This was the first of Charlie Stross’s novels I read, three years back, and I pretty much stand by the effusive review from then. His first published novel, from the distant past of 2003. I don’t have too much to add except that I love these three paragraphs from just about the end:
Riding in a chicken-legged hut through a wasteland that had recently gone from bucolic feudalism to transcendent post-humanism without an intervening stage, Burya Rubenstein drifted through a dream of crumbling empires.
The revolutionaries were ideologically committed to a transcendence they hadn’t fully understood–until it arrived whole and pure and incomprehensible, like an iceberg of strange information breaking the surface of a frozen sea of entropy. They hadn’t been ready for it; nobody had worned them. They had hazy folk memories of Internets and cornucopiae to guide them, cargo-cult assertions of the value of technology–but they hadn’t felt the elephant, had no sense of the shape the new phenomena took, and their desires caused new mutant strains to congeal out of the phase space of the Festival machinery.
Imagine not growing up with telephones–or faxes, videoconferencing, online translation, gesture recognition, light switches. Tradition said that you could send messages around the world in an eyeblink, and the means to do it was e-mail. Tradition didn’t say that e-mail was a mouth morphing out of the nearest object and speaking with a friend’s lips, but that was a more natural interpretation than strange textual commands and a network of post office routers. The Festival, not being experienced in dealing with Earth-proximate human cultures, had to guess at the nature of miracles being requested. Often, it got them wrong.
While Stross doesn’t generally go in for extended stretches of exposition, this passage comes about 40 pages from the finish, just prior to the climactic scene, and so he made a reasonable choice to back off a few steps and talk directly to us, to try and tie the phantasmagoria of the previous 300 pages into a tight package an early 21st century (educated, familiar with science fiction/modern physics) human might understand.
But look back at the beginning first sentence I quoted to understand that Charlie has a great way with language too. I mean “Riding in a chicken-legged hut,” really!
Awesome!
BillSaysThis 