He’s the guy who patented using genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial description of a problem domain—not just a better mousetrap, but the set of all possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics.
and in this dig at religion that could only have come from a computer scientist:
Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.
It feels nothing like the previous two books in the series, you can read it stand-alone. Some spoilers ahead.
Stross packs the novel with ideas, and there's an irreverence and whimsical cynicism that feels a little Douglas Adams at times. Like the AI based on uploaded brain scans of California spiny lobsters broadcast into space, later becoming the avatar for first contact inside an alien router with a race that essentially lurks near the router trying to scam new civilisations. 419 scams and pyramid schemes are alive and well post-singularity.
There's the matrioshka brain: a solar powered super computer that eventually grows to encase the sun to tap its energy for computation. And what I thought was a very novel solution to the Fermi paradox:
“I think we have the outline of the answer to the Fermi paradox. Transcendents don’t go traveling because they can’t get enough bandwidth—trying to migrate through one of these wormholes would be like trying to download your mind into a fruit fly,
Conscious civilizations sooner or later convert all their available mass into computronium, powered by solar output. They don’t go interstellar because they want to stay near the core where the bandwidth is high and latency is low, and sooner or later competition for resources hatches a new level of metacompetition that obsoletes them.”This is all very interesting stuff. Except the delivery is lacking. It's *lots* of exposition, very light characters, and generally missing a first person feel to anything. Lots of dense text like this makes for pretty boring reading, even if the ideas are interesting:
Not just our own neural wetware, mapped out to the subcellular level and executed in an emulation environment on a honking great big computer, like this: That’s not posthuman, that’s a travesty. I’m talking about beings who are fundamentally better consciousness engines than us merely human types, augmented or otherwise. They’re not just better at cooperation—witness Economics 2.0 for a classic demonstration of that—but better at simulation. A posthuman can build an internal model of a human-level intelligence that is, well, as cognitively strong as the original. You or I may think we know what makes other people tick, but we’re quite often wrong, whereas real posthumans can actually simulate us, inner states and all, and get it right. And this is especially true of a posthuman that’s been given full access to our memory prostheses for a period of years, back before we realized they were going to transcend on us.There's a political drama towards the end of the novel that is presented in the most boring way possible, essentially just people sitting around in a room talking about what is happening. No emotional connection to the story.
Bizarrely there's some action that livens things up right towards the end, but it turns out to be just a kid inside a VR environment with no morality boundaries, and is over swiftly.
I would love someone to take this new imagined reality, and make me believe it, give me a real 3 dimensional character, show me some real relationships and let me live them.
3.5 stars
