Trust me... the Rucker 'ware series will keep you laughing. There's not a lot of technojargon. He took the star trek approch (make up a word to describe what you're doing without and scientific basis).

Robot are called Boppers. They are on the moon. They mine. They started to build newer versions of themselves. They got smart.

Brain transfers, intellegent mold & fungus, drug use and a lot of oddness from book to book.

They're not real long books either. Very light reading, as oppose dto White Light which hurt. Spaceland my GF who is 100% NON GEEK read and was able to follow and enjoy.

--S

o0o0o0o then I'm totally interested!

--S

"the idea that Gibson (at least I think it was Gibson) invented called "sim-stim", where normal people can put on VR and see, touch and feel all the sensations of the "sim-stim" stars"

This idea was appropriated by the film "Strange Days," but the first place I ever saw such a concept was in the movie "Brainstorm," the final Natalie Wood appearance. "Brainstorm" came out one year before Gibson's first novel, "Neuromancer." The concept has been around longer than either, I'm sure. Philip K. Dick has quite a few similar scenarios in many of his works in which reality is perfectly simulated; the one that has such a "first-person" VR experience would probably be "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch," in which users can, via a drug called Can-D, "translate" themselves into being Perky Pat or her boyfriend Walt.

So to say Gibson "invented" it is dubious at best. Better to say he "borrowed" it.

To comment on some previous posts:

If you're going to read "To say nothing of the dog" by Willis, it helps to read "three men in a boat" by Jerome K. Jerome first. It's kind of an updated sci-fi homage to that book.

I second the recommendation for Ken MacLeod. The Star Faction, or the other three books in that series (Stone Canal, Cassini Division, Sky Road) are not at all "light" sci-fi or cyberpunk. There is a lot of people arguing about socialism vs. capitalism in pubs, and the implications of social theory on how people interact with technology. But they are great books. Stone Canal and Cassini Division are his two best books, and you don't have to read them in order. Star Fraction can be a little weak and heady for long stretches, and I usually give friends Canal or Cassini to start them off.

If you're looking for light, tongue in cheek affair, I'd go with Ribofunk by Paul DiFillipo, Headcrash by Bruce Bethke, and Sewer, Gas, and Electric by Matt Ruff. You would want to read Snowcrash before reading Headcrash.

The call for Rudy Rucker is a good one, in that it is funny and bounces along, but I was only really with him for the first couple of books. He kind of lost me with the intelligent mold. the books were still light and funny, but they stopped making that much sense. And if you want to read White Light by Rucker, it really helps to have read the flatland books and have a working knowledge of cantor's theorems of higher orders of infinity. There's a good nonfiction book out there about Cantor's theorems that I got out of the library. I think that Aleph is in the title.

A really good starting point is the Mirrorshades anthology edited by Bruce Sterling. Cyberpunk short stories, and if you like a particular author you can follow up. That's how I found DiFillipo.