badgerbag: (Default)
badgerbag ([personal profile] badgerbag) wrote2009-02-03 23:37

The endless frontier

Spin certainly did get my interest right around page 300, when it got less whiny, but it was and continued to be interesting, like a giant fail whale is interesting...

I kind of liked it anyway. Um. For the ideas.

(spoilers and snark ahead)



* tragic lesbians. tragic secret lifelong lesbians. Or, one of them anyway. I know... I'll make my tragic secret lifelong lesbian love my HOUSEMAID. Just to keep her near. But never tell her.

* magical negro from MARS

* asshole geniuses were correct after all. and are martyrs.

* neochristian hippie not correct and gets his wife took and his nose rubbed in it and humbly sees error of his ways and shuts up

* transhuman miracle drug which will make us all wise

* nanobot universe-spanning AI ecosystem which benevolently gives us protection from ourselves and then a pathway to the frontier

* a giant empty endless universe-problem-solving frontier with strong suggestions that migrants are smarter than everyone else and having endless room for expansion fixes any problems left over

How sarcastic is it? About as much as Twilight is. Just written from a different Id.

The empty-of-sentients frontier, well. I thought of Greg Egan books and how his endless frontier is fractal, in the spaces between everything else.
firecat: red panda looking happy (Default)

[personal profile] firecat 2009-02-04 10:20 (UTC)(link)
I'll make my tragic secret lifelong lesbian love my HOUSEMAID.

I liked it pretty well until I got to that bit.

[identity profile] communicator.livejournal.com 2009-02-04 13:29 (UTC)(link)
asshole geniuses were correct after all

Excellent expression. I think I may steal it as a catch phrase, summing up the weary inevitability of this trope in SF: AGWCAA! Might change to GAWCAA.

[identity profile] irontongue.livejournal.com 2009-02-04 15:25 (UTC)(link)
The secret lifelong lesbian love business is where I went off the rails. I liked a lot of the ideas, yeah.
ext_22: Pretty girl with a gele on (Default)

[identity profile] quivo.livejournal.com 2009-02-05 00:28 (UTC)(link)
(spotted you during RaceFail09, have been wandering your journal)
It's like this month is the month of making me feel better about a ton of books I never got round to reading or finishing. Spin, for me, was just so bloody boring at the beginning that I never bothered to move past the first couple of chapters. Now my nagging sense of 'maybe I should have tried harder to finish that' has been put firmly to bed. Thank you :D

[identity profile] hazelbroom.livejournal.com 2009-02-06 01:18 (UTC)(link)
My sentiments exactly! I got deadly bored about four chapters in. Thanks for finishing it for us.