lucasw's Journal: The Cassini Division by Ken Macleod

I launched into The Cassini Division, never having read the author before (except perhaps from short stories in The Year's Best Science Fiction), and read it through in about three days. I'd heard just enough good things- it's modern space opera with the hard-sf edge, and right on the cover is a blurb from Vernor Vinge.

There's a lot of concepts thrown around without the deeper explanation another author might go for (and the book is also relatively short), mainly dealing with post-humans and singularity. Nanotech I accept as a given, though obviously a newcomer is going to encounter a lot of strange stuff- but that's what sf is all about.

(semi-spoilers)

One interesting concept in the books is that the post-humans aren't very enlightened, just very smart and frequently insane or inimical to lesser intelligences- and therefore pose a danger everyone else. One of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix stories dealt with humans modded for high iq but without fail all going crazy. The virus onslaught that keeps inhabitants of the solar system from using electrical computers has echoes in Chasm City (though there, all nanotech is affected), and the human assimilation stuff is similar to A Fire Upon The Deep. And of course the human visual meme-virus: Snow Crash.

It's not that it's all derivative material (though some of it is)- Macleod approaches it in a unique and exciting way.

I didn't find the 'True Knowledge' info-dump convincing. Maybe a longer novel could have had more compelling material in the story that would support the explanation later on, but it didn't work here. Monolithic belief systems don't really cut it anyhow, perhaps it could be said that everyone interprets the True Knowledge differently, sometimes radically so.

I think my main impression is that as good as the book is, it's not as satisfying as it could be.

The post-capitalist obscenities were amusing ('shop-off' and references to deviant acts of employer-employee role-playing...).

I've got some of Macleod's earlier novels on hold at the library- I'll probably burn through most of his stuff over the next few weeks. I've got a habit of rapidly exhausting an author's work, but not remembering to pick up new books as I've already moved on to someone else.