect much of your cyberpunk other than moderately interesting entertainment.

[Gregor Xane · Rating 3 out of 5]

A light, entertaining read. Strange how I could really feel the absense of cell phones while reading it, though.

[Tzenlong · Rating 5 out of 5]

nuf said!