I’m in the middle of reading Lobsters by Charlie Stross and while it’s very enjoying (a kind of superpowered MacLeod without the communism – okay, that doesn’t make any sense, but still) I can’t help but think – does anyone actually talk like this?
“I work for the betterment of everybody, not just some narrowly defined national interest, Pam. It’s the agalmic future. You’re still locked into a pre-singularity economic model that thinks in terms of scarcity. Resource allocation isn’t a problem any more – it’s going to be over within a decade. The cosmos is flat in all directions, and we can borrow as much bandwidth as we need from the first universal bank of entropy!” etc etc.
I have no real problem with this, since it is fiction after all, but sometimes he gets carried away with his neologisms and invents words that could mean something, but I’m damned if I know what they do. Like ‘metacortex’. I’m sure this isn’t a real anatomical or functional term.
(I just read a bit more and have seen ‘metacortex’ in a more enlightening context. But it’s still weird.)
mssv 