hil Gottner is a cook with modest ambitions. His quiet routine changes when a seemingly harmless holographic toy devours his father, a famous mathematician. About all that's left of Kurt Gottner is his wedding band, which has become a seamless knot, the inscription a mirror image of the original text. Phil realizes that this could only have happened by manipulating the ring in four physical dimensions. Phil wishes he had listened to his father and studied more math.
At his father's funeral, Phil falls for Yoke Mydol-Starr, a visitor from the lunar colonies. It turns out that Yoke's mother perished under similar circumstances. Phil wants to dump his unfaithful and empathy-impaired girlfriend Kevvie for Yoke, but Yoke hooks up with a shady fellow named Onar. They go to the island kingdom of Tonga, where Onar has been assigned to track down hackers who have been stealing bandwidth from a Tongan communications satellite.
The pirated bandwidth, however, actually encodes the personalities of aliens from a place called, for lack of a better term, Metamars. Once decrypted, the alien "personality waves" are downloaded into bodies made of a bio-engineered and somewhat unpleasant-smelling substance called imipolex.
The Metamartians worship a god named Om, who instructs her followers to give the human race "realware," a technology that enables the manipulation of matter at the subatomic level. Using devices called "allas," people can create virtually anything they want: food, cool clothes, fast cars, guns. Om is a benevolent god, but it seems she hasn't really thought everything through. Realware causes more problems than it solves. Meanwhile, Phil still has issues to work out with his father, dead or alive.
Not your everyday kind of strange
Realware is the fourth and possibly last volume in Rucker's "'Ware" series, which began in 1982 with Software. Strangeness is one of the main attractions of science fiction, and Rucker delivers plenty of it--exotic technologies, a funky future culture, mathematical head trips.
But the strangeness manifests in execution as well as in content. Rucker has a playful, sometimes whimsical, style. His 21st-century slang and technical terminology owe more to Santa Monica surfers than to Silicon Valley geeks.
Stephen King, or even Stephen Baxter, would never have someone devoured by a thing called a "wowo."
Yet Rucker invests his main characters with surprising depth and complexity. Phil suffers from a genetic predisposition to substance abuse, and his commitment to avoiding drugs, alcohol and higher math puts a strain on his relationship with his dissipated but brilliant father. From time to time the novel's often madcap tone becomes unexpectedly serious, even tragic.
Rucker never fails to fascinate and entertain readers, though his plotting could be tighter. The sequence on Tonga goes on for too long before the aliens finally deliver the goods for which readers have been waiting: realware.
Realware can be enjoyed without having read the other novels. Readers might not be exactly sure what an "uvvy" is, but the general idea isn't hard to grasp. Veteran Rucker fans might be surprised by Rucker's focus on sobriety and spirituality. These themes also appear in Rucker's 1999 nonfiction book Saucer Wisdom, which explains exactly what an "uvvy" is.
