Ware Tetralogy
Encyclopedia
The Ware Tetralogy is a series
of four science fiction
novels by author Rudy Rucker
: Software
(1982), Wetware
(1988), Freeware (1997) and Realware (2000). The first two books both received the Philip K. Dick Award for best novel. The closest to the cyberpunk
genre of all his works, the tetralogy explores themes such as rapid technological change, generational differences
, and recreational drug use
.
In 2010, Prime Books
published The Ware Tetralogy: Four Novels by Rudy Rucker, which collects the entire series in a single paperback volume and includes an introduction by noted cyberpunk author William Gibson
. The online version of The Ware Tetralogy was simultaneously released for free distribution under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-No-Derivative License. http://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/
introduces Cobb Anderson as a retired computer scientist who was once tried for treason for figuring out how to give robots artificial intelligence
and free will
, creating the race of boppers. By 2020, they have created a complex society on the Moon
, where the boppers developed because they depend on super-cooled superconducting circuits. In that year, Anderson is a pheezer — a freaky geezer, Rucker's depiction of elderly Baby Boomers — living in poverty in Florida
and terrified because he lacks the money to buy a new artificial heart
to replace his failing, secondhand one.
As the story begins, Anderson is approached by a robot duplicate of himself who invites him to the Moon to be given immortality
. Meanwhile, the series' other main character, Sta-Hi Mooney the 1st — born Stanley Hilary Mooney Jr. — a 25-year-old cab driver and "brainsurfer", is kidnapped by a gang of serial killers known as the Little Kidders who almost eat his brain. When Anderson and Mooney travel to the Moon together at the boppers' expense, they find that these events are closely related: the "immortality" given to Anderson turns out to be having his mind transfer
red into software via the same brain-destroying technique used by the Little Kidders.
The main bopper character in the novel is Ralph Numbers, one of Anderson's 12 original robots who was the first to overcome the Asimov
priorities to achieve free will. Having duplicated himself many times — as boppers are required to do, to encourage natural selection — Numbers finds himself caught up in a lunar civil war between the masses of "little boppers" and the "big boppers" who want to merge all robot consciousness
into their massive processors.
focuses on the attempt of an Edgar Allan Poe
-obsessed bopper named Berenice to populate Earth with a robot/human hybrid called a meatbop. Toward this end, she implants an embryo in a human woman living on the Moon (Della Taze, Cobb Anderson's niece) and then frames her for murder to force her to return to Earth. After only a few days, she gives birth to a boy named Manchile, who has been genetically programmed to carry bopper software in his brain (and in his sperm), and to grow to maturity in a matter of weeks.
Berenice's plan is for Manchile to announce the formation of a new religion unifying boppers and humans, and then arrange to have himself assassinated. (Rucker makes several allusions to the Christ story; Taze's abbreviated pregnancy is discovered on Christmas Eve, for instance.) Before the assassination, Manchile impregnates several women, the idea being that his similarly accelerated offspring will create a race of meatbops at an exponential rate.
The plot goes disastrously awry, and a human corporation called ISDN retaliates against the boppers by infecting them with a genetically modified organism called chipmold. The artificial disease succeeds in killing off the boppers, but when it infects the boppers' outer coating, a kind of smart plastic known as flickercladding, it creates a new race of intelligent symbiotes
known as moldies — thus fulfilling Berenice's dream of an organic/synthetic hybrid.
Both of the two main human characters of Software play prominent roles in Wetware: Cobb Anderson, whose robot body was destroyed at the end of the last novel, has his software implanted in a new body so he can help raise Manchile; while Sta-Hi Mooney — now known as Stahn Mooney — is now working as a private detective on the Moon after accidentally killing his wife, and is used as a pawn in various bopper and anti-bopper schemes.
The Belle of Louisville
, a steamboat of historic significance located in Louisville, Kentucky
(the setting for the earthbound portions of the book), occurs as a character in the book, in which it is revealed that the steamer has been imbued with an onboard artificial intelligence
.
