Wetware

What a wild ride! Seriously!

And I was just thinking that I'd have more boppers and meat-sacks in some sort of wacky adventure.

Little did I know that this would be about boppers making meat-sacks or what it would mean for religion in this wild, wild world.

Things are always changing in these novels. Big changes. Enormous changes. No spoilers, but the results of the whole bopper/human war is really freaky. Rudy Rucker doesn't hold back with his idea storms. He lets it all hang out.

I love it! And by the way, this one has a much tighter plot and the themes are less a drug-infused orgy and more of a brain-melt. Often quite literally a brain-melt for the characters, too! Let's start mixing machine DNA with normal biology, shall we? Roll out show more the machine messiah and other preachers of peace and harmony between all PEOPLE, no matter what they began as or what they became, and then let's roll out the reactionary machine.

Of course.

But what a wild ride! It's the details and the the gorgeous tidbits of a really zany SF future that makes this novel. I stand by my original pronouncement that these should BE a huge Cult favorite. :) We should all be sitting around these books hitting shots and laughing about all the nutty things going on here! show less

On the one hand, a book in which baby-boomer psychedelia and technophilia blossom into an influential transhumanist classic. On the other hand, it's lowbrow Guy Sci Fi full of big boobs jiggling in low gravity and "his penis stiffened". Also, there is tons of unnecessary exposition for some reason. I don't know. It's a wild ride, if you want to take it. But these days, most readers might not.

This review is written with a GPL 3.0 license and the rights contained therein shall supersede all TOS by any and all websites in regards to copying and sharing without proper authorization and permissions. Crossposted at Bookstooge.booklikes.blogspot.wordpress.com by express permission of this reviewer   Synopsis Some years later after Hardware. Sta-Hi is now a Private Investigator, on the moon and drug free after accidentally killing his wife Wendy in a drug induced haze. Humanity has taken over the main Moon city and the boppers have moved underground.   My Thoughts This was just as well written, engaging, funny and seriously psychedelic as the first book.   The boppers have been pushed underground and are trying to survive. One show more group wants to mix bopper and human in a new synthesis called a Meatbopper. They kind of succeed, but don't think through the scenario and so ultimately fail. Which leads a renegade human to invent a "virus" to destroy the boppers. Which in turn leads to a new lifeform of the boppers, kind of like a butterfly coming out of it's chrysalis.   Rucker's mind must be one messed up place to think up the things that happened in this book. And yet at the same time he must have a great mind, for he executes it perfectly. It is kind of scary actually, considering such a dichotomy of mind existing.   I'm not sure I've ever encountered something this odd before. Which is nice, to have a novelty, but I couldn't live on a straight diet of such weirdness. First, I don't want to become that jaded in my reading tastes. And Second, and in all seriousness, Robot/Human sex, even non-graphic, just makes me shudder.   Rating: 3.5 of 5 Stars Author: Rudy Rucker " show less

The cover art (of this edition) pretty much spells out what to expect. You get just what it says on the tin. Rucker is grosser here, and his robots are even more amoral. But he's still got that sense of freshness and charm that carries you through. More weird fun.

A quick one, and he throws out some ideas that were novel at the time. Their freshness still echoes. But the plotting went quite wide of the mark. This is not Neuromancer. I do like the idea of just giving Florida to the old people. :)

He said that people and boppers are the same. It’s really true, but some people don’t like hearing it. Some people even think that sex and skin color matter...

...bottom line is that we’re all information processors

Inclusive thinking by the bopper messiah "A saintly badass."

Another good story, infused with plenty of the philosophy and sensibilities of the 60s culture.