Favorite line so far (spoken by a post-human android concerning early manned missions to Mars): "Our Creators were clearly insane. Sending canned primates to Mars was never going to end happily." ( )

I felt like I should like this book more than I actually did; it's an homage to a Heinlein book that I like and is full of great ideas about a robot civilization that survives past the extinction of the human race. But I had a hard time staying interested; the book went to great pains to show the main character was just a machine, and a copy of another machine at that, making it hard to care about her. Most of the events of the first half of the book seemed like random unrelated events. It took me months to actually finish the book, but the ending did sew things up neatly. ( )

I can’t think around general comparison of this book to anime. Crazy and far fetched world heavily based on our real issues? Easy to read but hard to follow? So funny in places but so sad in general? It’s all there with some more. The "trick" of changing decoration to make the core ideas to shine even more is done brilliantly. Like some anime this book is pure genius in places. There are some social messages you just can not miss. They hit hard. They make you think. They make you sad knowing it will be something like that or worse. Whatever the description says this book is mostly about inevitability of human nature. ( )

Charles Stross is starting to wear thin on me. ( )

I am always all over the place with Stross. He is a gifted writer and can really put a story together but sometimes his books just don't knock me out.

This book was good but I admit that I was expecting more and it wasn't nearly as clever as I think it was suppose to be. I will continue to read Stross but I have a feeling he is going to always be one of those writers that just completely wows me or is just all right. ( )