Ware

It was Cobb Anderson who built the "boppers" - the first robots with real brains. Now, in 2020, Cobb is just another aged "pheezer" with a bad heart, drinking and grooving on the old tunes in Florida retirement hell. His "bops" have come a long way, though, rebelling against their subjugation to set up their own society on the moon. And now they're offering creator Cobb immortality but at a stiff price: his body his soul... and his world.

In 2030, bopper robots in their lunar refuge have found a way to infuse DNA wetware with their own software code. The result is a new lifeform: the meatbop. Fair is fair, after all. Humans built the boppers, now bops are building humans... sort of. It's all part of an insidious plot that's about to ensnare Della Taze - who doesn't think she killed her lover while in drug-induced ecstasy - but isn't sure.

The Godfather of cyberpunk - a mad scientist bravely meddling in the outrageous and heretical - Rucker created Bopper Robots, who rebelled against human society in his award-winning classic Software. Now, in 2953, "moldies" are the latest robotic advancement - evolved artificial lifeforms made of soft plastic and gene-tweaked molds and algae, so anatomically inventive and universally despised that their very presence on the planet has thrown the entire low-rent future into a serious tailspin.

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.