Software - Softcover

Rucker, Rudy.

3.74

4,230 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140072918 ISBN 13: 9780140072914

Publisher: Penguin, 1985

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Cobb Anderson created the ‘boppers,’ sentient robots that overthrew their human overlords. But now Cobb is just an aging alcoholic waiting to die, and the big boppers are threatening to absorb all of the little boppers–and eventually every human–into a giant, melded consciousness. Some of the little boppers aren’t too keen on the idea, and a full-scale robot revolt is underway on the moon (where the boppers live). Meanwhile, bopper Ralph Numbers wants to give Cobb immortality by letting a big bopper slice up his brain and tape his ‘software.’ It seems like a good idea to Cobb. Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of which (Software and Wetware) both won Philip K. Dick Awards. As his “own alternative to cyberpunk,” Rucker developed a writing style he terms: Transrealism, as outlined in his 1983 essay “The Transrealist Manifesto,” is science fiction based on the author’s own life and immediate perceptions, mixed with fantastic elements that symbolize psychological change. Many of Rucker’s novels and short stories apply these ideas. Rucker often uses his novels to explore scientific or mathematical ideas; White Light examines the concept of infinity, while the Ware Tetralogy (written from 1982 through 2000) is in part an explanation of the use of natural selection to develop software (a subject also developed in his The Hacker and the Ants. His novels also put forward a mystical philosophy that Rucker has summarized in an essay titled, with only a bit of irony, “The Central Teachings of Mysticism”.

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Synopsis:

Life was quiet for the septuagenarian hippies who lived in the Gray Area. But one of them, Cobb Anderson, had more exciting memories than most. Years before, he had built the first robots with free will, and these had evolved into boppers - giant artificial intelligences who ran the moon.

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