Software

I came to cyberpunk from an interesting vector: I discovered it through Marvel's 2099 comic series, of all places, and then watched the Matrix, and only after that became aware of authors like Gibson, Cadigan, and Stephenson. So while I've read a lot of cyberpunk, and have a fondness for it as a genre, it's a patchwork sort of fondness, which is why I'd never heard of this until recently, despite it's role as a primum movens within cyberpunk literature (something that William Gibson talks about in the introduction of the edition I read).

Like a lot of science fiction, the philosophical angle to this one is as important to the plot - robot builder Cobb Anderson goes to Mars, has his body broken down, and gets reborn inside a robot shell. Which sounds straightforward, but Rucker also throws in a lot of questions about identity and self in with that - does the robot Cobb still have an essential “Cobbness” to him, even though there's no physical continuation between the two? Is there a “soul” that can be transferred, even if we can transfer things like memories? Even wider than that, is a person still a person when so many of those essential human qualities (the need to sleep, eat, procreate, the fear of death) are taken away from them? It's heady stuff, and like any good philosopher Rucker doesn't completely answer them as much as lay them before the reader for them to provide their own answer.

When reading Software, I think it's important to remember where and when it's coming from - compared to other novels of its cohort(books like 2010, Foundation's Edge, and the Ringworld Engineers) there's a quantum leap of difference in terms of how the book understands technology and our relationship with it that might cause a modern reader to undervalue how important and influential a book like this would have been.