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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