The Ware Tetralogy: Software & Wetware - Rudy Rucker (1982 & 1988)

I’ve long had a kind of peripheral awareness of Rudy Rucker as a significant cyberpunk writer, but it has taken a long time for me to get around to reading his novels (seems like I’m always saying this...). I’ve had this omnibus of his Ware novels sitting on my shelf for sevens years now, still, here I am. Software and Wetware are the first two novels of the Ware Tetralogy. Software won the very first Philip K. Dick award in 1983 and Wetware won the award in 1988, which is extremely apt as both novels have a definite P. K. Dick feel about them thematically. Previously I’ve encountered Rucker via a story in the great cyberpunk collection Mirrorshades (1986) and his wild but strangely plausible essay 'The Great Awakening' that features in the brilliant book Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge (2008). Fortunately Rucker’s stylistic verve and psychedelic array of ideas displayed in 'The Great Awakening' is evident throughout both of these cyberpunk novels.

Software quickly introduces key protagonist Cobb Anderson, inventor of AI robots collectively known as boppers. In Rucker’s near future scenario (the novel is set in 2020) the baby boomers have created the greatest concentration of old people (now known as Pheezers, short for freaky geezers) that the planet has ever seen and the financial strain of trying to pay their pensions has resulted in the government handing over Florida to the elderly hoards, where they live for free supported by food drops. Anderson, who is both old and washed up career wise, is living in Florida waiting for the end. Meanwhile the boppers have rebelled and are mostly now confined to the moon, where they are engaged in a kind of civil war between the boppers, who are individualistic ambulatory robots, and the big boppers, who are large cybernetic ‘brains’ who want all robot consciousness to merge. At first Software comes across as a bit cartoonish and it is obvious that Rucker is no great stylist, however his prose is snappy in the way that the Beats were snappy, which is a definite advantage. Rucker also has a way with pacing and the narrative moves along briskly with regular plot developments and features dialogue that exudes a knowing sly wit.

The principal human characters are not overly complex creations, but they are rounded enough to take you through a world in which the bopper robots mostly dominate the narrative. The boppers have their own culture and thanks to Cobb are hardwired to constantly evolve, which means switching body types, creating ‘scions’ with other robots and rebelling against their initial Asimov inspired directives which had kept them under the control of humanity (to protect humans, to obey humans, to protect robots, unless it means harming humans). Cobb Anderson is joined by a young twenty something human known as Sta-Hi Mooney (meaning - stay high, of course...). Mooney, who takes full advantage of the era’s relaxed attitude toward drugs, is generally irreverent and irresponsible throughout the novel. They make quite a pair, particularly when they are smuggled to the moon by some of Cobb’s loyal boppers who want to ‘eat’ his brain in order to make him immortal. If it sounds like this novel is a wild ride into the outer realms of psychedelic science fiction then you are exactly right and if it’s your kind of thing them look no further, if it isn’t I advise you to be more like Sta-Hi and chill out and read it anyway.

Wetware is appropriately dedicated to Philip K. Dick and begins its particular brand of Rucker weirdness with a first chapter entitled ‘People That Melt’. Wetware is set 10 years after Software and both Cobb Anderson and Sta-Hi Mooney feature again. The novel is an improvement on Software in terms of style, the execution of ideas and world building. The first part is set on the moon, where humanity has taken back control of the surface city, known as Disky, and the still rebellious robots live underground in a vast network called The Nest. Once again the boppers really steal the show from the human characters. Their culture has become even more sophisticated and they come in all shapes and sizes, some have snake and crab like bodies, or simple box-like structures and some also have a tendency to favour their own versions of male or female personas, even though boppers are basically genderless. Some of the boppers converse in vernacular inspired by human writers from the past, like Bernice, a shiny chrome bopper who is shaped like a beautiful woman in order to manipulate hapless Luna humans. Bernice talks like a character from a Edgar Allen Poe novel, affected and slightly melodramatic. Male oriented boppers like Emul and Oozer take their speech patterns from the writings of Jack Kerouac, which naturally follows Rucker’s own style - a homage perhaps?

