Now Reading: The Diamond Age

Just Finished: Wetware

All right, so Wetware was recommended by the Paperbackswap recommendation engine. It was originally published in 1988, and I think this shows in the writing, which is strewn with all sorts of futuristic invented slang. It is very easy for such supposedly grungy street talk to come off sounding rather silly and made-up. By the second or third chapter, I was prepared not to like the book, as it seemed somewhat juvenile, as though it were maybe written for young adults. Perhaps the spelled-out accents ("kin ya git mah porse offen the soh-fah?") and SHOUTING IN CAPS gave me this impression. But, it was a short book, so I read on, and the story itself was a bit intriguing, though several characters' storylines seemed to me to suffer from excessive twists.

Now, I don't feel as though I'd read anything new. Rather, I feel as though I'd been looking at a very interesting fossil of a recently extinct common ancestor of a family of modern species. That is, I vaguely recognized various themes and ideas in this book which have since been elaborated upon, refined, and improved by later authors. For example, robot evolution, polymorphic nanotech materials, human-machine hybridization, etc.

In the end, I ended up liking the book a bit after all. I'd be interested in reading the previous and next books in this series at some point.