The concept of cyberpunk is so appealing to me. It's sci-fi with a spin. No dorky, happy space travelers, no dalecks and laser guns--well, not that many laser guns. I immerse myself in it, from anime to movies to everything.
It pains me to say that I have not once read a cyberpunk novel I liked. Philip K. Dick bores me to tears. I have yet to sit through a William Gibson novel. It's as if in order to write cyberpunk you need all flair to be sucked out of your writing. The only cyberpunk I ever liked that involved the printed page was a short story by some unknown approximately a decade ago.
Rudy Rucker's Software was a little better. I actually read it. And while I cannot say that I liked it, I didn't horribly dislike it. That's all you can get from me on the subject--it wasn't bad.
Written when I was a youngin'3 and Ronald Regan was still nursing his gun shot wound, Software takes place, well, now. Um, actually 2 years ago in 2001 when the boppers, a highly intelligent race of robots, catch up with Cobb Anderson, the inventor of true artificial intelligence. They intend to make an offer that he can't refuse. They will give him immortality because he was basically their father. Least they could do, right?
He travels to the moon with a stoned cab driver named Sta-Hi where he is taped (dissected while his memory is taped) and Sta-Hi inadvertently starts a revolution among the regular robots against the big boppers, their oppressors.
This book had all the markings of great cyberpunk. Man merging with machine...A cannibalistic street gang...A cute robot/flight attendant getting drunk by rubbing an electromagnet on her face...An insane religious suicide cult...Violent class struggle...Where could it go wrong?
Baby Boomers and Velcro Shoes.
When I was in high school I read and watched 2001: A Space Odyssey for my English class. What most impressed me about it? The flight attendant on the rocket to the moon was wearing Velcro shoes so that she could walk in zero gravity. Software had that too, and it bothered me. Such a small detail really should be insignificant, but once I lose respect for an author, it's gone.
The other part that I didn't like is how Baby Boomer centric it was. As a Gen X type, the whole baby boomers running the show kind of gets to me. I'm sure people of a younger generation will say the same of mine; it is the way of things.
But in this book, the younger generations took pity on the baby boomers and gave them Florida, where they could live out their lives in their happy hippy ways and party and listen to the Beatles all the time.
Of course this book was written before yuppies happened, so it is natural that it overlooked a few things. But it's written like the baby boomers stopped at '79 and were suddenly transformed to old people in 2001, ignoring the fact that things change and grow. There was no inventiveness to how time passed for them, they were just old but still had a stack of Beatles records on the record player.
In reality, there are probably people legal to drink who don't get the "stack of records" comment.
I understand that he could not have guessed what the 80's held, much less the 90's, but he didn't let them grow to old age, he just put them there just as they were in the time the book was written.
This book had one, amazing redeeming quality though. One thing that actually moved me, one thing that the author foresaw that makes me forgive the Velcro shoes.
Artificial Intelligence.
It is impossible for humans to create a machine that is more intelligent than humans. This is easy; how can you invent something smarter than you are?
Evolution. What Dr. Anderson did to create the boppers and make them intelligent was set up a bunch of programs in an environment where they could evolve. Every once in a while, he would throw in some random variables, corrupt some code, and let them continue to evolve. By doing this, the programs become more and more intelligent and could eventually "think" better than humans.
Why do I love this so much? Because it's true. It's real. This is how they are currently working on artificial intelligence. So all the other flaws in the book, the major piece of engineering in it is what is actually going on in the real world.
Sure, it wasn't enough to make me like the book, but it perhaps kept me from hating it as much as I could have.
It's a good way to blow the afternoon, but overall I'd say find a better cyberpunk author. Then come back and tell me who it is, please!
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