what they're saying about THE SPIKE

From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Wed Apr 18 2001 - 21:47:15 MDT


Truth in advertising time.

Here's what one reader says about THE SPIKE on amazon.com:

Virtually Unreadable, March 27, 2001
                Reviewer: A reader from Berkeley, CA USA
                The ideas explored are fascinating, but the prose used to
do the
                exploring is wildly uneven. While there are chunks here and
there that
                approach coherence, to a large extent the writing consists
of a sort of
                manic hyper-caffeinated chattiness that at times verges on
hysteria.
                Liberally peppered with irrelevant asides that careen from
topic to
                topic without differentiating fact from wild speculation,
the book is
                also repetitive and poorly edited. There's also an annoying
habit of
                taking commonly used terms and arbitrarily coining new
names for
                them ("minting" for nanotech assembly, the titular "spike"
for Vinge's
                singularity). The jacket blurb casts this as accessible pop
science
                writing in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke's "Profiles of
the Future."
                While somewhere under all that verbiage Broderick seems to
have a
                basic command of the subject, trust me -- Clarke he ain't.

Damien Broderick



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