New York 2140

DNF @ 28%. Kind of a bummer, but KSR can be hit and miss. Actually, lemme rephrase: KSR is a master of sci-fi, I consider him in my top 2-3 sci-fi authors. But! I have indeed abandoned him before without much suffering, and while his masterpieces are very amazing and the best in the genre, his B-game is like anyone else's: a B-game.

And given the books are such TOMES... well. I got other things I gotta read!

Anyway, this had a nice premise: NYC, 100 years from now, half-drowned after two “pulses” - giant jumps in sea-level rise due to melting polar ice caps. We follow a motley crew of characters who all live in the MetLife building in drowned downtown. The usual KSR agenda - when do we get sublimated into a post-capitalist utopia? - is very much on everyone's mind, from the refreshingly vapid “geo-finance” day trader, to the Paula Mendoza-type building coop head lady, to the urchin kids who live in a boat, to the idealistic “coders” who live on the roof.

What made me lose interest fast was the writing style. KSR is a cranky dude, his goat is particularly gotten by people complaining about his infodumping (according to that interview, anyway), and I guess he considers himself a very smart dude (which he is!). That's a recipe for writing that felt arrogant and suuuuper indulgent. There's a narrator character, “the citizen”, whose chapters are solely giant future history info-dumps written in an obnoxious, combative, 60+ white dude trying to write slang voice. It's cringey. At one point, “the citizen” tells readers who hate “infodumps” to “skip ahead”. WTF!

Those were the worst, but there were numerous other moments of sorta lazy, indulgent writing: cheesy jokes and winking self-references and cringey self-enamored curlicues. They kept pulling me out of the story and ruining perfectly good scenes!

And then there was the econ and the coding. I'm an economist turned data scientist, so econ and coding are my thing. I like them! I also know something about them. So, yes, I got some solid squee when KSR name-dropped “Shiller” (BOB! I LOVE YA BOB!), and an affectionate eyeroll at the name-drop of (Thomas) “Picketty”. But his portrayal of the coders was super groan-worthy; did he just, like, browse the tech shelves at his bookstore? He name-drops the R Cookbook, of all things, and has these coders be, seemingly, all things at once: data scientists, devops, infosec. It's like, wai wai wait a minute. “Coder” is a catch-all term for “someone who programs on their day job”, but once you get into the weeds of the actual tech industry, there's specialization and shit. It just felt like KSR didn't know what he was talking about. :(

So yeah. I'm sorry to bash ya, KSR, you are still my number 1 or 2 (can't decide, main contender is Ursula Le Guin).