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"[There are actually] no fewer than *seven* sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Billy couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension..."

Billy's summary of the movie viewed backwards, initially trite, ends rather poignantly

What a ride.

I just started Lexicon and damn if I'm not tearing through it. Strong, action-packed opening made brilliant by Barry's stylistic flair.

Damn. I knew it hadn't any grand plans, but the ending still felt unresolved

End of ch8. It's hard to imagine this novel actually ending after so long.

"You may remember dying. Do not worry: like all your other memories, this is a fabrication."

End of ch7. This novel is such an epic. It could have logically concluded a half dozen times by now, I'd say.

End of ch6. "The destiny of intelligent tool-using life [is] to be a stepping-stone in the evolution of corporate instruments."

End of ch4. It's interesting how Stross manages to a maneuver all these pieces right there in front of you, hiding them in plain sight and not tipping his hand as to the grand plan until he means to do so.

End of ch 3. Aineko so ominous.

End of ch2. Man, Manfred's metacortex knows how to deliver an ominous closing line.

"Annette is very conservative, preferring the naked penetrative fuck of the last century to the more sophisticated fetishes of the present day." Heh.

End of ch1. Whaaaaat a crazy bitch D:

'Epoch' is crazy good. An old emergent AI isn't pulling profits anymore so they're turning it off, but it's sysadmin handler goes to bat for it raising the expected ethical questions.

'Chicken Little' may be my favorite of Doctorow's short stories - even considering the less-than-neat ending. At its core is a story of neuroeconomics; a subject made all the more intriguing by receiving the Doctorow treatment.

'Pester Power' features a tantalizing central conceit that spam is a great way to train an AI to behave more like a human without humans actually evaluating it in the traditional sense. It's just crazy enough to work!

'Constitutional Crisis' is a narrative in the form of a constitution agreed upon by a group of friends - and its subsequent amendments. It's a very novel delivery method, I'll give it that.

'Visit the Sins' is a haunting piece that obviously stems from some of Doctorow's personal experiences. It concerns a young man visiting his grandfather in a home for those who have undergone some flawed ADD/ADHD surgery that leaves them 'switched off' a lot of the time.

'Power Punctuation!' is a curiously enjoyable short tale of a simpleton who finds himself in a position of power in a strange paeudo-Orwellian world

'Liberation Spectrum' is an engaging read with a charming character portrait of the chauffeur-cum-CEO of a mobile multinational startup

'Human Readable' features remarkably good characterization of the relationship between its two protagonists - which is particularly surprising for Doctorow. It's set in and concerns a world where an autonomous networking solution is in place and whose integrity and corruptibility are being called to question.

'Scroogled' is a tantalizingly dystopic story set 5-minutes-into-the-future where Google has finally fallen to the Dark Side and gone evil. It's a story of good people doing bad things, and because of this fundamental truth it's a very believable tale.

'Other People's Money' is a typically Doctorow look at the future of entrepreneurship, nothing more and nothing less.

'The Right Book' is a vignette depicting the future of book selling in 50, 100, and 150 years. It started interestingly enough, but got a step or two too abstract towards the end.

'The Things That Make Me Weak and Strange Get Engineered Away' was average. I didn't feel that the world was well developed and the plot, while featuring a few interesting tidbits, was somewhat standard fare.

'After the Siege' was strange. It was obviously an abstraction of historical fiction, which doesn't really interest me, and so I didn't enjoy the story very much.

'I, Rowboat' was great. I really enjoy Doctorow's Asimovist writings because they drag the old precepts forward into modern sci-fi and makes them feel fresh and insightful again. Nowhere has he achieved this more than in this story, concerning an intelligent Asimovist rowboat.

'I, Robot' opened weakly, but it really comes together by the end of the story. It's an interesting and Doctorowian mesh of (primarily) Orwell and Asimov that's far enough removed from all of its inspirations as to remain fresh