A free ebook version of The Wares Tetralogy is now online at www.rudyrucker.com/wares.

The Prime Books paperback is available in stores and from online booksellers such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell’s Books, and others.

And the commercial ebook version is available for purchase as well. Check out this awesome tome and leave a comment below.

Into the light, my friends, into the light…

The Ware Tetralogy is now in print! I have more info about it with an excerpt and a podcast on an earlier post, “Monkey Brain Feast…Southern Style.”

I’ll drop in some blurbs for the four component novels here:

Software.

One of cyberpunk’s most inventive works.
— Rolling Stone.

Wetware.

Delightfully irreverent. This is science fiction as it should be: authoritative and tightly linked with our real lives and our real future.
— Washington Post Book World.

Freeware.

One of science fiction’s wittiest writers. A genius … a cult hero among discriminating cyberpunkers.
— San Diego Union-Tribune.

Eminently satisfying … intelligent and witty … the climax of what may well have been one of the most important SF series of the past 15 years.
— Washington Post Book World.

Much has been made of Rucker’s affinity with Dick, insofar as they both identify with and honor the common man, and both men write with a lucid simplicity that allows them to convey the weirdest ideas in the easiest to understand form. Rucker wishes — for himself, his characters, and everyone else — the maximum freedom that reality will allow.
— Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine.

It is fast-paced, funny, and celebrates the complexity of the universe without dumbing it down. It adds up to a unique voice in SF, exuberant, vigorous and dense with strange but vividly realized ideas.
— Interzone.

Freeware is a fearlessly weird and very funny romp through a seedy, decadent 21st century America. Rucker’s evocation of the 21st century has an internal logic that provides a firm foundation for his gonzo inventiveness and dark humor.
— San Francisco Chronicle-Examiner.

Realware.

Rucker’s writing is great like the Ramones are great: a genre stripped to its essence, attitude up the wazoo, and cartoon sentiments that reek of identifiable lives and issues. Wild math you can get elsewhere, but no one does the cyber version of beatnik glory quite like Rucker. Rucker does it through sheer emotional force … it’s not his universes, it’s his people and how the relate to each other — and to the spiritual. That’s what Realware has going for it: healing and a calm sense of spirituality.
— New York Review of Science Fiction.

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. Yet Rucker invests his main characters with surprising depth and complexity. From time to time the novel’s often madcap tone becomes unexpectedly serious, even tragic.
— SCIFI.COM

Rucker has written a generational saga that spans sixty years of mind-blowing change. Without sacrificing any of his id-driven wildness, Rucker has developed into a benevolent, all-seeing creator … Realware brings to a fully satisfying conclusion this landmark quartet.
— Isaac Asmiov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Yeah, baby! Be diggin’ on the electric pig!

This weekend we happened to be in the SF Civic Center, and the Juneteenth festival was going on. One of the bands playing was Sila and the Afrofunk Experience . The lead singer, Victor Sila, is from Kenya, the ancestral home of President Obama. The band was great, hypnotic.

Almost the only other white person at this event was the guy running the sound board. It was unusual for me to be quietly sitting with this crowd, kind of liberating. Hardly anyone was eating or drinking anything, not consuming, just relaxing and enjoying the festival.

Later that night we went to a completely different kind of event, the SF Opera’s staging of Wagner’s Walküre, fully four and a half hours long, counting intermissions. During act two, while I was sitting there in my dress shirt, I felt something moving on my skin under my shirt. The next morning I figured out that I’d brought back four ticks from my walks in the woods in Kentucky.

[Downtown Lagrange, Kentucky.]

Wandering around in SF in the afternoon, we went into the Japanese tea garden in Golden Gate Park—if you actually live in the SF area, you tend not to go into this spot very often, as it’s something of a tourist attraction. But if you push through to the back, there a nice tiny Zen rock garden.

Near the garden was a statue of Buddha, with a spiderweb covering his face. That’s kind of where my writing muse is at these days, covered over, inactive. I’m still recovering from finishing the last novel, Jim and the Flims, I guess.

Another walled-off muse is in the Civic Center park—it’s this statue called “Three Heads Six Arms,” and the city has put a fence around it because people were writing graffiti on it, also they’re worried about people climbing on it. Supposedly the fence is temporary, and the web will blow away. Let’s hope so.