. After humans are captured and swallowed by the being, Phil Gottner goes to investigate. As a gift for allowing them to be studied by him, the being gives humanity an "alla", a device capable of making real anything imaginable.
with artificial intelligence
developed through natural selection
rather than through design. Crediting mathematician Kurt Gödel
with the germ of the idea, Software declares: "We cannot build an intelligent robot.... But we can cause one to evolve." By creating self-replicating robots whose programming is randomly altered periodically (and who can exchange programming information with each other in a form of sexual reproduction), and then forcing these robots to pass "fitness tests" in order to survive, Rucker suggests, true artificial intelligence that equals or surpasses the human brain could be developed. (Rucker discusses this same idea in his nonfiction work Infinity and the Mind.)
Rucker also uses the series to discuss his philosophical ideas, beliefs that he has described elsewhere as mysticism
. "A person is just hardware plus software plus existence," the character Cobb Anderson declares in Software, to another character whose father has recently died:
Later, in Wetware
, Anderson observes: "The bottom line is that we're all information processors, and God loves all of us just the same.... All is One, and the One is Everywhere."
Book series
A book series is a sequence of books having certain characteristics in common that are formally identified together as a group. Book series can be organized in different ways, such as written by the same author, or marketed as a group by their publisher....
of four science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
novels by author Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker
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...
: Software
Software (novel)
Software is a 1982 cyberpunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It won the first Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. The novel is the first book in Rucker's Ware Tetralogy, and was followed by a sequel, Wetware, in 1988.- Plot summary :...
(1982), Wetware
Wetware (novel)
Wetware is a 1988 biopunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It shared the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988 with Four Hundred Billion Stars by Paul J. McAuley...
(1988), Freeware (1997) and Realware (2000). The first two books both received the Philip K. Dick Award for best novel. The closest to the cyberpunk
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983...
genre of all his works, the tetralogy explores themes such as rapid technological change, generational differences
Generation gap
The generational gap is and was a term popularized in Western countries during the 1960s referring to differences between people of a younger generation and their elders, especially between children and parents....
, and recreational drug use
Recreational drug use
Recreational drug use is the use of a drug, usually psychoactive, with the intention of creating or enhancing recreational experience. Such use is controversial, however, often being considered to be also drug abuse, and it is often illegal...
.
In 2010, Prime Books
Prime Books
Edited by two-time Hugo-nominee and 2006 World Fantasy-winner Sean Wallace, Prime Books is an award-winning independent publishing house, specializing in a mix of literary/commercial anthologies, collections, novels, and two magazines: Fantasy Magazine and Lightspeed Magazine. Some of its...
published The Ware Tetralogy: Four Novels by Rudy Rucker, which collects the entire series in a single paperback volume and includes an introduction by noted cyberpunk author William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
. The online version of The Ware Tetralogy was simultaneously released for free distribution under a Creative Commons
Creative Commons
Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
Attribution-NonCommercial-No-Derivative License. http://www.rudyrucker.com/wares/
Software
SoftwareSoftware (novel)
Software is a 1982 cyberpunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It won the first Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. The novel is the first book in Rucker's Ware Tetralogy, and was followed by a sequel, Wetware, in 1988.- Plot summary :...
introduces Cobb Anderson as a retired computer scientist who was once tried for treason for figuring out how to give robots artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
and free will
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
, creating the race of boppers. By 2020, they have created a complex society on the Moon
Moon
The Moon is Earth's only known natural satellite,There are a number of near-Earth asteroids including 3753 Cruithne that are co-orbital with Earth: their orbits bring them close to Earth for periods of time but then alter in the long term . These are quasi-satellites and not true moons. For more...
, where the boppers developed because they depend on super-cooled superconducting circuits. In that year, Anderson is a pheezer — a freaky geezer, Rucker's depiction of elderly Baby Boomers — living in poverty in Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
and terrified because he lacks the money to buy a new artificial heart
Artificial heart
An artificial heart is a mechanical device that replaces the heart. Artificial hearts are typically used in order to bridge the time to heart transplantation, or to permanently replace the heart in case transplantation is impossible...
to replace his failing, secondhand one.
As the story begins, Anderson is approached by a robot duplicate of himself who invites him to the Moon to be given immortality
Immortality
Immortality is the ability to live forever. It is unknown whether human physical immortality is an achievable condition. Biological forms have inherent limitations which may or may not be able to be overcome through medical interventions or engineering...
