This book would get tons of upvotes in the right circles if you covered up the name, I am sure. Here you have Benito Mussolini citing Marx, defending This book would get tons of upvotes in the right circles if you covered up the name, I am sure. Here you have Benito Mussolini citing Marx, defending progressivism and decrying the "Dark Middle Ages". It's like he wrote this just to show folks in the future that everything they thought they knew about him was dead-wrong....more
**spoiler alert** 2.5 stars. I really didn't like this story. Good things first: The crustacean KGB-AI, the idea of uplifting and then uploading anima**spoiler alert** 2.5 stars. I really didn't like this story. Good things first: The crustacean KGB-AI, the idea of uplifting and then uploading animals and the way the topic of human rights for said animal-uploads was handled were great. If only the story had focused on them, instead of trying to give the spotlight to what feels like a dozen plot points and items at the same time. Needless to say, spotlights don't work that way. In just over twenty pages, Charles Stross tried to deal with the aforementioned speculative issues, delivered jabs against both anarchocapitalism and communism (neither was interesting), talked about alien intelligence, post-scarcity economics and abuse of the IP laws of the future, discussed whether tax responsibility and romantic responsibility are comparable (an issue he never resolved) and whether we should terraform Mars or turn everything into computronium. There's a particularly terrible romance subplot too, which was resolved with a gratitious BDSM-rape scene and the threat of paralyzing the protagonist for life. Speaking of which, the protagonist was completely forgettable, and so was his ex. So was everyone besides the lobster-KGB-AI-refugee, who almost pushed this story up to three stars for me, but sadly, that's not enough.
Lastly, some of the prose - including the technobabble - is pretty bad:
The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays.
She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: she’s got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex.
This is what it’s like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neurone disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD. I could spike you with MPPP and you’d stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you’d like that?
My problem here is not that this is incoherent. I'm sure Stross knows his science. Nor do I find it too hard to understand. I know what a hypothalamus is and I quickly figured out what a metacortex is supposed to be. Besides, I can enjoy similar levels of technobabble in the works of Peter Watts. However, in Watts' stories, it feels far less gratitious. I don't know why that is, but it's nevertheless my impression....more
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