Rudy Rucker's Software (Avon Books, 1981) is unusual in the way it imagines human life existing within digital information, and even more unusual in the way it laments the loss of human flaws and limitations which individuals would need to give up in order to live such a carefree existence.

Like most works of cyberpunk science fiction, Software envisions a way of existing and a type of society that runs counter to mainstream society and counter to the natural world. Rucker's vision is a fusion between humans and computers (boppers) which enables humans to be reborn after death, and boppers to live life and create societies much like humans.

Having imagined this futuristic counterculture, Rucker quickly subjects it to examination under a microscope. He envisions any human-bopper fusion as a trade-off, for humans, between boundless potential and human frailty. While this may seem like an easy choice at first, Rucker's writing style and characters problematize it.

One of Rucker's most flawed characters, Sta-Hi, manages to aptly demonstrate what characteristics of natural existence would be lost if humans were to exist like boppers. Over the course of the novel, Sta-Hi's own degeneracy becomes appealing and inexorably tied up in what it means to be human. The novel's counterweight to Sta-Hi is Cobb, who is entirely open to the idea of eternal existence as computerized information. By becoming more like a bopper, Cobb experiences numerous improvements in his quality of life. The conflict between Sta-Hi and Cobb and the overall question of the merits of the human-bopper fusion, thus, become the central conflict in Software. It is a conflict that is so open to different interpretations that it can only be resolved superficially at the close of Rucker's tale.