Lobsters

by Charles Stross, Shandra Marie (Narrator), Jared Doreck (Narrator)

"Lobsters" introduces us to the permanently wired Manfred Macx, a youthful, self-assured (and self-doubting) cultural purveyor, the world's first "Venture Altruist," out to prove the validity of Win-Win synergistic scenarios while engaging in exotic drugs and sexual experimentation against a near future socio-political backdrop. Fleeing his dominatrix ex-wife, shifting world economies, trading his image on the "reputations market," and inventing extropianistic technologies are all in a day's work. Nebula Award Nominee, Hugo Award Nominee

Genres: Science Fiction, Short Stories, Cyberpunk, Audiobook

1 pages, Audio CD

First published June 1, 2001

About the author

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

SF Encyclopedia: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/...

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...

Tor: http://us.macmillan.com/author/charle...

Reviews

[Andreas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Synopsis: Manfred Macx is a genius in coming up with ideas, and realizing them instantly to patents, only to giving them away to other people to get rich off, and also to the public. He doesn't earn money but lives comfortably off the generosity from his benefactors, e.g. a provided luxury appartment in a hotel, free public transport, free shopping. The setting is a near future Netherlands somewhere shortly before the singularity. Uploading minds is nearly there and already started with an experiment of uploading lobsters ("one neuron at a time") and turning cats into war machines. Exactly those lobsters contact Manfred to help them escaping humans into space. Meanwhile, Manfred's ex-financee Pamela visits him and tries to change him to a responsible, capitalistic life.

Review: A revised version of this novelette started Stross's famous novel Accelerando.
The story is chock-full with futuristic ideas which superpose content and characters. The author's staccato of futuristic terms will probably be hard for most readers, a Bruce Sterling on crack, similar in style to Hannu Rajaniemi.
I found the concept of exponentially accelerating development very convincing: The novelette was published more than 15 years ago. In that decade, technologies developed and spread out that nobody really believed in then: Smart phones, natural language processing, machine learning, autonomous cars, robotics, just to name a few. That kind of acceleration is visible right now. People in general can only extrapolate linearly, they don't grog an exponential development; The Second Machine Age : Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies names that acceleration as "living in the second half of the chess-board".
Yes, the time-frame of the novel seems a little rough - uploading minds or reaching singularity within only a couple of years from now on seems as unbelievable as converting the planets of our solar system into a single computronium within a hundred years. In this, the author succeeds: exponential acceleration taken to extremes, invoking scepticism.
Although the concepts in this story are extremely dense, other qualities are fascinating as well. One is the contrasting juxtaposition of the characters of innovative Manfred and conservative Pam, bound together in a SM bondage relationship. In the end, it is a romance fiction. The other is the storytelling with its perfect timing, ending in an unexpected but satisfying plot twist.

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. From the standpoint of pure brilliance of imagination and cleverness of writing, this short story (novelette really) is a no doubt 5 star effort, if not more. This is the first story set in the Accelerando series and the above description does an accurate job with the plot (to the extent anything can) and so I won't repeat it here.

I rated it 4.5 stars only because, from a pure enjoyment standpoint, it was a little bit "too out there" to really track all the nuances of the story. That said, it is definitely worth a read and is cast in the mold of other frenetic, high octane stories like Snow Crash and Neuromancer.

Nominee: Hugo Award for Best Novelette
Nominee: Nebula Award for Best Novelette
Nominee: Locus Award for Best SF Short Fiction

[Brainycat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this in Rewired: The Post-CyberPunk Anthology. It's the best story in the 61% of the book I've read so far. The characters are real and quirky, and the world is utterly believable.

Assuming that processing power and mobile bandwidth keep accelerating at their current rate, let the world's governments fracture and/or hide in bunkers, and put yourself in Amsterdam. That's where this short story begins, and we follow a couple of days in the life of Manfred Macx, who enjoys life as an elite in the nascent post-scarcity economy as a technologist who patents emergent technologies, then signs the patents over to an opensource trust. His problems include his ex-fiance and dominatrix, a group of radical luddites who send him dead kittens, the constant harassment from an IRS that can't understand why he doesn't need money, the Moscow NT User Group wants to defect, and then the weirdness starts.

As the late and great Hunter S. Thompson said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

I have Accelerando laying around, I'll definitely be reading it sooner rather than later.

[Mikehendo · Rating 2 out of 5]

it just sort of went nowhere...

[Claus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Lobsters and then all the other Charles Stross short stories in this series and it was the perfect timing as I was immersed in posthumanism, transhumanism and living on the Extropy mailing list and reading Slashdot daily. I was young and the future was exciting and radical.

[Kirsten Audiobook Addict · Rating 4 out of 5]

So bizarre. Definitely interested in more by Stross

[Alex · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. I really didn't like this story. Good things first: The crustacean KGB-AI, the idea of uplifting and then uploading animals and the way the topic of human rights for said animal-uploads was handled were great. If only the story had focused on them, instead of trying to give the spotlight to what feels like a dozen plot points and items at the same time. Needless to say, spotlights don't work that way. In just over twenty pages, Charles Stross tried to deal with the aforementioned speculative issues, delivered jabs against both anarchocapitalism and communism (neither was interesting), talked about alien intelligence, post-scarcity economics and abuse of the IP laws of the future, discussed whether tax responsibility and romantic responsibility are comparable (an issue he never resolved) and whether we should terraform Mars or turn everything into computronium. There's a particularly terrible romance subplot too, which was resolved with a gratitious BDSM-rape scene and the threat of paralyzing the protagonist for life. Speaking of which, the protagonist was completely forgettable, and so was his ex. So was everyone besides the lobster-KGB-AI-refugee, who almost pushed this story up to three stars for me, but sadly, that's not enough.

Lastly, some of the prose - including the technobabble - is pretty bad:

The Teledesic satellite cluster was killed by cheap balloons and slightly less cheap high-altitude solar-powered drones with spread-spectrum laser relays.

She knows she can have this effect on him any time she wants: she’s got the private keys to his hypothalamus, and sod the metacortex.

This is what it’s like to be tetraplegic, Manfred. Bedridden with motor neurone disease. Locked inside your own body by nv-CJD. I could spike you with MPPP and you’d stay in this position for the rest of your life, shitting in a bag, pissing through a tube. Unable to talk and with nobody to look after you. Do you think you’d like that?

My problem here is not that this is incoherent. I'm sure Stross knows his science. Nor do I find it too hard to understand. I know what a hypothalamus is and I quickly figured out what a metacortex is supposed to be. Besides, I can enjoy similar levels of technobabble in the works of Peter Watts. However, in Watts' stories, it feels far less gratitious. I don't know why that is, but it's nevertheless my impression.

[Damndirtypandas]

Lobsters by Charlie Stross (2003)

[Nicholas Whyte]

Part of the Accelerando sequence.

[glitrbug]

Kindle,.96,Amazon

[Mack · Rating 3 out of 5]

William Gibson but nice.

[Kate123 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Krátka zaujímavá sci fi poviedka.