“His reputation is up two percent for no obvious reason today, he notices. Odd, that. When he pokes at it he discovers that everybody’s reputation—everybody, that is, who has a publicly traded reputation—is up a bit. It’’s as if the distributed Internet reputation servers are feeling bullish about integrity. Maybe there’s a global honesty bubble forming.”
(I'd short it. -C.)

Fascinating speculations about the future of the human race. Would have been a five-star book without the obtrusive political lecturing. In a future in which the solar system has been disassembled and the human race is on the verge of extinction, Stross feels a need to get in a lecture on... 9/11 and how it shattered America's "myth of invulnerability." Or something. (Stross, it seems, is a free-thinking genius who has never heard of Pearl Harbor.)
The book is full of such gratingly out-of-place lectures that instantly suck you out of the story. So, having created a superb Merlot with excellent dryness and fruitiness, Stross pisses in it.

Why do authors feel a need to do this? ( )

Quite possibly my favorite book. Not the best book, but the best in competition for my heart. ( )

This was an exquisitely mediocre book, featuring just enough suspense and philosophizing to keep things moving, although without much in the way of originality.

The book uses the “lives” of three “generations” of the Macx family as the frame from which it hangs a story of humankind’s future. I have to resort to quote marks back there because the book posits that technology will soon allow people to essentially be uploaded into and “live” in virtual environments, split off into different “copies” when needed and downloaded back into new bodies, among other things.

The basic plot focuses on the people who avail themselves of this technology but still try to maintain some kind of essence of what it means to be human, as opposed to the fully “posthuman” entities that “live” entirely within technologically created digital environments. Things eventually turns into a case of irreconcilable differences, and the “real” humans look for ways to leave the solar system and avoid disassembled by the posthumans for use as dumb matter in building their (the posthumans’) structures.

There’s some alien interaction, too, which gives the “real” humans insight into their predicament.

But, especially considering the book was 400+ pages long, there just wasn’t much new. It was like reading an older, shallower, blander William Gibson novel, albeit one that extrapolates much farther into the future than Gibson usually takes things. And, to be fair, I think it’s the time scale of Stross’ book that prevents him from creating characters as strong as Gibson’s.

Also, the whole “uploading people” meme has been around at least since Frederick Pohl’s Heechee series.

And making a key character a Muslim religious scholar struck me as pandering a bit to the times, as well as a recycling of a semi-common trope in sci-fi: having a non-judeo-christian character attempt to integrate his/her religion into the new technology and vice-versa, all in a way that’s supposed to bring a new viewpoint to all of us materialistic Westerners. Somehow, these characters always end up getting better treatment than would a similarly religious man/woman with a J/C background.

My final nit to pick: Most of the book seems to support a wider concept of what it means to be human, or at least sentient, in terms of rights, duties, etc. Except in a couple of key places: For example, one of the characters has “copied” herself in such a way that one of her goes exploring interstellar space while another remains behind. When years pass and the space voyager comes back to find the home copy dead, she finds herself legally responsible for the home copy’s legal liabilities.

And, at the very end of the book, a character faces what should be a very difficult moral problem: Should he let another character, not human and much more technologically advanced, “run off” a copy of himself for experimental purposes, knowing that, for plot reasons, the copy will be killed at the end of the experiment. The “human” character blithely agrees, with very minor qualms about the situation.

Bottom line: A perfectly readable book that doesn’t quite have enough breadth to make up for what it’s missing in depth. ( )

Set in the near future, this group of related stories is about an Earth where technology has run rampant, and humanity's inability to keep up.

Computing power, and artificial intelligence, have passed the limits of human intellect. Nanotechnology is everywhere, reprogramming and replicating at will. Posthumans, with all sorts of biological implants, have rendered people extinct. Corporations have become alive and sentient. New resource allocation algorithms, collectively called Economics 2.0, have replaced capitalism and communism.

This book is about three generations of the same family. Manfred is a freelance broker in intelligence amplification technology in a world where everyone must be 30 seconds ahead of everyone else. Years later, his teenage daughter, Amber, signs up as an indentured astronaut on the first exploration ship heading to Jupiter. It is to get away from a domineering mother who insists that Amber have a "normal" life on Earth. Her son, Sirhan, finds his destiny intertwined with all of humanity. Along the way, most of the planets in the solar system are systematically taken apart by various sorts of mini-robots and nanomachines. There is also a multi-year journey to a specific brown dwarf star a long way away. Building a ship with sufficient life support for people, and propelling it at any reasonable portion of the speed of light is not possible. Therefore, the "passengers" have been uploaded into a nanocomputer the size of a Coke can, and that is sent to the stars.

I thoroughly loved this novel. Cyberpunk fans will also love it. It does a fine job at the near future speculation, it's cool, it's high tech, and it's got a good story. What else does a reader need? ( )

I read several of these chapters when they went by in Asimov's earlier this century; only now in 2009 did I finally read them as fixed-up together in novel form.

Madly inventive, but these portions are not much more coherent in a single serving than they were spread out across several years of Asimov's.

Einstein places hard limits on the stories an author can tell about the exploration of the galaxy; humans are too puny and too ephemeral to inhabit stories that span star systems.

Stross side-steps the problem by having his characters sail to the stars as computer downloads aboard a can-sized starship, capable of high g's and tiny payload mass.

But once the characters are computer simulations of themselves, it becomes increasingly hard to take their adventures seriously.

But then I realized that "rebootable software emulations of real characters" is actually a pretty good definition of the entire enterprise of "fiction". ( )