Two books I read recently, in brief

Charles "autopope" Stross's episodic generational saga Accelerando is cool, brain-hurting Singularity SF, basically the story of how we go from today's world to converting the solar system into spambot-infested thinking matter within a hundred years, with a side trip to communicate with some aliens who are further along the curve. I'd heard mixed things about it before I read it, but it was better than that led me to expect. The hero of the opening installments is a bit insufferable and his genius and integrity come across as Informed Attributes, but the rest of the book redeems itself by acknowledging this and revealing him to be far from always right.

I do agree with the criticism I heard somebody make (I have forgotten who) that its plotting occasionally displays a common science-fiction problem: a character will throw out some wild speculation for the sake of argument that vaguely seems to fit the facts, then in the next section everyone's suddenly treating this as gospel truth and is apparently right to do so. Granted, it's a more forgivable sin when the story spans decades and epochal shifts in the nature of being, so your imagination can fill in the gaps.


Victor Pelevin's Omon Ra (translated from the Russian by Andrew Bromfield) is a short, paranoid, grimly funny satire on the Soviet space program, about a boy who grows up wanting to be a cosmonaut and gets his chance in, shall we say, an unexpected manner. The central conceit is a good enough plot twist that I'm not even going to spoil it behind a cut here. Parts of it work sort of like a Russian comedy version of The Prisoner. Unfortunately at the end Pelevin pulls a second plot twist that is way, way overdone (even if you only read Eastern Bloc satires) and surprised me by being too unsurprising, especially since he seemed to be setting up a more interesting ending in a surrealistic digression earlier in the book. Anyway, if you can forgive that letdown, it's a good read.