lol... I liked it more than that...
Emlyn James O'Regan - Managing Director
Wizards of AU
http://www.WizardsOfAU.com
emlyn@WizardsOfAU.com
"Australian IT Wizards - US Technology Leaders
Pure International Teleworking in the Global Economy"
----- Original Message -----
From: "Damien Broderick" <d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au>
To: <extropians@extropy.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 1:17 PM
Subject: what they're saying about THE SPIKE
> 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
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:47 MDT