The Ware Tetralogy

"Rucker’s four Ware novels—Software, Wetware , Freeware , and Realware—form an extraordinary cyberweird future history with the heft of an epic fantasy novel and the speed of a quantum processor. Still exuberantly fresh despite their age, they primarily follow two characters (and their descendants): Cobb Anderson, who instigated the first robot revolution and is offered immortality by his grateful “children,” and stoner Sta-Hi Mooney, who (against his impaired better judgment) becomes an important figure in robot-human relations. Over several generations, humans, robots, drugs, and society evolve, but even weird drugs and the wisdom gathered from interstellar signals won’t stop them from making the same old mistakes in new ways. Rucker is both witty and serious as he combines hard science and sociology with unrelentingly sharp observations of all self-replicating beings. This classic series well deserves its omnibus repackaging, particularly suitable for libraries." — Publisher's Weekly. "Rudy Rucker is one of the modern heroes of science fiction, one of the original cyberpunks. The early cyberpunks only had a few writers who could be meaningfully called punks — writers like John Shirley and Richard Kadrey — but there was only one who could truly be called cyber: Rudy Rucker. Rucker is a mad professor, a mathematician and computer scientist with a serious, scholarly interest in the limits of computation and the physics and mathematics of higher-dimension geometry. But that’s just about the only thing you can describe as 'serious' when it comes to Rucker. He’s a gonzo wildman, someone for whom 'trippy' barely scratches the surface. His work is shot through with weird sex, weird drugs, weird brain chemistry, and above all, weird science." — Cory Doctorow