Customer Reviews

Freeware

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I loved this book. It's light in style and narrative structure, and rucker doesn't take himself at all serriously. Rudy Rucker is a brilliant mathmetician and science fiction writer, and his protagonist, Randy Karl Tucker, is an uneducated redneck, whose primary passion is for sex with artificial life forms that smell of cheese. Other characters include a down-to-earth California surfer girl who, along with her stoner mathmatician husband, runs a fleabag sea-side resort in the autonomous nation of California, the head of a corporate empire who made his fortune selling burgers made from the cloned flesh of his half-human wife, and a delighful host of "moldies," artificial life forms with the power of gods, short lifespans, and generally no other ambition than to buy enough of the expensive high-tech goo of which they're made to form a child to perpetuate their own software.

This book is an absolute gem.

..what else can you ask from a science fiction book? Good characterization, plausible sciences & other stuff you can find in any boring science speculation book scribbled by engineers.

Rudy Rucker belongs to the GREAT freewheeling tradition of imaginative writers; forget Kim Stanley Robinson and Arthur C. Clarke, think van Vogt, Charles Harness and Barrington Bayley - he invents his science (that's why it's called fiction, eh?) and bounces off to the nomansland like some mutant kangaroo. This is stuff you can barely find on the shelves today as franchise poop is being pushed on all the fronts. Rucker knows his science but isn't limited by it - he writes straight from his subunconscious pool, winging it with gusto and joy. Engineers beware, this works on dream-logic and grabs you by the jellyfish.

Comparisons never quite seem to work. The closest I can get, however, is Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and Greg Egan's "Quarantine". Why? Well, the book <feels> like a prepubescent Heinleinesque make-love-not-war-on-the-moon jaunt, but has a <mind> reminiscent of Greg Egan's heavy physics sci-fi. It seems like a neat synthesis of the two, in fact. On the other hand, it's just a damn good read.

I've never thought of Rucker as a great writer, but he never wants for interesting ideas. While his characters tend to be fairly broad and cartoonish, the bright colors of his invented slang and weird technology make for a nice pleasant brain buzz.

In "Freeware", Rucker continues his little AI saga begun in "Software" and "Wetware". The boppers (the little AI robots featured in the first two novels) are all dead, but their spirit (or at least their core software) lives on in the "moldies", who are basically big pieces of self-aware floppy plastic infected with a stinky fungus. Of course what Rucker immediately wants to investigate is: Can you have sex with a moldie? The answer, of course, is yes.

The plot meanders through the backstories of its various characters (which also help shed light on the events which have occurred since "Wetware"), shows off the interesting abilities of the moldies (some of which require some suspension of disbelief), showcases exciting new fictional mind-altering drugs, and eventually comes to the Big Reveal, which I found fairly interesting. Although this sort of thing (I'm not going to say WHAT sort of thing) has certainly been done before, I don't think it's ever been done in quite this fashion.

One major complaint I have about the book is its rather abrupt ending. Rucker wraps things up here in about two pages, as if he was in a rush to finish. A bit more denouement would have been nice.

Basically, if you've read and enjoyed the first two "Ware" books, you're likely to find this enjoyable as well. Anyone who HASN'T read the first two books is advised to start with the first book, "Software", which is a rather short (150 pages) and breezy read.

Evolution continues rapidly in Rudy Rucker's freeware. From bops, big bops, little bops through meatbops we have yet another life form appearing in freeware, and it is sentient mold.

These moldies, being more organic, can interact with humans differently, and in some cases very closely.

More of the burned out beach bum and borg style can be found here.

Freeware picks up where Rucker's other work left off, with enough of the requisite re-hashing to make the novel stand on its own. Artificial Intelligence has taken on another even more bizarre form in this novel than in Software or Wetware. The Boppers are gone in the wake of a cataclism that destroys all electronic hardware. Out of the ashes come the Moldies, sentient artificial life made of a piezo-electric elastic substance that enables them to take on any form, and to perform virtually any task. The Moldies smell awful, hence their collective nickname.

As ever, Rucker takes a serviceable premise, and adds a dash of his patented twisted reality. Before you know it your following a thoroughly perverse tale with disgustingly dysfunctional characters through a bitter vision of the future.

Rucker's characters are perpetual losers with invariably warped motives. Dialogue is often idiotic, but somehow stylishly so. Once again Rucker has created a novel that will make some cringe, and others put it down. But the patient reader will be rewarded with an ending that - even if it doesn't blow your mind - will at least provoke thought. This is no small feat given the seemingly purposeful baseness of the entire plot build-up. Rucker was arguably one of the first authors to write in the style that's come to be known as cyberpunk. His vision then was unique. His earlier novels exert influence on the way much sci-fi is now written. With Freeware, Rucker makes it clear that his vision will continue to be - if not revolutionary - then at least way wierder than most.

At his best, Rudy Rucker demonstrates that he can write truly engaging cyberpunk science fiction tales that are heavily infused with his knowledge of mathematics (In real life he is a professor of mathematics as well as a science fiction writer.). I honestly don't know what to make of "Freeware", which is the third of his "ware" novels chronicling the evolution of both humanity and self-replicating AI life. Here he introduces us to "Moldies", a plastic-derived AI life form that has developed an uneasy truce with humanity and colonized the Moon after the "bop" AI life forms were killed off by a virus. Alas "Freeware" isn't as funny as Neal Stephenson's "Snowcrash", though Rucker often tries to be, mixing up fast-paced action sequences with lots and lots of kinky sex. (I'm not troubled at all by the sex, but I've seen it done with more realism and finer literary technique from other science fiction writers.). So hardcore fans of Rucker's work may find "Freeware" quite enjoyable; for me it's a bit of a disappointment.

With all the predictions and future strangeness this comes off as Sodom and
Gomorrah: the characters are mostly seriously morally challenged ( bright like Molly).
It comes off with the feeling that it was written by a person on pot having a dream that turns rapidly into a nightmare.
The ideas of using
aperiodic tiles as computers has so far not had anything but virtual fruit like this.
Written before the current quantum computing doctrines came in
and AI went out of fashion, this novel has a genealogy of humans and moldies
and some sexual content that might be too much for a lot of people.
The two other novels I've read by Rudy Rucker were much better than this one.

In this novel Rudy Rucker creates an original, twisted world where moldies (artificial life forms) and humans live amongst each other. Rudy creates a surfer/stoner dialect that could quite plausibly be a future lingo, like our generic, hip, MTV influenced lingo. Although I love Rudy's world and writing style I must admit this book was somewhat of a letdown. It was very captivating at times but those times were often followed by idle narrative. Plus the novel jumped around. It's like when you're watching a captivating sitcom, and right at the climax "to be continued" appears; tune in next week. The plot would then start a new chapter with a new character's story. Rudy would be careful to work in each character into the overall theme of the book though. I think if Rudy cut out all the idle, boring parts (that would be about half of the book) it would be a good novel. Some of Rudy Rucker's other books got better reviews so I would recommend you read those books.

I thought this was the best of the three in the series. I especially liked how he told the story from several points of view.