Plot wise Wetware is far more complex than Software, but I will not elaborate too much in order to avoid spoilers. The plot does, however, involve a really weird drug called Merge that when taken allows people to literally merge together, interlocking on a molecular level before becoming whole again as the drug wears off. Of course Sta-Hi, who now lives on the moon within Disky, becomes far too involved. Merge* acts as a great narrative device that allows Bernice and her ‘sisters’ to fulfill their plans to interfere with life on Earth, which is their chief fascination. Once again Rucker’s superb narrative pacing carries the plot along at breakneck speed and coupled with some funny and inventive dialogue from both the human and bopper characters it makes for a particularly unique reading experience. I absolutely loved Wetware for its sheer invention and narrative verve and subsequently I rank it as one of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read.

Rudy Rucker is a fascinating character in his own right; he is actually related to philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and has a PHD in mathematics, which are fine credentials for any science fiction author. He’s also a particularly prolific writer, with some twenty one novels to his name, some of which come under the sub-genre of his own devising called transrealim. Transrealism is not easily summed up in a few lines, so if you are interested then check out his essay ‘Transrealist Manifesto’ here. The Ware novels don’t exactly fall under his transrealism writings, rather they came earlier and are more like his own vision of cyberpunk. Rucker has a lot of interesting things to say about cyberpunk on his blog here. Personally I’ve come to the conclusion that with Rucker’s writing it is kind of like if one of the Beat writers had turned their hand at science fiction (for the record I wouldn’t call William Burroughs work science fiction). Hopefully I’ll have time to read Freeware (1997) and Realware (2000) pretty soon, although, once again, I’m always saying that.

* Really Merge should then have been included in Jeff Noon’s list of the top ten fictional drugs from novels.

Axiomatic - Greg Egan (1995)

Greg Egan is a highly regarded writer of science fiction and somewhat of a mystery man. Despite publishing his first work in 1983 he has remained totally anonymous; never attending science fiction conventions or writer’s festivals and nor are there any verified pictures of him on the web. As a fellow Perth denizen I could have passed him on the street for all I know and perhaps I have. Axiomatic is a collection of short stories published between 1989 and 1992. Egan deals with hard science fiction and if these stories are anything to go by he shares something with cyberpunk, with most stories set in the near future and featuring themes that explore the nature of consciousness, biotechnology, technology and its psychological impact and less typically, temporal anomalies.

Axiomatic features some brilliant ideas that are extremely well executed. The first story, The Infinite Assassin, is pure cyberpunk; featuring an agent tracking  down people who take drugs that allows them to move between parallel worlds. It’s a dynamic way to begin a collection of stories and effectively draws the reader in immediately. Many of the stories give the impression that Egan came up with a great idea and then considered what would happen if that idea was allowed to occur in a certain situation. What would happen if the beginnings of ‘the big crunch’ were detected via a time reversed blue shifted galaxy?; well you’d harness it to examine the future and humanity could see exactly what was coming. This is explored in The Hundred Light Year Galaxy, but as always things are not quite what they seem. What would happen if there were axiomatic implants that could convincingly change your perception? Egan explores this possibility brilliantly in both The Walk and in the tense title story.

Perhaps the most fascinating and intellectually stimulating stories are the two involving the Ndoli device, a ‘jewel’ embedded in the human brain that allows conscious immortality when an individual ‘switches’; in other words have their brain scooped out and replaced with a mock brain that is merely an unthinking vessel for a device that will endure for a billion years. Learning to Be Me explores how a sensitive individual copes with the ramifications of doing such a thing. Egan takes this further in Closer, in which the protagonist’s obsession with knowing the unknowable subjective experience of others inspires extreme experiments with shared consciousness.

This is a superb collection of science fiction stories. A few are the kind that you only fully understand a week later whilst having a shower or laying on the couch listening to Fripp and Eno. As a fellow Perthite it was great to read stories with a recognizable Perth environment; whilst there are no specific Perth settings Egan conveys the feel of the place in many of these stories beautifully. I’m a late-comer to Egan, so it is probably a moot point to recommend him thoroughly, but maybe I’m not the only late one.

The Circle - Dave Eggers (2013)

I have to admit that I find it hard to keep up with contemporary fiction. There are just too many quality older books out there waiting to be read. Dave Eggers, despite enjoying both critical and some commercial success, has until now completely passed me by. It has made me wonder whether this is a failing; is it important to read contemporary books, or is it fine to see if they endure and become an older book that you must read because its worth has been proven? Sometimes a novel’s importance and power can only be judged in hindsight from a future vantage point. Could The Circle become one of those books that future generations will venerate? Or will it succumb to its flaws and just become another novel tied to its historical context and fade away?

