Troubadour
I'm at King's Cross, eating a bagel and waiting for my train. Manfred is in Milton Keynes, and Rome, and three years further into the future. He's struggling through a messy divorce and trying to stay ahead of the curve.
Let's talk about language. This is a book written in geek idiom. It's idea-dense; jagged; never a short word where a longer but more precise one will do; and funny. It's hard to read without an involuntary grin spreading over your face. If cyberpunk was noir, this is brilliant technicolour.
And there's that omniscient voice, the source of mysterious explanatory interjections into the narrative, our guide -Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2x10^27 kilograms. Around the world, labouring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^23 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^23 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold - one million instructions per second per gram of matter. Beyond that, singularity - a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to double-digit months ...
Let's talk about language. This is a book written in geek idiom. It's idea-dense; jagged; never a short word where a longer but more precise one will do; and funny. It's hard to read without an involuntary grin spreading over your face. If cyberpunk was noir, this is brilliant technicolour.
And there's that omniscient voice, the source of mysterious explanatory interjections into the narrative, our guide -Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It's night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore's law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2x10^27 kilograms. Around the world, labouring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 10^23 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 10^23 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time. About ten years after that, the solar system's installed processing power will nudge the critical 1 MIPS per gram threshold - one million instructions per second per gram of matter. Beyond that, singularity - a vanishing point beyond which extrapolating progress becomes meaningless. The time remaining before the intelligence spike is down to double-digit months ...