Customer Reviews

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

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2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

It's not that I don't like these books. I do, sort of. As another reviewer mentioned, there are a lot of interesting ideas. There's also a lot of time wasted on the stupid antics of characters who were in a position to do more and ended up smoking 'til their brains were fried, then getting lucky. And that sums up two of the major flaws in these books: the characters are annoying most of the time, and things happen to turn out well because they got lucky, not because they did much of anything on their own. So, not only do these books reek of stoner stupidity, they are also NOT character driven. And that is a HUGE flaw in a cyberpunk novel, which is usually written around broken, down-and-dirty characters who end up doing the right thing even when they don't believe they can (not falling on their butts and somehow still landing on their feet, as Rucker's characters do).

For me, these were throwbacks to the hoary old 'idea' novels and moldy, cardboard characters of the past (sorry, couldn't resist). Frankly, these stories were a drag to read. I normally finish a book of this length in 3-5 days. I've been reading this for nearly a month. And sadly, there IS some funny stuff, and there are some interesting ideas, but the whole thing just meanders in a very boring fashion.
Had this not been an omnibus edition, I doubt I would have read the 2nd and 3rd books. Look elsewhere, say Neal Stephenson, early William Gibson, maybe Elizabeth Bear (who writes like early Gibson), if you want good cyberpunk.

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.

Each Of these books are masterpieces of what good modern Cyber Punk should be. If your thinking of just getting one of these books, its inevitable that your going to want the others as well, so do your self a favor and just buy this colection instead.

This is a collection of all three 'Ware' are books, Wetware, Software, and Realware. All three of these books have recived very good reviews, and are also considered to be some of the best CyberPunk literature out there. Even if you have the three books in your collection, you should definitely get this.

It's a really odd world of the future, but very well constructed. With a very breezy, funky style, this is a new take on the robot/human conflict that runs all the way from Florida to the Moon where the Boppers grow human organs in "pink tanks" and the aging human population can look forward to uploading their consciousness for later life. Very mind-bending in a way, but fun reading, not so ponderous and dark as a lot of sci-fi tends to be.