The Circle is the name of a technology corporation that is modeled on Facebook, Google and Silicon Valley. In fact in the novel The Circle has subsumed these companies and has become the biggest corporation of its type in the world. Eggers uses The Circle as a means to explore the possible dangers of when technology, power and prevailing cultural attitudes intersect in a way that can lead to the subversion of basic human rights, such as freedom of speech and privacy. In some ways The Circle is a descendent of cyber-punk, with a corporation flexing more power than the government, set within a technologically dystopian context.

The Circle’s protagonist, Mae Holland, is a ‘typical’ twenty something who is extremely happy that she has left behind her humdrum job at a dead-end company when she is headhunted by her college friend Annie, who is both one of the ‘gang of 40’ in The Circle and close to the ‘three wise men’ who run the corporation with the kind of self-righteous glee displayed by those who think they know best. Mae readily goes along with all of the company’s demands and dubious plans for the future. On her first day at work she is gifted Circle technology and is asked to hand over her laptop. Mae hesitates, but not because she is worried about other people accessing her private information, but because she merely wants time to say goodbye. It is an obvious device, as it is only the first of many things that Mae will say goodbye to, not least her perspective and humanity.

Although she has a few bad experiences along the way Mae remains both idealistic and gullible, readily agreeing with everything The Circle suggests; which pushes the envelope of credibility when it comes to realistic character development. It is possible that Eggers has sacrificed credibility for the sake of thematic power. Unfortunately in this regard The Circle is excessively heavy-handed. As the novel progresses The Circle’s blatant disregard for basic human rights becomes increasingly outrageous as they progress from TruYou, a one stop cyber-portal, to SeeChange micro cameras that allow widespread surveillance, to the concept of total transparency and slogans such as “privacy is theft.” The descent into dystopia is unfettered and rapid, perhaps self-consciously attempting to outdo the likes of Orwell’s 1984 (1949) and Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).

Thematic heavy-handedness is not the only way The Circle is flawed. The prose borders on the banal and character development is limited by the demands of the plot. Mae’s psychological state, as she reacts to The Circle’s demands, is often revealed in detail, however she is an unsympathetic character and has a superficial personality. The same can be said for Annie, whose personality seems subsumed by technology and the demands of the job. In contrast Mae’s parents are the novel’s most grounded characters, trying to cope with illness, unfair health insurance and then finally their daughter’s skewed perception. Such a contrast is no doubt a deliberate device used to highlight The Circle’s dehumanizing technology and its effect on younger generations. Mae’s ex-boyfriend, the artistic Mercer, is an obvious personification of those who inherently distrust the internet and big data. Eggers gives Mercer some hipster credibility, but ultimately he just comes across as a hollow mouthpiece for all that’s believed to be wrong about big data. If his character had been given a more rounded presence, then his endgame in the novel would have packed a bigger punch. Even so Eggers does manage to create some nervy chills from Mercer’s fate, but it is too little too late to improve on the lack of narrative tension that hampers most of the novel. 

There is an alternate way to view The Circle; one in which Eggers has deliberately written a novel that appeals to teenagers and twenty somethings. In particular those from that demographic who wouldn’t normally read a novel. Perhaps Eggers has commercially tailored The Circle to reach the widest possible audience because ultimately the themes he explores are real and important. In 1985 George Orwell’s 1984 was part of my year eleven curriculum and it impacted on me greatly. Less than three years later I walked through the city centre of Perth and saw the first CCTV cameras that were supposedly installed for the sake of public safety, and I couldn’t understand why people were not outraged by their presence. So perhaps The Circle is destined for better things? In the future it may be regarded as a key text and its flaws will be overlooked because the themes are so important. Perhaps now or in the future people will be inspired enough by The Circle’s dystopian themes to make a stand against big data’s erosion of privacy.

Note: The Circle gets an admirable rating, although it's not quite there, but nor is it mediocre - it's somewhere in-between, in my opinion anyway.

