Realware

Ware, Book 4

By: Rudy Rucker

Narrated by: Chris Sorensen

Length: 12 hrs and 5 mins

Publisher's Summary

It's 2054, and Phil Gottner doesn't know where his life is. His girlfriend is hooked on merge, a drug used in "bacteria-style" sex. His father has just been swallowed by a hyperspatial anomaly that materialized from a piece of art designed to project images of four-dimensional objects into three-dimensional space. Then, at the funeral, Phil meets and falls in love with Yoke Starr-Mydol, a young lovely visiting from the Moon.

Spuring Phil's advances, Yoke flies to the Polynesian island of Tonga, where she discovers an alien presence at the bottom of the sea. Calling themselves Metamartians, the aliens offer Yoke an alla, a handheld device that gives its owner the power of mind over matter - which, it turns out, is pretty much like having a magic wand.

But as Phil pursues Yoke, and the altruistic Metamartians distribute more allas, he begins to suspect that his father's disappearance and presumed death are linked to the aliens and their miraculous gift. For it seems that the allas are accompanied by a fourth-dimensional entity known as Om, a godlike being who's taken a special interest in humans. Now Phil and Yoke must solve the mystery of the Metamartians and their god, before humanity uses its newfound powers to destroy itself altogether.

©2010 Rudy Rucker (P)2014 Audible Inc.

When manifesting goes wrong.

When manifesting goes wrong.

A current trend across the dimmer areas of social media is the concept of "manifesting." If you want a healthy relationship in 2022, you "manifest" it. If you want a raise, manifest. If you want a list of passengers on an airplane -- you manifest the eff outta that manifest. In other words, manifesting seems to be nothing more than thinking about what you want.

That's also the basic premise of 2001's "Realware," the final volume in Rucker's "Ware" tetralogy. Here we have aliens introducing to humanity a technology called "allas" which permits them to create anything they can think of with reasonable specificity. The more complex the object, the more specific the thoughts must be to produce a working version. These allas can be used to create both organic, inorganic, rudimentary, and mechanical objects and nearly everything in between.

So in a world where scarcity has been theoretically wiped out, how does a global economy run?
Physical property takes a back seat to intellectual property because if you can think and create anything you want, can't someone else steal your idea? The answer is obviously, yes. Further, what, therefore, is the purpose of government? Or politicians? Or states? Other than war and death, I mean.

The *idea* of the allas on a global scale is fascinating but unfortunately, is not introduced until 4/5 through the novel. Before that, we're still dealing with the fetid quasi-synthetic "moldies" creatures and the human "cheeseballs" that want to have sex with them. The time it takes to reveal the concept of the allas and their ramifications simply takes too long to the point where I found myself losing what little interest I had in the book up to that point.

After 4 books of meatbags, boppers, sentient dildos, and now alien-introduced fantasy Deus Ex Machinas, I think I'm about done with the Ware world. The first two books were intriguing, the third was masturbatory excess, and the fourth had too much of the third before finding an interesting premise too late. Turn this into a trilogy and it's a really solid series. Instead, I was subjected to the notion of self-aware sex toys, and I can't "manifest" that out of my brain.