Arbie's Unoriginally Titled Book Blog
It's a blog! Mainly of book reviews.
Currently reading
The Rapture of the Nerds, Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross
I've never read Doctorow before but I've read quite a few Stross novels and this fits squarely in his techno-geek SF vein of novels, quite similar to Accelerando in style, theme and even plot to some extent.
It moves at a ridiculously fast pace (or maybe it just feels like it after the Jane Eyre glacier) and this partially makes up for a number of flaws. The worst two being swearing-as-humour-substitute and lack-of-protagonist-agency. The swearing thing is not something I'd noticed Stross being guilty of previously but you can find some fine examples of it in Iain Banks' novels. Creative insults can be amusing but simple profanity gets dull really fast so it's very easy to over do it.
As for the protagonist, he has to save...something,then something more important...then something even more important...except it's not really him doing it; everybody else is manipulating him. At one point even he complains that he's just cargo...which reminded me of the let-down aspect of Accelerando quite a bit and even one of Sross's Laundry novels (the James Bond one). This approach only really works if the hero turns the tables at some point, which doesn't really happen in any of these three books. It's frustrating because I keep feeling Stross has a great book in him but he always gets something wrong. Grrrrr.
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