I found something else Charles Stross hates...

[roseembolism]

...aside from feudalism that is.  And that's David Weber style milporn^H^H^H^H MilSF.  

While slogging throughThe Apocalypse Troll, wincing at  the somewhat less than two-dimensional charaters, and the descriptive prose that could have been lifted from a bad romance novel, I realized that in Singularity Sky Stross is taking a poke at the "whole "invincible starship piloted by a brilliant captain" idea".  

While Stross of course couldn't develop such a fetishistic attention to the details of his space military, there was the similar description of:  the huge space feudalists capital ship, the proud, dedicated and competent personnel manning it, and the tactical genius of a captain...all of which proves to be pretty much irrelevant.  Plus there's the representatives of a more advanced civilization, who futily try to warn the feudalists of this fact because the feudalists just.  Won't. LISTEN.

In the Stross-verse, classic militaries in the Weber sense don't just lose, they get eaten.

Comments

[pompe.livejournal.com]

I thought Accelerando was a bit too long to be entirely amusing. With Stross' style I'd prefer shorter works.