Leszek Ciesielski

This is an incredibly odd book.

The book is definitely interesting. It is not, though, SF, as that is literary genre, and The Martian is more of a NASA guidebook or manual. The protagonist muddles through catastrophe after catastrophe, only to be thrown into the next one with extreme predictability, all the time keeping the certainty that his/NASA's engineering genius will save him. No characters to speak of, the whole read is a demonstration of authors proficiency with the “science” part, but very little of the “fiction”. More like an astronaut training drill.

For a beginner to savings in personal finance, this book tends to be recommended as the first steps. However, I found the forced fake-old-English style off-putting (and not used consistently either). I'm also saddened that the author didn't look for actual factual knowledge of finance in Babylon ( such as in [b:Debt: The First 5,000 Years 6617037 Debt The First 5,000 Years David Graeber https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1390408633s/6617037.jpg 6811142] ), instead only learning it was where finance and banking begun- and he invented all the rest to fit his American-centric narrative.If you're looking for a starter on personal finance, [b:The Simple Path to Wealth: Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life 30646587 The Simple Path to Wealth Your road map to financial independence and a rich, free life J.L. Collins https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1466299641s/30646587.jpg 51187846] is a much better choice.

Like the golden age SF of the '60s and the cyberpunk of the '80s, the singularity SF is emblematic of the '00s. And there's hardly a better example of the phenomenon than Accelarando.

Re-reading it after almost 20 years, the book has clearly aged - but it also still shines, perhaps even more so, because so much of the technoscientologic corporate bullshit it extrapolates is actually happening - being made to happen, by those who took the singularity gospel as, well, gospel. Stross was (and is) quite uniquely on point when it comes to pointing out the multitude of moral, ethical and simply economical problems with such people.

Polish translation (Próchniewicz) is quite brilliant.

I've enjoyed it. Dragon riders, reasonably thought out battles. And a not-quite-regency era romance. Yeah, it's cheesy and happy. It also (at least the first book) doesn't explore much behind the ridiculously class-obsessed setting, which for a recent book is a let down. It's also ridiculously francophobic and painting a horror-like image of Napoleon, which (as a Polish person) makes it somewhat hard to cheer for the protagonists.