eFf Tee Ell ...

Am 90% through Newton's Wake: A Space Opera by Ken Macleod.

Some thoughts:

"The Idiot's Guide to Singularitypunk"

Badass yet flawed heroine, Lucinda Carlyle, descendant of Glasgow gangsters, is a combat archeologist. For those not in the know, it means a typical dig for her is more shooting than shoveling.

Standalone story - surprising and a good thing too; I'm sick of trilogies.

Unlike Stross in Accelerando, Macleod pulls the standard cop-out for this genre and writes about the people who got left behind.

Another long pause. The ship contemplated certain mathematical relationships that gave it a sense of satisfaction.

This while waiting for its human to finish a thought. I thought that line was pure genius. Your mileage may of course vary.

I will also say that, by the end of Chapter 3 Side 1, your opinion of the term "Just add water" will be forever changed.

Macleod, near as I can tell, is the first person to use FTL as a word, a verb no less. Fittle he says. Cute.

Mortality takes on a very different importance when you have uploads and backups at your disposal. There's a Broken Angels-reminiscent part where Lucinda has to gather a team for a one-way mission into a radioactive zone. Her first recruit had the following to say when she told him he was first:

"That's good," he said, to her surprise. "It means we're not cluttered up with artillerymen, grunts, scientists and such, all quite redundant on this exercise ..."

I can't tell if this is a poke at Broken Angels or just that particular genre trope of "badass team goes into dangerous area. Many die."

Posthuman tech is surprisingly amenable to the likes of us. Too amenable, methinks.