| T.R | Title | User | Personal
Name | Date | Lines |
|---|
| 602.1 | | DEADLY::REDFORD | | Wed Apr 06 1988 00:59 | 23 |
| I've read both. They're fun but incredibly sexist. The storyline
concerns a colony of self-replicating and self-evolving robots on
the moon. Their creator
is a fan of early rock and roll, so the robots call themselves
boppers. "Software" described a nice political
struggle among the robots - the more powerful robots (the big boppers)
were capturing the weaker ones and eating them. That is, they would
incorporate their software into their own and consume their bodies.
In "Wetware", the robots have been evicted from their base, and
are in uneasy coexistence with a human lunar colony. They plan a bold
move against humanity; encode bopper software onto the DNA in
human sperm and impregnate some women, thus creating the "all-meat
bopper". The book is also full of bizarre drugs; ones that uncoil
all your DNA and turn you into a flesh puddle, and ones that align
all your quantum mechanical spin states, depending on whether you
are meat or bopper.
/jlr
PS Rucker coins two new words here that we probably won't be
needing for a while: petaflop, 10^15 floating point operations per
second, and exaflop, 10^18 flops. He says that humans run at
a mere ten teraflops.
|
| 602.2 | Mini-Review of "Software" & "Wetware" | RSTS32::WAJENBERG | | Wed Apr 06 1988 13:16 | 26 |
| Rucker has also written some non-fiction works on mathematics. These
include more than one book on higher-dimensional geometry and a book on
transfinite analysis called "Infinity and the Mind." This last one
actually ties in with the science fiction, since both touch on some of
the same metaphysical ideas.
Another sf novel of his is "Master of Space and Time." I liked it
better than "Software" or "Wetware." Neither "Software" nor "Wetware"
has a single continuing character, but rather a small cast of them,
human and robot and in between, who act as viewpoints at different
times. In both novels, the society appears as an unpleasant mixture of
anarchy and tyranny, with the accent on anarchy.
The society is also in a state of very rapid flux, driven by the
technical miracles that hit the streets every few months. So not only
is it chaos, it's changing chaos. All these technical miracles get
exploited in violent or gruesome ways. For instance, the "merge" drug
that temporarily melts people also makes them vulnerable to murder by
the simple expedient of splashing them.
The underlying hypothesis being explored seems to be, "What if you
could do anything you wanted with information?" The answers are
presented in a manner up-close, gritty, and frenetic. I found it full
of ingenuity but basically repellent.
Earl Wajenberg
|
| 602.3 | | KISHOR::HIGINBOTHAM | stax o' wax, Jack. | Mon Nov 13 1989 18:12 | 11 |
|
I am about halfway through "Master of Space and Time", and its
a riot. If you like Lafferty and Sladek, this might be your cup
of tea. It moves like a high speed bumper-car through a world
gone (delightfully) mad. I can't put it down. Has anybody got
a bibliography of Rucker's works? I'd love to see what he does
with short stories. Are there any collections?
a new fan,
Brent
|
| 602.4 | Can you say mind-boggleling 8-| | POLAR::LACAILLE | Lookit them yo-yo's | Wed Nov 15 1989 11:10 | 4 |
|
Try his book Space_Time_Donuts, its a riot!
Charlie
|
| 602.5 | | MYCRFT::PARODI | John H. Parodi | Fri Aug 07 1992 16:30 | 6 |
|
The recent posting about new Zelazny brought this to mind. I recently
got "The Hollow Earth" by Rudy Rucker and thought it was a good read.
Edgar Allen Poe is one of the protagonists.
JP
|
| 602.6 | | TECRUS::REDFORD | | Fri Aug 07 1992 20:37 | 5 |
| Second the recommendation on "The Hollow Earth". Edgar Allan Poe
hooks up with a mad captain and sails a balloon into the core of
the Earth through a hole at the South Pole. Resemblence to "MS
Found in a Bottle" is not accidental. Poe comes off as a really
unattractive character, though, which might be accurate. /jlr
|
| 602.7 | | RUSURE::MELVIN | Ten Zero, Eleven Zero Zero by Zero 2 | Sun Jan 03 1993 02:18 | 13 |
| > I am about halfway through "Master of Space and Time", and its
> a riot.
I had been looking for this book for awhile and finally ran into it at
a book clearance store in the TJ MAXX shoppin plaza in Tyngsboro Mass
(near the Pheasant Lane Mall). It was $1.50. They also had other SF
books for similar pricing (Hambly, for instance). The books are NOT
sorted into sections (eg, SF, romance, etc) so you do have to look around
a bit.
I did like the part with "Godzilla" :-) :-).
-Joe
|