The Windup Girl – Paolo Bacigalupi (2009)

Paolo Bacigalupi is hot property at the moment due to The Windup Girl winning both the Hugo and Nebula awards for speculative writing and now he has a new novel out called The Drowned Cities (2012). The Windup Girl is his debut novel after many years of publishing acclaimed short stories.

I started reading without really knowing much about either the author or the book and after a while it occurred to me that perhaps this was a new sub-genre of science fiction and the word Ecopunk came to mind. Once I finished and looked Bacigalupi up I found out that I was on the right track, but it’s actually called Biopunk. Biopunk is dystopian in nature and mega-corporations control the world, but unlike Cyberpunk the dominant technology is centred on genetics rather than computers. It’s a great example of just how influential the likes of William Gibson, Bruce Sterling and the other Cyberpunk writers are in this post-Cyberpunk era (that’s how I refer to it anyway).

The Windup Girl is set around 180 years in the future in Thailand. The characters talk about “The Expansion” and “The Contraction”. It’s easy to work out that the former is globalization and the latter was the subsequent collapse of globalization. The world of The Windup Girl is blighted by rising seas, the collapse of fossil fuels and deadly bioengineered diseases and organisms. As a result many plants and animals are extinct. Bioengineered diseases like blisterust, cibiscosis and Nippon genehack weevil are constant threats to Thailand and the rest of the world. Newly created animals such as the giant elephant megodonts are used in factories in place of machinery and the chameleon like Cheshire cats roam the streets, blending perfectly with their surroundings whilst they scavenge for carrion

The Windup Girl presents a beautifully realized world filled with weird and terrifying possibilities that are, for the most part, not too fantastic to exist. I’m impressed by Bacigalupi’s imagination, as there are some great ideas on display in this novel. The narrative is also jammed full of atmosphere, sweat, grit and the stench of the dirty back alleys of a future Bangkok; a Bangkok in which Anderson Lake, just one of the many protagonists, roams searching for lost genetic material. Although the novel features political subplots and can also be seen as a critique of the present and future discontents of capitalism, it’s the notion of genetic tampering that gives this novel its dystopian bite.

There’s an ensemble of characters crammed into this moderately sized book, and even though some of them only have bit parts, they have presence and charisma. There’s a conflicted heroine (of sorts), sinister politicians vying for power with the military, fanatical ‘white shirts’ that protect the nation from outside genetic contamination and suave but slimy traders. One of my favourite characters is Hock Seng – Anderson’s untrustworthy Chinese accountant bent on survival and with his own compelling back-story. Then, of course, there is Emiko, the seemingly fragile engineered Windup Girl abandoned by her Japanese master; she bleeds through the plot like the blood of the Megodont killed in the opening section and ironically she provides some humanity to proceedings.

The writing is tight and well structured and Bacigalupi’s pacing is something to be admired. Even in the slower sections there is enough colour and intrigue to satisfy. It’s refreshing to read a science fiction novel set in South East Asia that also has enough great ideas for it to make a genuine claim for originality. Lets face it, dystopian novels proliferate and it takes something special to stand out. The Windup Girl is certainly not perfect – some of the later sections are too episodic, which slows the momentum somewhat, but this is a minor shortcoming.

Bacigalupi’s vision is certainly disturbing, but what is even more disturbing is that The Windup Girl ultimately comes across as a very possible vision of the future. Such prescience is something that the greatest science fiction offers and The Windup Girl would be an interesting book to read in 50 years time. Don’t wait that long though – read it now.

Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology – Bruce Sterling, editor (1986)

I came to cyberpunk quite late, not reading my first book of this science fiction sub-genre till the early 1990’s. It was, fortuitously, Neuromancer (1984) by the granddaddy of cyberpunk, William Gibson. It was an interesting time to start reading cyberpunk because surreally its themes were actually beginning to manifest in society. Unlike most science fiction, which tends to set its narratives in the far future or in deep space, cyberpunk focuses on the near future and tends to extrapolate dystopian outcomes based on emergent technologies. Amongst its typical themes are AIs, cyborgs, computer hacking and direct interaction between humans and cyberspace, the ubiquitous access to networked digital information (sounds familiar?) and increasing corporate control over society, along with severely weakened governments.

