Book review
May. 8th, 2013 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
riontelFinally (after nearly a month!) finished Rudy Rucker's Ware Tetralogy. It's made up of four books (yeah, duhh): Software, Wetware, Freeware and Realware. Rucker is considered to be one of the founder of cyberpunk but I am guessing not on the basis of this series, as it's much more about robotics than cyberspace. Though there were plenty of punks. And lots of drugs. And some extremely psychedelic dialogs and actions. And all written in these short, choppy sentences made up of simple words. Hemingwayesque like. Except that Rucker likes the word copacetic quite a bit.
Rucker is a mathematician and a computer scientist so his evolution of robotics and descriptions of various related aspects of technology are quite interesting and sound, his uninspired writing style notwithstanding. But the characters are annoying, irritating, illogical and act stoned most of the time, probably because most of them are stoned most of the time. The books were written over the period of twenty years and the progression of author's opinions on certain things are fairly clear. It looks like by the last book he discovered that drugs might not be that great for you. He also seems to have discovered god at the same time and decided to share that revelation with the readers. Gods in a science fiction book are appalling unless it's Zelazny's Lord of Light. So, the first three books while not well written at least have some good science fiction ideas, the last one is a complete nonsense, repetitive, preachy and suddenly corny and mushy.
Rucker is a mathematician and a computer scientist so his evolution of robotics and descriptions of various related aspects of technology are quite interesting and sound, his uninspired writing style notwithstanding. But the characters are annoying, irritating, illogical and act stoned most of the time, probably because most of them are stoned most of the time. The books were written over the period of twenty years and the progression of author's opinions on certain things are fairly clear. It looks like by the last book he discovered that drugs might not be that great for you. He also seems to have discovered god at the same time and decided to share that revelation with the readers. Gods in a science fiction book are appalling unless it's Zelazny's Lord of Light. So, the first three books while not well written at least have some good science fiction ideas, the last one is a complete nonsense, repetitive, preachy and suddenly corny and mushy.
