This Space for Rent

Oh, for heavens sakes. Stop teasing him and just award him the Hugo now.

My friend Charlie Stross appears to be getting another 15 minutes of fame with the release of his latest science fiction book. I'm not particularly up on modern science fiction, but the snippets I've read of his stuff are certainly at least as good as any of the hard SF I've ever read (I don't read much SF anymore; the last hard SF writer I read was Neal Stephenson, who wrote The Big U about 20 years ago and has been on a steady arc downwards since then) and he has the temerity to actually put a plot and maybe even character development into his writing.

Of course, you'd not figure this out from the reviews. Charlie's most recent book (Accelerando), if you read the review Bradford Delong linked to, is nothing more than E E Smith meets the J. Peterman catalog. It's possible, I guess, that Charlie could have been eaten by the Edinmumble pod people, but even without reading the book I'd bet that the reviewer merely did the traditional trick of warping the contents of the book to match his own impression of what the book should be like.

If I win the lottery, I'll try and bribe Charlie into redoing the Laura Ingalls Wilder books with a frontier family circa 2035. It would be worth it just to see the reviewers heads explode.