days of future passed

[ironymaiden]

i mentioned The Atrocity Archives elsewhere in lj-land today. i mention it again because it is tasty and good, managing to merge the experience of the put-upon IT person with spycraft and Lovecraft. it's a clever and fun read.

it was the book that got me to try Charles Stross again. every time i encountered one of his short stories in a magazine, i hated it. they were all full to the brim with five-minutes-ago technobabble hyperbole. lame. it was like he was the radiation-damaged love child of Neal Stephenson and William Gibson. (then again, perhaps this was all a knowing parody that flys right over my head. kind of like a modern audience trying to parse Armado in Love's Labour's Lost. feel free to explain it to me.)

we stayed at a hotel in Colorado that had a free books shelf. someone had added quite a bit of SF. there were several Stross books there (a fan, his publisher, him, dunno) so i finally picked up Accelerando, the award-winner.

aha. it's a collection of the stories i hated. i'm sure that they were better at their original publication date (Lobsters was published in 2001) but by 2007 their near-future has been curdled by reality, but yet not aged into the rich cheese of older near-futures that aren't. i tried valiantly to slog on, but found myself mostly marking passages to read aloud to C later. i like to listen to C laugh. i've passed it on to sinthrex. perhaps he will enjoy it more.

i finished Halting State not too long ago. it's fun, and a nice extrapolation of where portable information technology could take us. (definitely recommended for you WoW fans.) it's already nearing its pull date, so if you have any interest, i would ingest it before it's a mass market paperback. (web 3.14159? describing someone as looking like a character from The Matrix? *eyeroll*)

(as a side note: i started out loving Merchant Princes, but the last two books have been boring middles. dude needs a stiff edit, or to stop spewing out pages and rewrite, or permission to print fatter books, or something. world=awesome. Miriam=awesome. Miriam doing nothing to further the plot=lame. also, where is my Paulie?)

Comments

[samildanach.livejournal.com]

Charlie's one of my favorite authors writing now.

I adored ACCELERANDO when I was first introduced to it, through one of the later stories Asimov's ran in mid-to-late 2003. It hit me right on my geek spot; I mean, an application of the Thomson hack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thompson_hack#Reflections_on_Trusting_Trust) as a critical plot point, and an AI friendly to humans because it was trained on Sesame Street, and the horror when they stole Amber's cat by editing it out of her mind, and the "street drug called sensawunda".... how could I not?

I feel like it ages... OK. It actually does feel to me like a period piece from the dot-com bubble, which he's alluded to a few times since.

I share your opinion about the middle Merchant Princes books. I'm reading the most recent (THE MERCHANTS' WAR) right now, and there's one throwaway, universe-shifting OH NO YOU DI'NT moment that had me snickering again like the "squamous and rugose" finger-waggling-under-chin moment in THE ATROCITY ARCHIVES. It feels like he's getting the series-plot back under him in this one.

[ironymaiden]

yeah. i think i would have liked those stories if i had read them on time, but i tend to pick up Asimov's and F&SF second or third hand, years after publication. i liked Glasshouse pretty well, which i think is set in the same world.