A while back, Rudy Rucker's massive four novel Ware series migrated out of the cat bookstore and onto my shelf, likely because I saw it had won the Philip K. Dick award. Remind me that not all awards are created equal. It's not that the first two novels in the series (Software and Wetware) aren't fairly entertaining sci-fi on the Philip K. Dick cyberpunk model -- but award winning? They just didn't seem to me to have that much going for them either in the domain of unexpected ideas or in terms of writing craft. I mean, our brains are just software, man! Maybe kinda prescient in 1982? But not an idea that's explored here from a philosophical angle. And while the very PKD concept of describing futuristic drug highs is interesting in concept, it turns out that describing any drug high is actually kinda boring. Just ask your stoner friends to tell you about their last epic trip. Let me guess, it was crazy! So crazy they spent the whole time giggling on the couch. Getting high might be fun, but reading about it isn't. More interesting would be the action of the second novel, where the 'bopper' robots are killed off by a strain of "chipmold" that decimates all silicon before creating a newly intelligent symbiotic fusion with a type of plastic called 'moldies'. Wetware is surely the high point of the collection, and has the most interesting characters and twists and turns.
After that, things go downhill in pretty much every way. I have the impression that after his earlier success, Rucker decided he was 'a writer', and so when he returns ten years later to continue the saga, we find a less interesting story saddled with much more florid prose and a bunch of irrelevant gossip that I suppose one would file under 'character development'. Rucker should have stuck with his hardboiled pulp fiction style all the way. Judging from the first two books, the results might still have been of uneven quality, but at least this would have fit with the spirit of the award.
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