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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the wares-walt dept.

Without checking copyright dates, it was more accurate to describe the Ware Tetralogy as two pairs of books. The compendium begins rather ominously with a family tree and I was concerned that I might have to keep notes of 22 clones or suchlike. Thankfully, this was not the case and it would be easier to describe the story as being centered around one AI researcher and his descendants. However, character names can be quite bizarre. Ralph Numbers is one of the more moderate examples.

The researcher, Cobb Anderson, is a very strong character. From the afterword, it is explained that Cobb Anderson is based upon Rudy Rucker's father. Overall, Rudy Rucker writes exceptionally good father/son or master/apprentice relationships. Despite descriptions to the contrary, I imagined Cobb Anderson and Stan Mooney to be more like the disgraced Walter White and the youthfully impatient Jesse Pinkman from Breaking Bad. This was re-inforced by a particular incident which could have influenced an episode of Breaking Bad.

In addition to write strong relationships, Rudy Rucker writes some of the scariest antagonists. Mr. Frostee is particularly creepy. In the afterword, Rudy Rucker apologises for some of the technical details around Mr. Frostee. No apology is required. The rôle of cults is largely unexplored. Likewise, comic relief is vastly under-used. (Tuthmosis Snooks is particularly under-utilized.)

The Ware Tetralogy forms part of a virtuous circle of science fiction. In addition to the first two books each obtaining the Philip K. Dick Literary Award, the books build upon some of the core ideas from Philip K. Dick and Isaac Asimov. However, it explores placement of self-preservation ahead of subservience in the form of the Three Laws Of Robotics. This leads to an initially inexplicable question of why robots in a ruthlessly Darwinian free-market anarchy would display their internal state so vividly. However, this is all part of a progression of technology and intelligence which progresses over a number of computational substrates.

This is pro-sex, pro-drug trans-humanism. Although, for a mathematician accustomed to abstract thinking, Rudy Rucker writes the most cringeworthy, heteronormative, sex scenes from a cisgender, masculine point-of-view. This is not helped by over-use of "fractal", in particular, when describing pleasure from the increased surface area between two entities which are not on a mammalian substrate. Likewise, one of the many drugs, Merge, is toony enough for it form the basis of a Futurama episode. Thankfully, this is one of Rudy Rucker's more experiemental ideas and it can be ignored without adversely affecting the plot. To get the most from these books, it may be useful to have an understanding of backoff algorithms (such as RFC1191 and TCP Cubic), fractals, Penrose tessellation, cellular automata (and associated use as a computational substrate), Conway Life Gliders, N-dimensional space in the context of Flatland and pop-culture understanding of Lewis Carroll's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass. Of these, the literary references are most beneficial.

Some locations have familiarity: a beach-front hut, a sleazy speak-easy, a grand cavern, a lunar dome and marginal accommodation which could be taken from Total Recall, The Expanse or Babylon5. However, this is vastly preferable to some of the needlessly exotic locations found in an Iain Banks novel, an Eoin Colfer novel or a typical James Bond film.

The structure of each book peaks with one satisfying climax, although, perhaps Book 3 starts slow and finishes fast. It is gripping to the extent that I read Book 1 and 2 in one sitting and was unable to progress significantly into Book 3 due to the exhaustion of reading more than 100,000 words. Book 1 and 3 gain from perculation of the most original ideas but I would happily read another two books which only followed the existing characters and did not introduce further characters or concepts.

Whereas Vernor Vinge's bobbling is explained with some hand-waving about Walsh functions, Rudy Rucker's work has a more rigorous grounding in Penrose tessellation and this is used repeatedly for various plot elements. Although many regarded this a science-fiction fantasy, the subsequent discovery of quasi-crystals gave additional interest and weight to the work. The Ware Tetralogy is of general interest to anyone seeking background considerations about smart structures, IoT, robotics, artificial intelligence and/or sentience. However, Rudy Rucker's direct experience of computers was extremely limited when he began and therefore it should be read mostly in the context of widely disseminated ideas in the popular consciousness.

The Ware Tetralogy with SHA512 of 8a7c87845e207b13a34e8d265f94bdaa6e72242280c356b8bd71ea8e91c78e18f85462eb40b6c8ad36cfc752fe83c52ebf6b8ba469347bd1cd94605b1d966353 is available under a restrictive Creative Commons licence which, under the circumstances of commercial fiction, is extremely generous.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:31PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:31PM (#580802)

    Read all four in paperback, long ago. Other Rudy Rucker books also highly recommended.

  • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:57PM (2 children)

    by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @09:57PM (#580812) Journal

    Damn, I wasn't even know Realware existed! That's how long ago I read what I thought was a trilogy.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:00PM (1 child)

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday October 11 2017, @10:00PM (#580813) Journal

      Also, writing sentences in linear time is for you unenhanced normies!

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:08AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @10:08AM (#581063)

        I need more than linear time — I never measured the time I need to compose them, but, admittedly without further justification rather than just a wild guess, I think it might be O(n log n), where n denotes the length of the sentence, using an appropriate measure like the number of characters, or the number of words (I think the average word length should not factor into the complexity; however my familiarity or non-familiarity with the language may well do so) — to write sentences, therefore I conclude that, assuming that, despite lack of any supporting evidence, your claim is true, I must not be an unenhanced normie, which of course leaves the question open, which of the other obvious alternatives — enhanced normie, unenhanced non-normie or enhanced non-normie — applies to me, assuming that those are indeed, as seems plausible but is, thanks to the frequent lack of logic in natural languages, not certain, the available options.

        But I'm sure you'll need more time to understand the above sentence than I needed to write it. ;-)

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @04:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 12 2017, @04:55PM (#581214)

    Rucker is an arrogant ass and it comes through in his writing.