Saturday, January 30, 2010

This month in Sci-Fi

Accelerando (Singularity) by Charles Stross:
Charles Stross has made a complete hash of what would've been a fantastic novel on the Singularity. You are subjected to such copious amounts of techno-babble that would put even a Gartner or Forrester analyst on a Redbull+coffee over dose to shame. IP network protocol stack, Java Ring etc etc and so much of such page after page of noise that I didn't bother to read all pages. If only he had stuck to the stars powering giant AIs and brown dwarves..it would've been a nice novel.

It left such a bad after taste that I had to run to the second hand bookstore to buy some "old fashioned" Greg Bear, Gregory Benford novels.

Ironically his first novel - Singularity Sky was far better.

Other novels that I read in the recent past:
Vernor Vinge - A deepness in the sky. Not very original. But an OK read.

Peter F Hamilton - The reality dysfunction. Another first part of very likely a long and laborious Hamilton series. Hasn't anyone told him that it's ok to write shorter, slick novels?

Clarke and Baxter - Time's eye. Two great minds worked together to bring us this very interesting alternative history, sci-fi book. Seemed interesting enough. I might eventually read the rest of the series.

Until next time...cheers!

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