Moldies & Meatbops: Three *Ware Novels: Software/Wetware/Freeware

Ware #1-3

by Rudy Rucker

It was Cobb Anderson who built the "boppers" - the first robots with real brains. Now, in 2020, Cobb is just another aged "pheezer" with a bad heart, drinking and grooving an the old tunes in Florida retirement hell. His "bops" have come a long way, though, rebelling against their subjugation to set up their own society on the moon. And now they're offering creator Cobb immortality, but at a stiff his body, his soul ... and his world. In 2030, bopper robots in their lunar refuge have found a way to infuse DNA wetware with their own software code. The result is a new the meatbop. Fair is fair, after all. Humans built the boppers, now bops are building humans. . sort of. Its all part of an insidious plot that's about to ensnare Della Taze--who doesn't think she killed her lover while in drug-induced ecstasy. . .but isnt sure. And its certainly catastrophic enough to call Cobb Anderson--the pheezer who started it all--out of cold-storage heaven. Rudy Rucker has seen the future. . .and it is extreme. The Godfather of cyberpunk--a mad scientist bravely meddling in the outrageous and heretical--Rucker created Bopper Robots, who rebelled against human society in his award-winning classic Software. Now, in 2953, "moldies" are the latest robotic advancement--evolved artificial lifeforms made of soft plastic and gene-tweaked molds and algae, so anatomically inventive and universally despised that their very presence on the planet has thrown the entire low-rent future into a serious tailspin. So the moon is the place to be, if you're a persecuted "moldie" or an enlightened "flesher" intent on creating a new, more utopian hybrid civilization. Of course up there, there are other intergalactic intelligences to contend with--and some not so intelligent--who have their own agendas and appetites.

Genres: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

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

[Mitch Shangwa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best scifi books i have read and enjoyed, multiple times. Having first read it when i was about 13, now almost 6 years later i still find it really great.

[Poppy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Batshit and hilarious. I wish these stories were better edited because they read congested and long.

[Kitap · Rating 4 out of 5]

Exhilarating SF tour de force---brings "cyberpunk" from the neck down
.
This volume collects three of the four novels in Rudy Rucker's intellectually stimulating and thoroughly enjoyable *Ware series: Software, Wetware, and Freeware. The arc of these three novels carries the reader from the dawn of the 21st century, when humanity's lunar robots reprogrammed themselves for freedom and consciousness, to the middle of the century, the radical future of artificial life, and beyond. In Rucker's mostly optimistic vision of the near-future, robots (from the Czech word for "slave", remember) give way to self-directing boppers (and human-dominated asimovs), who in turn pave the way for the quasi-organic moldies, who themselves become the staging ground for something far more transcendent. Meanwhile, humanity tries as best it can to keep pace with its new neighbors while inadvertently catalyzing their evolution from time to time. An exhilarating intellectual romp!

Rucker's novels work on so many levels that it beggars description. His intellectual and philosophical speculations about the nature of conscious life itself provide the skeleton, his joycean linguistic inventiveness enrobes his fresh ideas in strange flesh, and his sheer joy at being embodied succeeds both in animating his creation and in bringing the genre of science fiction, which has long been decidedly cognitively top-heavy, from the neck down. This is science fiction for people who love the raw stickiness and smelliness of physical existence. Moldies and Meatbops, or, more properly, the novels collected therein, easily ranks as Rucker's SF masterpiece.

[Anthony Messina · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had this one on my shelf for a long time. It's a great sci-fi, sorta dystopian, robots rule the world kind of novel (well, three since it's 3 books-in-1). Highly recommended if you like classic sci-fi.