I have to admit to being a bit wary of the whole singularity story—by definition, we can’t know what happens on the other side of a singularity, so books that lead up to, and apparently through, a singularity are suspicious by default.

I’m also not sure I really buy the whole idea in the first place. Singularity stories generally depend on humanity making some pretty amazing breakthroughs on the computing and AI front that I just don’t see us getting anywhere near. Of course, again pretty much by definition, we’d be looking at a few small breakthroughs snowballing into amazing leaps ahead, so maybe there is a singularity just around the corner.

My qualms aside, Charlie Stross’s book is very fun. It’s quite similar in some ways to Cory Doctorow’s work (he acknowledges Doctorow in the preface). It also reminded me a lot of Rudy Rucker’s Bopper books, which I also had some issues with but thoroughly enjoyed reading.