Appreciating Rudy Rucker's Wetware on Creative Commons's 10th birthday

It's Creative Commons's 10th birthday, and they've asked people to write short essays on their favorite pieces of CC-licensed media. I chose Rudy Rucker's extraordinary Wetware books:

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.

The Ware Tetralogy is comprised of four novels written between 1982 and 2000, and I gobbled them up as they came out. They describe a future dominated by intensely weird and eerily scientifically plausible self-modifying cluster organisms that use evolutionary algorithms to bud offspring, rising to contend with humanity for dominance of the Earth and its envrions. They also get very, very high. On math. And they screw. A lot. Not like weasels. Not, in fact, like anything. Because Rudy Rucker is NOT LIKE ANYTHING.

#cc10 Featured Content: Cory Doctorow on Rudy Rucker

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

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http://twitter.com/murwiz Jeff Boes

Bah, the ePub link is dead.
http://twitter.com/murwiz Jeff Boes

Found it at http://manybooks.net/_scripts/send.php?tid=ruckerrother10rucker_ware_tetralogy_cc2010&book=1:epub:.epub:epub
- http://twitter.com/beep54orama B E Pratt
  
  Wow! Thanks. Was not at ALL expecting that link to cough up the entire tetra-logy!
http://twitter.com/writebastard Ian Wood

Also, all of his short stories are here.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000444450214 Genre Slur

Rudy Rucker is in my top five writer’s circle. Sturgeon being number one…