Notes on 'Software' (1982) by Rudy Rucker (b. 1946)
Software is a pioneering work of proto-cyberpunk that envisions an anarchic, absurdist world of sentient machines. The opening novel in Rudy Rucker’s Ware tetralogy (1982–2000), it follows a handful of West Coast countercultural families whose haphazard, often accidental encounters with rapid technological change gradually propel the series towards pure technological transcendence. Software won the Philip K. Dick Award in 1983.