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A review by timinbc
The Causal Angel by Hannu Rajaniemi
2.0
Two stars strictly for ambition. But this series has degenerated into a wankfest.
You may wish to see my review of The Fractal Prince, in which I started to wonder if the series might be getting a bit top-heavy with concepts.
Note: you might do better if you plan to read this right after The Fractal Prince while that book is relatively fresh in your mind.
You know the recent craze to create the Best! Ever! Cocktail!!. where bartenders - sorry, mixologists -- toss in five ounces of liquor, most of them kinds you've never heard of, and serve it in a glass slipper, topping it with a froth made of mosquito wings? This is that in a book.
OK, Rajaniemi is a genius. But he doesn't need to try so hard to prove it. He has dumped into this series everything he has ever learned in his advanced degrees in math and physics. But what we've ended up with is not a culinary masterpiece, but a stew. Master chefs don't use all their ingredients in one dish.
I am a little bit familiar with most of the concepts he starts out with in this series. I have read a LOT of SF, I have a math degree, and I am quite OK with hard SF, right up to maybe half of Greg Egan's work. But the concepts are perhaps a tad overdeveloped and overused here.
Imagine, for example, that the entity writing this review is not actually me at all, but rather a simulation running in a cloud of plasm inside a copy of a copy of an upload of my original brain. And that the simulation is running as a sub-instance of a function inside a 30th-century version of a quantum-powered multiplayer Playstation. And of course when I say "me" I refer not to my actual self, but to my hobby role of playing a really skilled actor, who is pretending to pretend to be three other people at once (remember, I can copy myself). One of me is running through time twice as fast as the others, and a second one is in a spacetime bubble where time runs backwards, so he is going to have been younger next month. It's OK, because all the other clubs and gangs are doing it too.
Still with me? If so, you did better with that paragraph than I did with this book. I bailed at page 164.
I'll never know what happened to that lovable rogue Jean, and I don't care because by now he is not lovable, not a rogue, not charismatic, not even interesting. I even know that he's going to steal one of Saturn's rings later in the book and I Still Don't Care.
The musical group Red Priest does quite weird things with Vivaldi's music, and when accused of being over the top they replied, "If no one goes over the top, we'll never know what's on the other side." Rajaniemi has probably done SF a great service by being the first one over the top in this area, but I reckon I'll wait till someone comes back and writes a simpler version of the story.
There's probably a bloody good story hidden in here, but I can't be bothered digging it out. This book is for all practical purposes written in a foreign language.
You may wish to see my review of The Fractal Prince, in which I started to wonder if the series might be getting a bit top-heavy with concepts.
Note: you might do better if you plan to read this right after The Fractal Prince while that book is relatively fresh in your mind.
You know the recent craze to create the Best! Ever! Cocktail!!. where bartenders - sorry, mixologists -- toss in five ounces of liquor, most of them kinds you've never heard of, and serve it in a glass slipper, topping it with a froth made of mosquito wings? This is that in a book.
OK, Rajaniemi is a genius. But he doesn't need to try so hard to prove it. He has dumped into this series everything he has ever learned in his advanced degrees in math and physics. But what we've ended up with is not a culinary masterpiece, but a stew. Master chefs don't use all their ingredients in one dish.
I am a little bit familiar with most of the concepts he starts out with in this series. I have read a LOT of SF, I have a math degree, and I am quite OK with hard SF, right up to maybe half of Greg Egan's work. But the concepts are perhaps a tad overdeveloped and overused here.
Imagine, for example, that the entity writing this review is not actually me at all, but rather a simulation running in a cloud of plasm inside a copy of a copy of an upload of my original brain. And that the simulation is running as a sub-instance of a function inside a 30th-century version of a quantum-powered multiplayer Playstation. And of course when I say "me" I refer not to my actual self, but to my hobby role of playing a really skilled actor, who is pretending to pretend to be three other people at once (remember, I can copy myself). One of me is running through time twice as fast as the others, and a second one is in a spacetime bubble where time runs backwards, so he is going to have been younger next month. It's OK, because all the other clubs and gangs are doing it too.
Still with me? If so, you did better with that paragraph than I did with this book. I bailed at page 164.
I'll never know what happened to that lovable rogue Jean, and I don't care because by now he is not lovable, not a rogue, not charismatic, not even interesting. I even know that he's going to steal one of Saturn's rings later in the book and I Still Don't Care.
The musical group Red Priest does quite weird things with Vivaldi's music, and when accused of being over the top they replied, "If no one goes over the top, we'll never know what's on the other side." Rajaniemi has probably done SF a great service by being the first one over the top in this area, but I reckon I'll wait till someone comes back and writes a simpler version of the story.
There's probably a bloody good story hidden in here, but I can't be bothered digging it out. This book is for all practical purposes written in a foreign language.