Rudy Rucker’s Software Embodiment

The sheer messiness of flesh and blood (and data and robotics) is essential to Software’s role in the birth of cyberpunk as a genre. The first of the Ware books, Software arrived in 1982, two years before William Gibson’s Neuromancer, four years before Bruce Sterling’s Mirrorshades anthology of cyberpunk short stories, and a full decade before Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Now, there is plenty of software in Software, but ultimately the operative term is the first half of the title, not the second. What’s really at work in this first book isn’t a tale of mere technological singularity — in which data rules supreme, outpacing human cognition, blah blah blah — but quite the contrary, one in which embodiment is explored as the essence of life. How punk is that? That’s from my new essay about Rudy Rucker’s classic early cyberpunk novel Software, which turned out to be the first of four books in a tetralogy (or quartet) that ran for nearly 20 years, from 1982 to 2000. The essay is part of…