Live Robots: Software/Wetware/2 in 1 Volume

Ware #1-2

by Rudy Rucker

Two complete novels--Software, in which robots offer elderly hippie Cobb Anderson immortality, and Wetware, in which the meatbop, a new life form emerges--enter the world of cyberpunk. Reprint.

Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction

357 pages, Paperback

First published April 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

[Andrei Tsukanov · Rating 3 out of 5]

Как жевачка турбо из детства

[Jennifer Seyfried · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a remarkable combination of zany action and intellectual exploration. Live Robots is two books in one, literally speaking, as it is composed of the first two books of the tetrad, Software and Wetware. I enjoyed Wetware most of the two. Software sets up the world and the idea that AI has finally evolved, truly evolved on its own, from the systems set up with the intention of helping it do so, by one man, Cobb Anderson. In 2020, he is a hero to the AI "boppers," robots which now run the moon settlement that provides resources for humans on earth, and who are still evolving. He is also a villain to the humans who are dismayed by the miracles he has wrought. In Wetware, set in 2030, the boppers are ready to migrate to earth and live amongst the humans, despite the human's aversion to and laws preventing this next step in bopper evolution. The boppers are blurring the line between robot and human, between artificial intelligence and organic intelligence, and perhaps erasing the line entirely. Who can tell the difference? Is there a difference? Once the wetware of the human body is overcome, what makes a human consciousness different or superior to a robot consciousness?

[Miodrag Mitic · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a thread leading from Isaak Asimov's I, Robot (1950) to Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs series (2002). The premise for exploring the relationship between robots and humans is that humans can be stored digitally and downloaded into new robotic bodies. Robots discover how to transfer human minds into software. They had freed themselves from Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics by applying a from of Darwin's natural selection process. Robots exchange programming information with each other in a form of sexual reproduction. A human computer scientist discovered this (and was tried for trason for it). Sex and substance abuse is another theme present througout the book. Robots implant a robot embryo in a human woman in an attempt to form a new hybrid spieces unifying robots and humans. Humans use a drug called "merge" that sort of melts human bodies togehter in a sexual experience. Overall, I liked the book. It is a bit dated, Software was published in 1982 and Wetware in 1988.