Wetware

Ware #2

by Rudy Rucker

When bopper robots discover a way to infuse DNA wetware with their own software code, a new lifeform results, ensnaring Della Taze and bringing pheezer Cobb Anderson out of cold-storage heaven. Reissue.

Genres: Science Fiction, Cyberpunk, Fiction, Speculative Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels, Robots

183 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1, 1988

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

[Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wild ride! Seriously!

And I was just thinking that I'd have more boppers and meat-sacks in some sort of wacky adventure.

Little did I know that this would be about boppers making meat-sacks or what it would mean for religion in this wild, wild world.

Things are always changing in these novels. Big changes. Enormous changes. No spoilers, but the results of the whole bopper/human war is really freaky. Rudy Rucker doesn't hold back with his idea storms. He lets it all hang out.

I love it! And by the way, this one has a much tighter plot and the themes are less a drug-infused orgy and more of a brain-melt. Often quite literally a brain-melt for the characters, too! Let's start mixing machine DNA with normal biology, shall we? Roll out the machine messiah and other preachers of peace and harmony between all PEOPLE, no matter what they began as or what they became, and then let's roll out the reactionary machine.

Of course.

But what a wild ride! It's the details and the the gorgeous tidbits of a really zany SF future that makes this novel. I stand by my original pronouncement that these should BE a huge Cult favorite. :) We should all be sitting around these books hitting shots and laughing about all the nutty things going on here!

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed Software, the first book in Rucker's Ware series, but this second installment was even better. The ideas were more unique and disturbing and took the logical steps forward that a series should which deals with artificial intelligence. For being such a slim read, it packs a punch and leaves the reader's mind scurrying down endless possible paths of what will happen next in the future Rucker has created.

I just love that as far this book is concerned, intelligence is intelligence, regardless of the housing. Intelligence makes mistakes and starts all sorts of mischief, regardless of the housing.

Rucker also has loads to say about drugs. I have never read anything in which society has so solidly accepted drug use as these books have. Drug use is typical and expected and also provides numerous opportunities for trouble and story progression.

Just as with Software, my one minor, tiny, hardly worth mentioing complaint is that I had difficulty connecting with the characters. If the characterizations had been a bit more detailed, I would have truly loved this book, but maybe Rucker meant for everything about the characters to be realized through action, since this book is extremely action oriented. The time jumps worked and did away with what might have been excessive details of down time between Rucker's action scenes. I may have just argued against my initial complaint and won.

The ending with the moldies was perfect. I am excited to see what happens in the next book. 4 1/2 stars and I highly recommend this series to science fiction fans.

[Angela Randall]

Rudy Rucker has reprinted the series as a complete set: The Ware Tetralogy. As a bonus, he's also released the whole Tetralogy as a free PDF available on his site.

[Simon · Rating 2 out of 5]

Another melting pot of ideas presenting the authors weird vision of the future of humans and robots and their uneasy, unharmonious relationship. No doubt greatly influenced by Asimov's earlier robot stories but here is a much more up to date exploration of AI by a man well qualified in the field. Like it's predecessor, Software, this also won the Philip K. Dick award.

Despite this however, the story is all over the place with barmy plot developments and unfathomable character motivations; they just do things for no other convincing reason besides the author wanting to move the story in that direction. An unnecessary large cast of characters served only to diffuse the story with needless digressions, the chapters lurching between different POV's breaking any sense of continuity. Quite simply it's a mess of a story that I can only imagine was viewed as bold and experimental at the time.

It's all a bit of a shame really because there are the germs of good ideas here that, in the hands of a better writer, could have made a really good story. I don't think I'll be seeking out the last part of this trilogy, nor in any rush to return to this author's work for the foreseeable future.

[Paul Guthrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wild ideas and some good fun. But for a novel that proposes absolute equality between all thinking beings, there is a heck of a lot of overt sexism. Too many Robert Crumb comics for the author or something. Took away a lot of my reading pleasure, and so I put the third book on hold for something else.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

He said that people and boppers are the same. It’s really true, but some people don’t like hearing it. Some people even think that sex and skin color matter...

...bottom line is that we’re all information processors

Inclusive thinking by the bopper messiah "A saintly badass."

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

More cyberpunk weirdness featuring robots and meatbags.

Rucker's 1987 "Wetware," the sequel to his 1982 award winning "Software" takes place 10 years later where the sentient robot "boppers" occupying the moon have been defeated by humans but some still long for an "evolution" for humanity and robots.

