association-list

I just fin­ished this this morn­ing, and I’m still not sure what I think about it. It felt kind of tossed off and uncon­vinc­ing. It has a lot of sim­i­lar prob­lems to Warren Ellis’ Crooked Little Vein, in that if you spend a lot of time read­ing either of their blogs, a lot of the argu­ments, world-​​building and asides are old hat, since you’ve read them all before as the author first wrote them on their blog. Oth­er­wise, it was some­thing of an over-​​complicated caper tale, with all of the com­pli­cated twists that can happen in a SF novel where iden­tity is more fun­gi­ble than what might be in a stan­dard mimetic novel. Which is all fine, as far as it goes, but it is not my favorite of Stross’ novels.