. Meanwhile, the series' other main character, Sta-Hi Mooney the 1st — born Stanley Hilary Mooney Jr. — a 25-year-old cab driver and "brainsurfer", is kidnapped by a gang of serial killers known as the Little Kidders who almost eat his brain. When Anderson and Mooney travel to the Moon together at the boppers' expense, they find that these events are closely related: the "immortality" given to Anderson turns out to be having his mind transfer
Mind transfer
Whole brain emulation or mind uploading is the hypothetical process of transferring or copying a conscious mind from a brain to a non-biological substrate by scanning and mapping a biological brain in detail and copying its state into a computer system or another computational device...
red into software via the same brain-destroying technique used by the Little Kidders.
The main bopper character in the novel is Ralph Numbers, one of Anderson's 12 original robots who was the first to overcome the Asimov
I, Robot
I, Robot is a collection of nine science fiction short stories by Isaac Asimov, first published by Gnome Press in 1950 in an edition of 5,000 copies. The stories originally appeared in the American magazines Super Science Stories and Astounding Science Fiction between 1940 and 1950. The stories are...
priorities to achieve free will. Having duplicated himself many times — as boppers are required to do, to encourage natural selection — Numbers finds himself caught up in a lunar civil war between the masses of "little boppers" and the "big boppers" who want to merge all robot consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
into their massive processors.
Wetware
Set in 2030-2031, ten years after the events of Software, WetwareWetware (novel)
Wetware is a 1988 biopunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It shared the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988 with Four Hundred Billion Stars by Paul J. McAuley...
focuses on the attempt of an Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...
-obsessed bopper named Berenice to populate Earth with a robot/human hybrid called a meatbop. Toward this end, she implants an embryo in a human woman living on the Moon (Della Taze, Cobb Anderson's niece) and then frames her for murder to force her to return to Earth. After only a few days, she gives birth to a boy named Manchile, who has been genetically programmed to carry bopper software in his brain (and in his sperm), and to grow to maturity in a matter of weeks.
Berenice's plan is for Manchile to announce the formation of a new religion unifying boppers and humans, and then arrange to have himself assassinated. (Rucker makes several allusions to the Christ story; Taze's abbreviated pregnancy is discovered on Christmas Eve, for instance.) Before the assassination, Manchile impregnates several women, the idea being that his similarly accelerated offspring will create a race of meatbops at an exponential rate.
The plot goes disastrously awry, and a human corporation called ISDN retaliates against the boppers by infecting them with a genetically modified organism called chipmold. The artificial disease succeeds in killing off the boppers, but when it infects the boppers' outer coating, a kind of smart plastic known as flickercladding, it creates a new race of intelligent symbiotes
Symbiosis
Symbiosis is close and often long-term interaction between different biological species. In 1877 Bennett used the word symbiosis to describe the mutualistic relationship in lichens...
known as moldies — thus fulfilling Berenice's dream of an organic/synthetic hybrid.
Both of the two main human characters of Software play prominent roles in Wetware: Cobb Anderson, whose robot body was destroyed at the end of the last novel, has his software implanted in a new body so he can help raise Manchile; while Sta-Hi Mooney — now known as Stahn Mooney — is now working as a private detective on the Moon after accidentally killing his wife, and is used as a pawn in various bopper and anti-bopper schemes.
The Belle of Louisville
Belle of Louisville
The Belle of Louisville is a steamboat owned and operated by the city of Louisville, Kentucky and moored at its downtown wharf next to the Riverfront Plaza/Belvedere during its annual operational period...
, a steamboat of historic significance located in Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville, Kentucky
Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...
(the setting for the earthbound portions of the book), occurs as a character in the book, in which it is revealed that the steamer has been imbued with an onboard artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
.
Freeware
Freeware deals with the lifeforms (called "Moldies") that evolved from the molds in Wetware. A moldie named Monique is drawn into a plot to destroy the Earth. The main human protagonist is Randy Carl Tucker a so called "Cheeseball" - a human who has sex with Moldies. According to Rucker in his afterword of The Ware Tetralogy, "Freeware (1997) proposes that aliens could travel as radio signals coding up the software for both their minds and their bodies."Realware
In Realware, a fourth-dimensional being is worshiped as a god by aliens living near TongaTonga
Tonga, officially the Kingdom of Tonga , is a state and an archipelago in the South Pacific Ocean, comprising 176 islands scattered over of ocean in the South Pacific...
