Software

Software is the first in a tetralogy by Rudy Rucker - the others are Wetware, Freeware and Realware. All four are available in a one volume edition - the Ware Tetralogy. Like other books by Rucker that I have read, it is a bit strange, but it did hold my interest. Software won the first PKD award.

Cobb Anderson invented robots that appear to have developed sentience. They live on the moon and have continued to "evolve". Now there are little boppers and big boppers - boppers is the name of these sentient robots.

Many years go by and Anderson is old and in bad shape. He is asked to go to the moon and told that the boppers will make him immortal. He goes there with a young drug addict called Sta-Hi and is transformed. The two return and things get really weird - even more so than before. :) You'll never look at Mr. Frostee the same again - trust me.The ending leaves you hanging, but maybe things will be explained somewhere in the three books that follow in the tetralogy - I've just started the second book, so I'm not sure as of yet.

Earth is a real mess in the time of the story, but still recognizable. The characters are very flawed personalities, but I found myself liking them anyway. Plenty food for thought on what makes us who we are. Is it our software?

I'm anxious to find out where the succeeding books will take us.

Do You Speak American? by MacNeil and Cran

Overall, I liked the book, but there were some things about it that I thought were off - which I'll point out as I go here.

There are 8 chapters and an introduction for a total of about 200 pages. The book follows a kind of cross country trip format and looks at the various regional dialects/accents of American English. I'll comment on the chapters that I found the most interesting.

The chapter on Hispanics is of note. The authors claim that the longer particular Hispanics live here, the more they shift to using English. They claim that the reason what we see today looks otherwise is that Hispanic immigration is continuous, so we are always seeing new arrivals - in time, the newbies will be speaking decent English they say. Many people feel that current government policy is making it too easy for new arrivals to get by without learning English, so they won't. We'll see who is right.

It did seem surprising to learn that black English is diverging more than ever from white English. With the end of segregation, it would seem like the opposite would be the case. If the authors are correct, then we have a big problem here.

I'm not sure what to say about the chapter on California. Val Speak was mocked more than adopted as I recall.

The chapter on teaching computers to talk was very interesting. Personally, I hate talking to a computer on the phone, but maybe this will be less weird in future as computers understand what we say to them better than they do now.

There were a few places in the book where political correctness crept in. It is pretty hard to maintain objectivity when this happens. The authors did, however, quote someone making fun of JFK's accent - politically incorrect, perhaps. Was this for balance? :)

The authors spent a lot of time on some regional or ethnic accents and little or none on others. It's not all that clear to me why that was.

There was almost nothing on the New Orleans accents - a shame.

You can hear several different accents when listening to people from New Orleans speak - the Cajun accent is very rare there. Yat is pretty common - like a Brooklyn accent with southern expressions like y'all and dahling (darling).  Some people there speak with a light drawl that is distinct from other southern type accents - mine turned into a variation of this one after we moved to New Orleans when I was in middle school and stayed this way I guess. There are others of course, including the accents of many black people from there. The New Orleans area is not all that large land wise, but many very different accents can be heard there. Not sure why this got so little attention in the book.

I was disappointed in the section describing "Cajun English" - I'm Cajun, so I can have an opinion here. The accent described in the book does exist, but it is much heavier than that of most Cajuns today - even my 95 year old grandmother has a much lighter accent than this. A visit to Mamou does not tell the whole story - which is what the authors seemed to think it would. If you speak to people in southwest Louisiana (Cajun Country), especially younger people in the larger towns, you'll hear a lighter accent as a rule - and even less if they are college graduates, and there are many of these today.

Mixing in French expressions when Cajuns speak English is less common than the book makes it out to be. I will do this from time to time when talking with people I know very well from there - usually when talking about something relating to Louisiana that we find especially amusing or very tragic. We will also tend to pronounce English words with a heavy Cajun accent too at these times as well to make it flow well. But, this is not usual. Enough said.

I guess the big surprise is that the authors conclude that, overall, the speech of Americans is not converging, despite people from all over the country watching the same TV programs, reading the same new feeds, etc for many years now. Seems odd. Will this continue? We'll see.

The book is not all that long and an easy read. Recommended if the topic grabs you.