Wetware

Rucker, Rudy. Wetware. New York City: Avon, 1988. For translations, awards, and reprints, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of February 2023, available at link here.[1]

Sequel to RR's Software.[[2]] Cyberpunk work dealing with robot rebellion on the moon. Rev. Gregory Feeley, Foundation #43: 99-102. Note RR's "Christmas in Louisville December 24, 2030," Mississippi Review 16.2/3 (1988): 107-121.[3]

See for some AI robot's goal of merging humans with bopper (highly evolved) robots and motif of merging generally. Note that an important group of female-gendered robots speak the English part of their communications after the style of E. A. Poe, and that here we get more specifics on "nursies" and the gorier details of a human being encased in one, having organs removed for transplantations or — only rarely until the "now" of this novel — for removal for extraction and other processing to make a robot with a downloaded consciousness and more or less — potentially much less — individual personality and free will. So: see for a rather E. A. Poe-like suggestion of horror of threatening containment (here: inside a cybernetic device), where the threat includes dissection, sometimes with commercial use of organs. Cf. and contrast Coma and COMA (film).

For the merging of organic and inorganic cf. and contrast the artwork of H.R. Giger's biomechanicals and note that the ambivalence of most of our reactions to cyborg as a next stage of human/machine evolution is thematicized in The Ware Tetralogy and made central to a plot of conflict among humans and various kinds of boppers and bopper individuals over this project that is explicitly, if somewhat comically, called "miscegenation." Note also introduction in Wetware of "moldies": weaponized molds — anyway something in the "molds, yeast, and actinomycetes"[4] camp (with fungi) — adding to the mix of blendings, the microbial. The moldies as something that must be like gigantic (humanoid) colonies go on to a major role later in the tetralogy, and combine efforts with other biocybernetic entities.

Reviewed by David Nixon, Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review Annual for 1988 works, here pp. 374-75, including the nicely-stated summarizing clause, "man creates robot creates robot recreates man" (p. 375).

RDE, finishing, 13Feb23 (15Ap23)