Rudy Rucker has written forty books, both pop science and SF novels in the cyberpunk and transreal styles. He received Philip K. Dick awards for his Software and Wetware. He worked as a professor of computer science in Silicon Valley. He paints works relating to his tales. His stories can be read online his Complete Stories webpage. His for coming novel Juicy Ghosts is about telepathy, immortality, and assassinating an evil, insane President who has stolen an election. Rudy blogs at www.rudyrucker.com/blog

The Ware Tetralogy by Rudy Rucker

Your Guide to the 21st Century!

It starts with Software, where rebel robots bring immortality to their human creator by eating his brain. Software won the first Philip K. Dick Award.

In Wetware, the robots decide to start building people—and people get strung out on an insane new drug called merge. This cyberpunk classic garnered a second Philip K. Dick award.

By Freeware, the robots have evolved into soft plastic slugs called moldies­—and some human "cheeseballs" want to have sex with them. The action redoubles when aliens begin arriving in the form of cosmic rays.

And with Realware, the humans and robots find a wormhole with god inside, learn the art of direct matter control, get wacked out as usual—and find true love.

CURATOR'S NOTE

Rudy Rucker is like the Godfather of Cool, inventor of the Boppers, author of the classic Ware series which, hey, guess what? Is right here for you! He's also a mathematician, an artist, a veritable geniu— oh, just read his books: we've included four for the price of one! – Lavie Tidhar

 

REVIEWS

  • "Software (1982), Wetware (1988), Freeware (1997), and Realware (2000)—form an extraordinary cyberweird future history with the heft of an epic fantasy novel and the speed of a quantum processor. Still exuberantly fresh despite their age. Rucker is both witty and serious as he combines hard science and sociology with unrelentingly sharp observations of all self-replicating beings."

    – Publisher's Weekly.

  • "Rudy Rucker is one of the modern heroes of science fiction, one of the original cyberpunks. The early cyberpunks only had a few writers who could be meaningfully called punks — writers like John Shirley and Richard Kadrey — but there was only one who could truly be called cyber: Rudy Rucker. He's a gonzo wildman, someone for whom "trippy" barely scratches the surface. His work is shot through with weird sex, weird drugs, weird brain chemistry, and above all, weird science."

    – Cory Doctorow

  • "Delightfully irreverent. This is science fiction as it should be: authoritative and tightly linked with our real lives and our real future."

    – Washington Post Book World

  • "Eminently satisfying ... intelligent and witty ... what may well have been one of the most important SF series of the past 15 years."

    – Washington Post Book World
 

BOOK PREVIEW

Excerpt

"What do you want?" Sta-Hi said again. "What are you going to do to me?" There were five of them. Three men and two women. One woman had stringy red hair dyed green. The woman he'd picked up was the only one who looked at all middle-class. Bait.

"Y'all want some killah-weed?" drawled one of the men. He had a pimp mustache and a pockmarked face. He wore a chromed tire-chain around his neck with his name in big letters. BERDOO. Also hanging from the chain was a little mesh pouch full of hand-rolled cigarettes.

"Not me," Sta-Hi said. "I'm high on life." No one laughed.

The big man with no shirt came back across the room. He held five cheap steel spoons. "We really gonna do it, Phil?" the girl with green hair asked him. "We really gonna do it?"

Berdoo passed a krystal-joint to his neighbor, a bald man with half his teeth missing. Exactly half the teeth gone, so that one side of the face was flaccid and caved in, while the other was still fresh and beefy. He took a long hit and picked up the machine that was lying on the table.

"Take the lid off, Haf'N'Haf," the chick with the black eye urged. "Open the bastard up."

"We really gonna do it!" the green-haired girl exclaimed, and giggled shrilly. "I ain't never ate no live brain before!"

"It's a stuzzy high, Rainbow," Phil told her. With his fat and his short hair he looked stupid, but his way of speaking was precise and confident. He seemed to be the leader. "This ought to be a good brain, too. Full of chemicals, I imagine."