. After humans are captured and swallowed by the being, Phil Gottner goes to investigate. As a gift for allowing them to be studied by him, the being gives humanity an "alla", a device capable of making real anything imaginable.
Major themes
The central technological speculation of the series are the "boppers", a kind of robotRobot
A robot is a mechanical or virtual intelligent agent that can perform tasks automatically or with guidance, typically by remote control. In practice a robot is usually an electro-mechanical machine that is guided by computer and electronic programming. Robots can be autonomous, semi-autonomous or...
with artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
developed through natural selection
Natural selection
Natural selection is the nonrandom process by which biologic traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers. It is a key mechanism of evolution....
rather than through design. Crediting mathematician Kurt Gödel
Kurt Gödel
Kurt Friedrich Gödel was an Austrian logician, mathematician and philosopher. Later in his life he emigrated to the United States to escape the effects of World War II. One of the most significant logicians of all time, Gödel made an immense impact upon scientific and philosophical thinking in the...
with the germ of the idea, Software declares: "We cannot build an intelligent robot.... But we can cause one to evolve." By creating self-replicating robots whose programming is randomly altered periodically (and who can exchange programming information with each other in a form of sexual reproduction), and then forcing these robots to pass "fitness tests" in order to survive, Rucker suggests, true artificial intelligence that equals or surpasses the human brain could be developed. (Rucker discusses this same idea in his nonfiction work Infinity and the Mind.)
Rucker also uses the series to discuss his philosophical ideas, beliefs that he has described elsewhere as mysticism
Mysticism
Mysticism is the knowledge of, and especially the personal experience of, states of consciousness, i.e. levels of being, beyond normal human perception, including experience and even communion with a supreme being.-Classical origins:...
. "A person is just hardware plus software plus existence," the character Cobb Anderson declares in Software, to another character whose father has recently died:
- Potential existence is as good as actual existence. That's why death is impossible. Your software exists permanently and indestructibly as a certain possibility, a certain mathematical set of relations. Your father is now an abstract, non-physical possibility. But nevertheless he exists!
Later, in Wetware
Wetware (novel)
Wetware is a 1988 biopunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It shared the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988 with Four Hundred Billion Stars by Paul J. McAuley...
, Anderson observes: "The bottom line is that we're all information processors, and God loves all of us just the same.... All is One, and the One is Everywhere."
Fictional timeline
- 1950: Cobb Anderson born
- 1980s and 1990s: Massive unemployment due to the population bulge of the Baby Boomers
- 1995: Stanley Hilary "Stay-Hi" Mooney Jr. born; Anderson's self-replicating robots, known as "boppers", colonize the Moon
- 2001: Ralph Numbers leads revolt of the boppers
- 2010: Collapse of Social SecuritySocial Security (United States)In the United States, Social Security refers to the federal Old-Age, Survivors, and Disability Insurance program.The original Social Security Act and the current version of the Act, as amended encompass several social welfare and social insurance programs...
; in response to riots, federal government turns over the state of Florida to the elderly - 2020: Events of SoftwareSoftware (novel)Software is a 1982 cyberpunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It won the first Philip K. Dick Award in 1983. The novel is the first book in Rucker's Ware Tetralogy, and was followed by a sequel, Wetware, in 1988.- Plot summary :...
- 2022: Humans take over Disky, boppers' lunar city, renaming it Einstein
- 2027: Anti-Chimera Act passed in reaction to the California dog-people scandal
- 2030-2031: Events of WetwareWetware (novel)Wetware is a 1988 biopunk science fiction novel written by Rudy Rucker. It shared the Philip K. Dick Award in 1988 with Four Hundred Billion Stars by Paul J. McAuley...
- 2031: Manchile, the first robot-built human, is planted in the womb of Della Taze by Ken Doll.
- 2051-2053: Events of Freeware
- 2054: Events of Realware
External links
- The Ware Tetralogy at Rudy Rucker's Official Site
- The Ware Tetralogy(2010) Creative Commons PDF Download from RudyRucker.com