From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Sat Jun 18 2005 - 11:05:06 MDT
At 12:28 PM 6/18/2005 -0300, Christian Rovner wrote:
>it's probably worth taking a look.
It's definitely worth a look. Here's the opening of my forthcoming review
in the sf news journal LOCUS (so PLEASE do not quote this outside the list
until the end of the month):
===============
With this long-awaited compilation of his sequence of nine astonishing
stories from Asimov's, begun in 2001 with "Lobsters", Charlie Stross is
sealed as the new Poet Laureate of the Vingean technological singularity.
The project's five years of development (it's tempting to apply this sort
of corporate language to Stross's dense techno-speak art-artifact) has
produced a sort of early 21st-century counterpart to John Brunner's
compressed future shock Hugo-winner of the 1960s, *Stand On Zanzibar*,
complete with rich idiomatic sidebars or side loads of Baedeker guidance to
the non-native. Some will decry this as infodumping of the most blatant
kind. Yet it seems unavoidable when a torrential cascade of novelty is the
very topic of a work of art. Approached with an appreciative generosity of
response, these are tight, compressed, inventive, brilliantly illuminated
gems, or perhaps genomes (or memomes) that will unfold in a prepared mind
into wondrous ecologies of image and idea.
====================
That doesn't mean it's very plausible, or at all surprising to SL4 readers,
but it's very entertaining and it takes certainly singularity notions
entirely for granted, which is refreshing even in sf.
Damien Broderick
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