Troubadour

[coalescent]

I'm at King's Cross, eating a bagel and waiting for my train. Manfred is in Milton Keynes, and Rome, and three years further into the future. He's struggling through a messy divorce and trying to stay ahead of the curve.

Let's talk about language. This is a book written in geek idiom. It's idea-dense; jagged; never a short word where a longer but more precise one will do; and funny. It's hard to read without an involuntary grin spreading over your face. If cyberpunk was noir, this is brilliant technicolour.

And there's that omniscient voice, the source of mysterious explanatory interjections into the narrative, our guide -

Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.

It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2x10^27 kilograms. Around the world, labouring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^23 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^23 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold - one million instructions per second per gram of matter. Beyond that, singularity - a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to double-digit months ...

Comments

[andrewducker]

I found the opening chapter the hardest to get through. It read to me like someone had taken 30 or so issues of wired, chewed them thoroughly and then been sick onto a page. The sheer 'bleeding-edge-right-now'ness of it nearly drove me screaming away. Not only that, but 5 years from now it's going to look sooooo dated.

Once I got into the further chapters it all worked rather better for me.

So much so that I have the paperback on pre-order, and am very much looking forward to reading the finished version.

[coalescent.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Of course you're right that the early parts will date most severely, but I don't think that matters any more than it matters that Neuromancer has dated. They have a solidity that the middle three, for me, lack. Keeping the main transition in the background is probably the right move but it's still slightly disappointing. The final three are excellent again, though, because by that point he's created a consistent sf world.