SOJALS rating:

Mediocre (2/5)

I first read this in 1987 and most recently on the 10th January 2002

Cobb Anderson invented the intelligent, self-aware robots known as the Boppers. Sadly the Boppers rebelled and escaped to the moon to set up their own society. Meanwhile, back on Earth, Anderson was demonized, treated as a traitor to the human race.

Now twenty years later, Anderson is an old man, a controlled alcoholic, living in a Florida retirement home, waiting for his aged and damaged heart to give out.

Meanwhile on the moon, three big boppers have been quietly gaining control. Now they're getting bigger by subsuming smaller boppers into their storage banks, denying them independent existence. The big boppers have discovered that this works even better with human brains.

The small independent boppers have rebelled against this dictatorship by the big three. Now There's a full scale civil war going on, and the big boys are losing, at least for the moment.

So when a Bopper representative of one of the three monster AIs smuggles itself to Earth just to contact Anderson face to face, Anderson knows it must be something momentous.

This was surprisingly good. For some reason I expected a more black, a more down-and-dirty cyberpunk, from Rudy Rucker than this simple but exciting tale of robotic rights and revolution.

I rather enjoyed Rucker's characters, in particular, Sta High, both the real dude and the robot replica, was very entertaining.