Since I spent a lot of time sitting in a hospital room this week, I did get some reading done.
Samwise warned me that Accelerando was awfully hip, and it is. It’s like reading Neal Stephenson, but smarter and more entertaining, and without the bits where the author just can’t restrain himself anymore and barges out of the book to ramble at you. Unfortunately, like Stephenson, the characters and dialogue are far secondary to the hip, futuristic idea stream. And after a while they all start to sound alike. The secondary characters are flat and uninteresting (especially the female characters) and the protagonists are just annoying. I got about halfway through before deciding that I really didn’t care enough about any of these people to want to find out what happened next, and I was a little tired out from keeping up with the new! cool! future! that was being thrown at me.
The Atrocity Archives was much better. It still has the problem where any character onscreen for more than fifteen consecutive minutes sounding exactly like every other character, and Bob, the quantum/supernatural hacker dude, really is as annoying as every Slashdot groupie you’ve ever met; but it manages to be funny without diminishing from the horror. The title novella was the best of the two; “The Concrete Jungle” started out strong but simply wasn’t as good at “The Atrocity Archive”, and the ending was eye-rollingly pat.