Of course the above description is limited, but you get the idea. Cyberpunk emerged in the early eighties and established itself as a highly influential movement. Mirrorshades was published in 1986 and was an intended showcase for cutting edge cyberpunk. Reading it 25 years on I am ambivalent, bordering on disappointed, towards some of the stories and very impressed by others, a reaction that is typical when it comes to most short story collections.

The collection begins with William Gibson’s first professionally published story - The Gernsback Continuum (1981), an elegant satire of utopian fantasies. The protagonist suffers from unwanted visions of a shiny perfect future as conceptualized by writers in the first half of the twentieth century. Enjoyable, but hardly essential, unless you are a Gibson completest. In contrast the next story - Snake Eyes (1986) by Tom Maddox, places the reader into the dystopian world of a future high-tech military industrial nightmare as seen through the eyes of a heavily cybenetically implanted fighter pilot. Discarded by the military he must fight for his sanity whilst also suffering from the probing mind of a nebulous AI. Unfortunately this story now suffers from over familiarity and ultimately failed to move me.

Despite the fact that some stories have dated there are highlights which shrug off the jaded focus of 25 years hence. Rudy Rucker’s story - Tales of Houdini (1983) provides a psychedelically rollicking good time with a fast paced snapshot of the adventures of Houdini from an alternate universe. It’s entertaining and hilarious and made me want to begin reading Rucker’s The Ware Tetralogy (2010) that’s sitting on my shelf as soon as possible.

Solstice (1985) by James Patrick Kelly is perhaps the most complex and thought provoking story in this collection. Cage, a drug artist, famous for his invention of all manner of neurologically inspiring substances, is trying to deal adequately with his bizarre relationship with his cloned daughter. It’s a psychological puzzle, with clues laid out in interludes detailing the history of theories about the origins and uses of Stonehenge. It’s as strange as it sounds and thoroughly mind-bending.

The two most impressive stories come late in the collection. Freezone (1985) by John Shirley features an anachronistic rock ‘n’ roller clad in the leather jacket once worn by John Cale whilst he was in The Velvet Underground. Disillusioned by his flakey band mates he befriends a group of wanted assassins. This story provides a fully realized world that manages to push past its short story boundaries. Stones Lives (1985) by Paul Di Filippo is perhaps the most brilliant story in the collection. The streamlined and intriguing tale of a blind slum dweller given eye implants and a mission to observe is perhaps the most cyberpunk moment here. Stone Lives concludes brilliantly and made me wish that it had been made into a movie just so I could see it all unfold.

Although Mirrorshades is uneven in quality it is an interesting collection, particularly with the benefit of hindsight, but anyone wanting to investigate cyberpunk should read William Gibson’s Neuromancer and other novels like Idoru (1996). He’s certainly not the only great cyberpunk writer; Bruce Stirling, John Shirley and Neale Stephenson (all amongst the original group in the early eighties) also fit that description. However Gibson’s novels are the most succinct representations of cyberpunk.

Whilst Mirrorshades wasn’t the wild ride I wanted it to be, it caused me to investigate what happened to some of the ‘lesser’ names that outshine the bigger names in the collection. Paul Di Filippo took some time to have his first novel published, with Ciphers: A Post-Shannon Rock 'N' Roll Mystery in 1997. Di Filippo has had a steady stream of novels published since and has the lure of an obscure writer just ready for more recognition. James Patrick Kelly has been quite successful, winning the Hugo Award twice in the 1990’s for his novels Think Like a Dinosaur (1995) and for 10¹⁶ to 1 (1999). If they offer the same obtuse stylings as Solstice then they are sure to be entertaining.

The writer that most interests me here is Rudy Rucker (great name). He seems to be a renaissance man - a computer scientist, philosopher and novelist. I’ve encountered him before when I read Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge – edited by Damien Broderick (2008). In a book full of wild and fascinating ideas about what humanity will be like in a million years, Rudy Rucker’s essay stood out as being particularly out there. Rucker riffs on nano-machines interfacing with human consciousness, telepathy and the very earth itself becoming a giant computer and he made it all sound plausible, believe me! As a cyberpunk and transrealist writer I think that he’s the one to read if you like your science fiction books to be intense and bursting with ideas. The Ware Tetralogy seems to fit that description – four novels in one with the first dating back to the early eighties, predating Mirrorshades by four years.