To that end, a bopper surreptitiously impregnates a human female with a robotic fetus in an attempt to create a human/synthetic hybrid. The birth of this "child" - appropriately named "Manchile" - matures into adulthood in a week, proceeds to impregnate multiple women with similarly fast growing hybrid children in the hope of creating a hybrid population bomb with Manchile posturing himself as a Christ-like savior of humanity and robots alike.

Needless to say, this doesn't make everybody happy, and powerful forces take steps to corrupt the remaining boppers but inadvertently creating the organic/synthetic hybrid they sought to avoid.

Fast paced and all over the place, and like I said, really really weird.

[Derek · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a bit better than Software, but wtf?

Software's Boppers have evolved. Instead of needing to be supercooled they can run at room temperature. And they have a plan to put a robot intelligence into a human body. But humans have a plan to put a "chipmold" into Bopper bodies, that will kill off the AIs. Who'll win? Neither, of course...

Suddenly we have "moldies". Yet another kind of Bopper. How did that happen? You won't find out here.

[Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The cover art (of this edition) pretty much spells out what to expect. You get just what it says on the tin. Rucker is grosser here, and his robots are even more amoral. But he's still got that sense of freshness and charm that carries you through. More weird fun.

[Dana Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, interesting to watch the tech evolve.

[Leftjab · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really into this at first – Rucker’s satirical voice mixed with a pretty gnarly story involving a drug that literally melts its users and the attempts to impregnate a “flesher” with a biomechanical embryo – I was on board and into it. There’s a shift about midway through the book where a child grows extremely fast – once that element takes over the narrative for a bit, the book changes drastically and I have to admit it lost me. I can tell Rucker is a Dick and Pynchon fan (imipolex appears throughout) but it felt by the second half of the novel he was really winging it and I was left in the dust. Might be a classic case of it’s not you it’s me, but I’m not sure.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rudy Rucker is something of an unsung hero of the Cyberpunk movement. Rudy should rightfully be considered the third aspect in a trinity that would include Bruce Sterling and William Gibson. In fact, one of my favourite stories in the seminal Mirroshades anthology—absolutely fundamental to understanding Cyberpunk—is Rudy’s Tales of Houdini. Possibly one of the earliest examples—along with Software—of posthuman or transhumanist literature; Wetware spins the central conceit of Software (humans downloading their consciousness into robots/computers) further along the posthuman continuum through robots trying to design biological entities to land on an unexpected other: humans and robots merging into something new. Wetware is Darwinism and tech long gone wild and then waking up together trying to remember how they ended up on a sticky carpet in a hotel in Brazil with missing organs. Rudy also invents a new drug called merge that can reduce those who partake into muddy puddles of bio-mass with undifferentiated boundaries between individual users. The barrage of metaphors that spin out of the ideas in Wetware seem like organic growths of the concepts themselves. What’s magical about the book though is it also, somehow, realistic (in terms of character and emotion) and incredibly light of touch. Rudy is clearly a wizard, not a mathematician—or something in between as makes no difference.

[charlie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wetware, The Book That Made Me Reevaluate If I Really Want To Do A Cyberpunk Thesis

Weird sex things are pretty staple in the cyberpunk genre but there was an uncomfortable amount of men and male-coded robots wanting to do non-consensual things to women. There were more instances of the phrase "his penis stiffened" than female characters in this book. The plot (not great, but there are worse cyberpunk plots) took forever to get started and then the majority of the action was smushed into ~20 pages. It also took a major backseat to the cringe dialog-packed viscerally awful erotica sequences.

The best part about this book is that I took the notes I needed while I was reading it, so I don't have to look at it again.

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a very much matured writing style, Wetware is quite a lot better than Software - and the genre-blending is fabulous. I'm curious what exactly Rucker was reading that inspired the noir/sci-fi crossover, and what exactly the timing was (sure, it's not at all unique any more, but it was at one point!)... but it's a brilliantly fun, well-paced narrative.

This series is excellent. There are a whole lot of people sleeping on Ware - I think I'll be gifting this to quite a lot of friends.

[Deb · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know there is a story hiding under all the odd language (boppers, meaties, stuzzy, merge), but there are so many characters and it seems to go in circles. This feels like a sixties novel - very drug heavy with lots of sex. I think one of my issues is that I don't really like any of the characters enough to care about following their stories. Not sure if I will go on to read the third part.

[Charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

So that was a book that happened...

It was good, not great, but also great and not good. I don't know what to say other than that it was worth reading if only for the fantastic ideas thrown at you one after the other.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Once upon a time there were a mess of agitated robots on the Moon. And agitated humans in Florida. Also some agitated humans with a touch of robot in 'em, on the Moon and in Florida. What is it about Florida that lends itself for these kind of stories, anyway?

[Luke Burrage · Rating 2 out of 5]

Finally got to the end! I think cyberpunk might not be for me.

Full review of Software and Wetware on my podcast, SFBRP episode #not-sure-yet-probably-about-227-or-228.

[Quinton Young III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stay High

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of Rudy Rucker’s pioneering Ware tetralogy that envisions an absurd world of sentient machines.

Warning: spoiler alert!!

Wetware is the second book in Rudy Rucker’s Ware tetralogy (1982-2000). Spaced out over 25 years (2020-2054), the series follows the lives of a number of west-coast, counter-cultural families, their haphazard and often accidental relationship with rapid technological change defining the narrative dynamic. Based on the idea that life and ultimately consciousness can be expressed by information, it envisions different patterns of consciousness, allowing the character of Cobb Anderson who feature in all of the novels to leave his body behind and live ’life’ in different material formats: cybernetic organism, digital storage unit, computational bio-plastic, and four-dimensional space – always insisting that he is a human. Wetware won the Philip K. Dick Award (1989).

Wetware takes place in 2030, ten years after the events of Software (1982). Humans successfully quelled the big boppers’ attempt to harvest human brains and subjugate the small boppers, and the anarchic life of the small boppers is again flourishing on the Moon. Additional laws have been implemented to control AI, computers now fitted with behaviour locks. Boppers and humans, while dependent on each other – not least in the area of commerce – still enjoy an uneasy relationship though, the boppers unhappy with being treated as second rate citizens. The bopper Berenice, who makes a living growing and selling human organs, has started to bioengineer a new race of humans, designed to outbreed humans and pave the way for the boppers’ return to Earth. Meanwhile, a small group of humans are developing a virus that targets boppers.

Continuing the often humorous and deliriously absurd style presented in Software (1982), recalling Philip K. Dick’s style, both humans and boppers get up to some very weird things. Many boppers chose to base their speech patterns on literary stars such as Kerouac and Poe making for some very bizarre conversations. A new drug called Merge has hit the market, which allow people to merge on a cellular level, literally melting together, inducing an orgasmic feeling of being one with everything. 

The trope of moving beyond what it means to be human, experimenting with getting rid of the human condition, plays a major role in Wetware. Cobb Anderson who died 2020 has spent the past ten years stored as a digital wetware file in a Lunar storage facility. When resurrected – uploaded to a cybernetic body – not only does he rave about the blissful state of being ‘dead’, but he also loves his new form: smarter, younger, all his insecurities gone, no longer afraid of death, one with the One. The One is a bopper construct, a sort of collective consciousness, which performs an important role in bopper’s everyday life: boppers are designed to see themselves as part of a whole and routinely they jack into the One to experience wholeness.

At the end of the day though, the boppers fall victim to old human follies. Berenice’s plan to design a flawless version of humans known as meatboppers, in what is ultimately an an attempt to beat the humans at their own game, quickly backfires. By deconstructing the drug Merge, she manages to plant engineered eggs in the womb of Della Taze, Cobb’s niece. After a few days of gestation, Della gives birth to Manchile, a transliteration of ‘man child’, and barely a month old, fully grown and insanely handsome Manchile impregnates ten women on Earth. Inspired by human history, Berenice conspires to lay the foundation stones for a new religion by staging Manchile’s martyrdom on live television, betting that mankind can’t resist killing what they do not understand. It goes horribly wrong.

Meanwhile the plans of the small crew of human resistors to unleash the virus called Chipmold fare little better. While they do manage to unleash an all-invasive plague – the virus eating away at the boppers’ brain circuits – the virus causes the boppers to bio-metastasise which in tun gives rise to a new race of soft boppers called moldies. Quite accidentally they have invented a malleable, computational material, the onset of a gold rush that attracts a new generation of entrepreneurs, including characters such as Stahn Mooney who was one of the resistors behind the virus to begin with.

