The Ware Tetralogy

June 22, 2010 11:53 AM

Rudy Rucker's Ware Tetralogy is now available online under a Creative Commons license. [via Futurismic]
posted by brundlefly (12 comments total)

Awesome, something else for my reading list.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 12:21 PM on June 22, 2010

Brightly-colored drug-induced proto-cyberpunk brain-eating-robot fiction. And that's just the first book!

(I've been following Rucker's blog, and it appears that he got a digital copy of the books by simply grabbing a pirate copy and correcting the typos. How's that for crowdsourcing?)
posted by neckro23 at 12:28 PM on June 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

I had only read Software but thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks for this, very much.
posted by Splunge at 12:36 PM on June 22, 2010

In case anyone is interested, I converted the .rtf into a file you can copy onto your Kindle. You can download it here.
posted by crunchland at 12:49 PM on June 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Read the first two of these deep in my cyber-punk phase about 20 years ago and was blown away by the idea that the unique electrical being/soul of ones' brain might perhaps be uploaded/transferred onto some hardware (or was it a combination of both hardware and "wet" (bio) components) and a sort of end to death might be possible.

My head exploded. Wooff! I still think about it and if and when something like that might be ever possible.
posted by Skygazer at 2:20 PM on June 22, 2010

Obvious-filter: Rucker is trippy.
posted by ovvl at 5:06 PM on June 22, 2010

Thanks for this, brundlefly. Related: Flurb hasn't had a mention for a while.
posted by unliteral at 12:01 AM on June 23, 2010

I sent an email to Rucker, telling him about the kindle version I made. He wrote back, thanking me, but pointing out that there are all sorts of ebook versions available here. In fact, that's a pretty great site, all ways around, if you're an ebook reader.
posted by crunchland at 3:13 AM on June 23, 2010

Why do all of the PDF viewers on Android suck? The best is Adobe's own Reader, but the top line and bottom line are partially obscured by on-screen controls that aren't transparent.

I suppose I'll download the RTF and mangle it into a text or HTML file, but it's irritating that such a basic tool (a reader for PDF e-books that formats the text to the screen) doesn't exist on such a popular platform.
posted by Slap*Happy at 4:59 AM on June 23, 2010

Thanks for the link, crashland. Much better than reading a PDF on my phone.
posted by Eideteker at 12:38 PM on June 23, 2010

Great. After I already hunted down dead tree copies.
posted by Samizdata at 2:27 PM on June 23, 2010

This is a bit off topic, but this is my first time reading an ebook on my iPhone -- or any ebook, period -- and I'm pleasantly surprised. I expected to hate it, but the experience is quite nice, especially for reading in bed.

(I still prefer paper.)
posted by brundlefly at 9:41 AM on June 24, 2010