Not many cyberpunk stories take place in seedy Florida retirement communities. Nor do very many of them make robots seem so clunky and primitive--but therein lies the key to a truly brilliant conception of artificial intelligence that only softly surfaces toward the end of the story.1
Is Software an enjoyable read? Not really. Rucker goes deep in imagining his future society and does such an excellent job that it feels really foreign. Sometimes this is a great thing, but in the case of Software I had a hard time getting past it to the story.
You've got these old people who are pretty gross, just sitting around on a dirty beach, drinking sherry and trying to have sex with each other and scrape together enough money for new organs as their own go kaput. And then you've got young people like our hero, Sta-Hi, who live up to their names and spend a lot of time working menial jobs. Government functionaries are referred to as gimmies--a nod to the welfare state in which all this takes place.
There's a pretty horrible scene where some people who like to eat brains--possibly a predilection that stems from hardcore psychoactive substances routinely ingested--try to cut open Sta-Hi's skull but that's about the only well-done body horror in the story.
And then you've got the moon. That's where all the robots are, or more accurately where they were banished to. And they are scraping and scratching around in an equally sordid way, just as you might expect if robots had to get down and dirty and engage in a bit of survivalism--lots of chasing after microchips in a nasty, kind of cannibalistic way.2
You get the sense there's a lot that Rucker isn't telling you, and mostly you feel thankful--which may be an achievement on the writer's part. Occasionally you feel grumpy that he hasn't told you something. If you read it, you might find some interesting thoughts, but you'll probably end up feeling kinda gross.
Footnotes
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It's not a twist or anything, just a really interesting way to think about the evolution of AI and that's why I'm not going to tell you what it is. It's probably the only thing that makes Software worth reading. ↩
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Most stories give artificial intelligences a predator mindset. They act on the world with a clear goal (clear to themselves, even if it isn't clear to the audience). But we never get to see them as prey, and definitely not self-aware of their role as prey. How would robots behave if they knew they were both predator and prey? Rucker tries to create a natural world that includes robots in its food-chain. ↩