I agree with Niall, Dan, Ted Chiang, Matt Cheney, and Nick Mamatas all in one go, and you know how that makes me cranky.
I even agree with Itzkoff a little tiny bit. There were times when I was reading Accelerando when I felt a bit like reading a textbook, and it's not something I would recommend to a friend as a great piece of SF. Somehow Cryptonomicon, which has a similar feel of the author assuming that you want to be immersed in geek knowledge you might not fully understand, is something I would happily recommend to other people, and I'm not sure why that is.
He's totally wrong about Counting Heads, though, because it's great. The opening novella is easily the best part about it, but I'm not sure you could sustain that over the length of a novel without opening it out to multiple-viewpoints as he does, and I don't feel quite as involved with the characters because of it.
Also: "I don't mean to toot my own matrix here, but I did pretty well in collegiate-level classes in multivariable calculus and linear algebra, and when the novel concluded with a head-on collision of various clones, mentars, slugs, jerries, pikes and evangelines, I had no idea what the heck happened."
If you didn't like or understand the ending then you didn't, but I doubt it had anything to do with linear algebra.
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Date: 2006-03-07 12:16 pm (UTC)I even agree with Itzkoff a little tiny bit. There were times when I was reading Accelerando when I felt a bit like reading a textbook, and it's not something I would recommend to a friend as a great piece of SF. Somehow Cryptonomicon, which has a similar feel of the author assuming that you want to be immersed in geek knowledge you might not fully understand, is something I would happily recommend to other people, and I'm not sure why that is.
He's totally wrong about Counting Heads, though, because it's great. The opening novella is easily the best part about it, but I'm not sure you could sustain that over the length of a novel without opening it out to multiple-viewpoints as he does, and I don't feel quite as involved with the characters because of it.
Also:
"I don't mean to toot my own matrix here, but I did pretty well in collegiate-level classes in multivariable calculus and linear algebra, and when the novel concluded with a head-on collision of various clones, mentars, slugs, jerries, pikes and evangelines, I had no idea what the heck happened."
If you didn't like or understand the ending then you didn't, but I doubt it had anything to do with linear algebra.