Koufax reviewed Accelerando by Charles Stross
Terrible
1 star
It's very rare that I consciously decide to not finish a book. This was the only such case this year.
The book tries to extrapolate current (or rather yesterday's trends) into the near future. However, almost all predictions are stupid and just plain wrong, e.g.no, google glasses are not a success. Normally, I have no problem with that in science fiction. Sometimes things just do not turn out the way the author thought. But here there is nothing else to the book: there are no characters - neither likable nor unlikable, just none at all, no story, really nothing that could have motived me to continue reading.
The language is extremely heavy on invented jargon, and this is clearly not working either. It just makes the whole thing completely indigestible. There is actually an index at the end of the book that is supposed to explain certain words and concepts …
It's very rare that I consciously decide to not finish a book. This was the only such case this year.
The book tries to extrapolate current (or rather yesterday's trends) into the near future. However, almost all predictions are stupid and just plain wrong, e.g.no, google glasses are not a success. Normally, I have no problem with that in science fiction. Sometimes things just do not turn out the way the author thought. But here there is nothing else to the book: there are no characters - neither likable nor unlikable, just none at all, no story, really nothing that could have motived me to continue reading.
The language is extremely heavy on invented jargon, and this is clearly not working either. It just makes the whole thing completely indigestible. There is actually an index at the end of the book that is supposed to explain certain words and concepts (that might only be part of the German edition I was reading). However, for the concepts that I understand, the explanations are hilariously wrong, which makes me not trust any of the others.
Overall, I made it roughly halfway through before deciding not to waste any more time on this book. Maybe there is a big payoff in the end, but I will never know. So my recommendation: stay away from this!
