Quote from: skhellter on Jan 28, 2022, 05:24:06 PM
there is cringe bizarre humor in this book but Cadigan also reasons it in story as being the result of
"the mind going to damn weird places at times of deep stress" (as a few characters point out).
So most of the weirder lines are towards the end because everyone's just losing their damn minds.
Which makes for very weird tonal shifts.
(the "shoots and scores" bit is just plain bad, tho)
I had a hard time with all the "capitalists" stuff every time the UPP characters were in internal monologue.
By the end of the Soviet Union, they had long since transitioned to a state capitalist economy as opposed to anything representing communism. No educated Soviet would still be lamenting "capitalists" in 1991, let alone educated UPP scientists doing so in 2191. So even if you're using some alternate history where the USSR never collapsed, it was well on its way to complete control by oligarchs like modern Russia is.
And I checked Gibson's original draft. It only uses the word "capitalist" once, and in reference to megacorporations like Weyland Yutani, not the unnamed Space America.
It really took me out of the novel in those chapters because it literally sounds like something an elderly person who grew up at the height of the Cold War would write, not something written by someone with a strong grasp of politics.