[MykÆ G · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wetware is another speed run through a near future of smart machines, dumb junkies, terrible future-slang and creepy sexual politics. This books is vile at times. Vile in its body horror, vile in its treatment of women, and vile in its machiavellian use of race. Despite all of this much of it is addictingly enjoyable. Rucker's imagination leaps off of the page and in a world where every cyberpunk AI and net-upload start to feel the same, Rucker's creations still feel fresh and original. To be clear though it is incredibly rushed(!!!) and at times I feel like I could be reading the outline for the novel and not the novel itself.

The book is dedicated to Philip K. Dick, but owes just as much to William S. Burroughs for its narcotic horror. The number one question on all of the POV characters minds is, how do I get fucked up? followed as a close second by, how do I fuck? Rucker goes too far and ventures into very timelessly distasteful territory in both directions. If either one of these topics has the potential to verge into triggering territory for you I would recommend avoiding this book.

In the same vein (yup), This book features many acts of sexual violence, many of which exist in a context only possible due to the technologies that Rucker has envisioned. Some of it is gross, awful, and unjustifiable. The rest of it is just gross and awful. A significant part of the book deals with fertility, reproduction, and pregnancy. Should a guy like Rucker (or any guy for that matter) be writing about the exaggerated horrors of these things? It is too late to decide because he already wrote it and I already read it.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stan Mooney was once a human involved in a robot revolution on the moon, and helped thwart some of the robots plans to put agents on Earth. Now, a decade later, he's on the moon again, which has been reclaimed by humans again, with the robot boppers driven underground. He's a private detective, hired to investigate the disappearance of a woman, who it turns out is the focus of a new robot plan to forge a place for themselves on Earth by smuggling robot consciousnesses in human bodies.

This is much the same kind of thing as the first book, maybe a little less hippie energy, at least at first, but a similar high pace and the ideas are a little more out there with some ideas that strained my believability. It also delves into robots with stereotypical accents again, this time with ones at sort of a civil-war-era themed attraction with black servants. Since there's at least some in-story justification this time, it didn't grate quite as much on me personally as the other one, but it still reads as potentially offensive (again in a way that probably meant innocently).

I think I liked this one slightly more, even if it seemed less cohesive as a story, with plotlines that get set up and then seemingly dropped as something unexpected happens which changes everything. I'll probably keep reading the series, but I need a break in between to try something else.

[Professor Weasel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another really fun read! Equally mental. These is the kind of book in which one chapter heading is the following: IN WHICH MANCHILE, THE FIRST ROBOT-BUILT HUMAN, IS PLANTED IN THE WOMB OF DELLA TAZE BY KEN DOLL, PART OF WHOSE RIGHT BRAIN IS A ROBOT RAT.

So we have robot rats taking over human brains, Invader of the Body Snatchers style, killer mold spores, Jesus-like figures, robot-human hybrids who grow one year per day (so it only takes thirty days to become thirty years old), insane drug trips that involve literally melting on the floor and/or communicating directly with God, organ farms, robots that speak like famed literary styles (Edgar Allan Poe and Jack Kerouac, specifically), a smart bomb that behaves like a well-trained guard dog.... mental, mental. Fun, fun, fun.

"The bottom line is we're all information processors, and God loves all of us the same."

Stahn felt excited and ready for the change. They wouldn't take all that much of his brain out.

It wouldn't do to be found with the half-eaten body of a junkyard watchman. It would give people a bad impression of the boppers.

"You're a machine too, Aunt Amy," put in Willie. "You're just made of meat instead of wires and silicon."

[Stephanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

   Taking place 10 years after Software, much has changed since the big boppers were overthrown and Cobb’s mind uploaded to the big bopper Mr Frostee. Now Sta-Hi is Stahn, a private investigator for hire. He’ll need his 18-month-drug-free life experiences to survive the new bopper plans to evolve from big/digger boppers to boppers in human skin – meat boppers. That is, if he doesn’t fall victim to the lure of the new drug merge, which offers a melting and flowing deconstructed experience for humans (a temporary melting…unless someone pulls your melting body apart and it can’t flow back together).
   There was so much going on, with frequent time and character/location jumps. Even having read such a huge chunk of it in the past couple of days, not nearly enough of it stuck in my mind from one day to the next, let alone from when I first started it to finishing it. All in all, too much was slapped together into this book, much like the organs growing in the boppers pink tanks, and it even more distasteful of a read than the first without enough redemption for my tastes.
   The whole boppers wanting to install, for lack of a better word, their software into flesh and blood human bodies was arguably a logical step for things to take in this story. However, my prediction of cults and religion coming into play was not wrong, though it was underplayed compared to what it could have been. But it is still a solid thread, that All is One, and it sure seems likely to pull the rest of the tetralogy behind it.
   Also unfortunately, we also have far more female characters in this book. While they’re comparatively smarter than the ones from Software (for the most part), described slightly less often as sex objects, with far less sexist descriptions or active desire to have sex all the time, they’re still largely treated as vehicles for babies and evolution to ride forward with. Della Taze, Darla (could the names be any more similar?), Cisco…meatbopper vehicles. Aunt Ilse and Della’s female family, pretty bad people overall.
   This book was too much a merge-high mash-up of threads, people, ideas, locations, with well-placed time jumps (kept to the relevant scenes), not to mention the horrible ways women were treated even if they acted “better” than in the first book, that I’m very much not inclined to continue the series. Who am I kidding, I’ll probably at least start the third one to give it a shot, but I’m not afraid to DNF it after this mixed up pink tank of organs and limbs.

Quote:
“[…] Why is it so important for some people to think of boppers as mindless machines? Why do zerks laugh at monkeys in a zoo? Why do rich people say that poor people are getting what they deserve? Why don’t you show compassion for your fellow creatures? If you drop your selfishness, you can lose your guilt. And, wave it, once your guilt is gone, you won’t need to hate. Good-bye.” – page 174

[Steve Scanlan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Following on 10 years from SOFTWARE, the boppers have been evicted from their city on the moon and now live deep under its surface. Boppers and humans now share the moon, but not harmoniously. The boppers occasionally attack the human population with small bombs, but humans won’t wipe them out because of the advanced technologies they provide.

The boppers have evolved and some now wish to return to Earth, but as meatbops, bopper software embedded at the cellular level in organic, human form. In this form they hope to infiltrate human society and take mankind to its next level of evolution.

Cobb Anderson and Stahn Mooney (formerly Sta-Hi) are back in another very entertaining and quick read. If you enjoyed SOFTWARE then you won’t be disappointed with this story and I’m looking forward to the next instalment, FREEWARE.

[Scot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though this one was slow going at first due to the complexity of the latest evolution of humans and boppers and not quite as free flowing as Software, once it got up to speed, it kicked into high gear.

This time around the robots had a plan for merging with humans and becoming a new evolved species and it involved zany 60's psychedelia characters and only a few holdovers from book one. I loved the latest iteration of Sta-Hi, the next level boppers and their Edgar Allen Poe or Jack Kerouac language tracks, and a whole host of zany characters who made appearances throughout.

Once I was deep enough, I can see why this won the PKD award, who the book was actually dedicated to, and why Rudy Rucker is one of the best SciFi writers out there.

[Eran · Rating 2 out of 5]

More serious in style than the first book, but not in subject. On the one hand less "fun" to read and more tedious, on the other hand less cartoonish/childish to read.
While the first book introduced several different concepts and ideas, only one new main idea is introduced here, the merge drug. (and generally the DNA messing around with rapid-growth etc.)
So it was nice reading on in the series, but not much more than that. And definitely a slow read relative to its size (still I'll probably continue on the series).

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good book but not quite as enjoyable as book 1 (Software). The use of piegon is reduced in this book, which is a good thing. For the most part this book focuses on the same topics as book 1, so it feels repetitive. The attention to the drug culture and the evolution of the boppers seemed very much the same. You could also feel that the end of the book was geared towards preparing Book 3 (Freeware), which to me seems like the battle for Earth.

I think I need a break from the series so I am going to try Hardwrired next before returning to the next book.

[Jeroen · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF@80%, audiobook version.

After a somewhat disappointing first book in this series, I wanted to give this second book a chance.
However, it reads like a continuous acid trip; this book is more unhinged and chaotic than the first one.
The cast of characters all are unrelatable, and only seem to serve the purpose of introducing a bunch of new hip drugsladen slang words and ideas.
There is a plot somewhere I guess, but I found it hard to focus or care given the chaotic nature of the book and multiple different storylines/characters.

[Robbie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This one twisted all sorts of weird ways and I liked it better than the first book. I particularly liked how it ended with the symbiotic moldies more or less continuing the evolution towards the merging of all consciousness in a much more congenial fashion than seeding the earth with meatboppers. Overall, it felt a lot more coherent and planned out than the first book, and it left me really wanting to see where everything goes from here.