Helpful Score: 1
What a fascinating book this was!
As a quick summary, this is a near-future electronic crime mystery more than a scifi novel, but it's still a blast to read. There's distributed computing, cryptography, games that are effectively MMORPGs, and Alternate Reality Games thrown in the mix. I'm actually employed in the games industry, so I know a lot of the buzzwords used here, but even so I was looking up stuff on wikipedia to gain a little bit of background on the topics Stross brings up.
The book is narrated in second-person, alternating between three different "you"s. Initially, this was hard to get used to, but that's overcome without too much trouble, and it feels like an homage to all the old Infocom text adventure games... "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."
Toward the end of the book, more and more characters get involved in the storyline, and it began to get difficult to tell who was who. I kept feeling like I should have made a list of characters to refer to. And the final "battle" was sort of pulled out of thin air, making the finish a little let down, though other elements of the conclusion were fascinating.
Overall, this was a great read. It's got a William Gibson cyber-civiliztion feel about it, but hosted in the world of only a decade into the future, so the tech used to get there is actually understandable, and very much conceivable, rather than the mystical hand waving Gibson had to use 25 years ago. The book has its confusing spots, and I do worry about what non-techie-types will think of all the techno-babble, but Stross is someone I'll come back to.
As a quick summary, this is a near-future electronic crime mystery more than a scifi novel, but it's still a blast to read. There's distributed computing, cryptography, games that are effectively MMORPGs, and Alternate Reality Games thrown in the mix. I'm actually employed in the games industry, so I know a lot of the buzzwords used here, but even so I was looking up stuff on wikipedia to gain a little bit of background on the topics Stross brings up.
The book is narrated in second-person, alternating between three different "you"s. Initially, this was hard to get used to, but that's overcome without too much trouble, and it feels like an homage to all the old Infocom text adventure games... "You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here."
Toward the end of the book, more and more characters get involved in the storyline, and it began to get difficult to tell who was who. I kept feeling like I should have made a list of characters to refer to. And the final "battle" was sort of pulled out of thin air, making the finish a little let down, though other elements of the conclusion were fascinating.
Overall, this was a great read. It's got a William Gibson cyber-civiliztion feel about it, but hosted in the world of only a decade into the future, so the tech used to get there is actually understandable, and very much conceivable, rather than the mystical hand waving Gibson had to use 25 years ago. The book has its confusing spots, and I do worry about what non-techie-types will think of all the techno-babble, but Stross is someone I'll come back to.
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