I grew up in the countryside east of Louisville, Kentucky. I went back last week to visit with my brother Embry, to attend the funeral of his dear wife Noreen, and to join in the accompanying reunion.

The ceremony was in the old St. Francis in the Fields Church where I went to school from nursery through the third grade. My brother Embry and I sang in the choir there as boys and were confirmed as well. Our father was the assistant minister there in the early 1960s. Our mother’s funeral was at St. Francis too, about twenty years ago. My own little family went to many of Christmas services there with Embry and Noreen.

It’s terrible to see a loved one’s remains go into the ground, and to feel how heedlessly the greater world spins on. A death leaves a hole that’s initially too big to take the measure of, too big and ragged for the bereaved to readily explore.

At the funeral I encountered unexpected faces from the past. A woman who’d been in our neighborhood gang of kids in 1949, and whom I’d admired like a star. One of my brother’s old friends, telling a story about how they’d drag-raced the friend’s Corvette on River Road in 1958. The doctor who had my spleen removed after I ruptured it in 1960.

Kentucky was lovelier than I’d remembered. The early evening sun on the rolling pastures with their tidy fences, the glare of light on the early morning dew, the burgeoning density of the vegetation. I took a few walks in the woods, astounded at the huge, floppy plants, pumped up with rain.

In California, where it hardly rains at all, the plants are fibrous, woody, glazed. In Kentucky, the plants are more like water balloons. Nearly every day we had a thunderstorm, often at night. The flash and boom, the rain falling in sheets.

Before and after the funeral, our assembled families ate endless meals, sitting on the front porch of my brother Embry’s farmhouse. Talking, sometimes laughing, reminiscing, slowly beginning the process of grief.

We had six grandchildren there in all—it was comforting to see the new shoots starting up, the saplings beside the fallen tree. I’m a mastodon compared to the grandchildren, an ice-age behemoth. The Reaper has moved down to my generation.

Funerals are really for the survivors. The departed isn’t there, at least not in any obvious way. But I’m always willing to entertain the long-shot thought that the deceased is on the scene in some form, perhaps as a butterfly, or as a puzzling light at night, or even as an invisible ectoplasm. But in any case, I doubt they’re worried about the formalities. It’s the people they would care about, the loved ones who are there.

We’ll miss you, dear Noreen. You were wonderful.

Bruce Sterling was in town last week, giving a keynote talk at Are2010, that is, Augmented Reality Event, 2010.

He gave an inspiring talk, although I didn’t initially understand all of it. Turns out, AR is hoping to be a next big thing, a cozier and more commerce-driven cousin of the old VR, or virtual reality.

The basic idea in AR is to overlay images over video of the real world around you. Some recidivist types still dream of ultracool bulbous glasses. But it’s more likely you’ll be seeing your AR on the screen of your cellphone—when you hold it up and scan the world around you. The “augmentations” might be labels, ratings, ads, reality-based videogame bric-a-brac, or cultural info. The server uses your phone’s GPS and some image recognition to “know” what you’re pointing the phone at.

Videogame god Will Wright was there too, playing with a camera-equipped helicopter he’d been tweaking as part of his new venture, Stupid Fun Club. Another type of augmented reality would be to “see” through the eyes of a helicopter that you’re guiding around with simple moves of your hands and eyes. This comes close to realizing the “dragonfly cameras” that I’ve written about in my novels Saucer Wisdom and Postsingular.

I was happy to talk SF with Bruce and to be around the technogeeks. Bruce kept checking his Twitter feed every half hour or so, and he talked me into getting an account. I’m not sure how long I’ll keep it up, but I’m finding it interesting for now. If you want to follow my tweets—or find out whose tweets I’m presently following, you can click the button below.

I finished a new painting this week, “Billy’s Book.” As I mentioned in my previous post, the painting is a kind of illustration for Terry Bisson’s cool story collection, Billy’s Book. The twelve panels of my work illustrate twelve of the stories.

Billy’s Book, 40” by 30”, June, 2010. Click here to see larger image.

Terry wanted Billy to be “in” each picture, and at first he wasn’t, but then I had the idea of making some of the icons be stand-ins for Billy. Anything with blonde hair or a green t-shirt “is” Billy, in other words. We’ve got Billy and the Bulldozer, Billy and Spacemen, Billy and the Withc, Billy and the Unicorn, and so on. Actually there’s 14 stories, so I may yet do another painting with two squares only: “Billy’s Book (The Apocrypha)”.