Critical Mass – Daniel Suarez

Daniel Suarez is an author who has earned my respects. I have torn threw a few of his books so far, and I have loved all of them. As an author he comes across not only as knowledgeable on many topics, but also capable of weaving those details into a great narrative. I believe he was an engineer of some stripe before writing fiction, and I often found that it showed. He tends to write sci-fi for the STEM geek.

Critical Mass is the sequel to his 2019 novel Delta-v, which follows the trials of the first attempted astroid mining operations. That novel was filled with the very real problems such an operation would naturally undergo, and ends in something of a cliffhanger, not only for many of the characters in the book, but for humanity in general. How will all that happened impact the future of humanity, with the environment collapsing all around?

BITCOIN!

Wot?

I wanted to like Critical Mass. I really did. But I feel like the author was not well enough removed from the novel itself. I am normally ok with an author inserting themselves and their opinions into a book, but this one did far, far, far too much of it. Among the many things a good book should not do, one is to make the reader utter the following:

If I hear one more god damned explanation of cryptocurrency I will throw this book away.

That was my experience after a while. Enough so that I did not want to continue reading it. Kinda spoilers: because of the geopolitical implication of a successful asteroid mining operation, all the world governments reach out with their hands for their cut of the profits, which really haven’t materialized anyway. The first operation was proof of concept at best. That solution is a blockchain backed yada yada yada – a non-government stock market based on cryptocurrencies.

Ok, sure.

I am something of an old fuck. I have had these conversations for the past decade, and I am rather sick of them. Are you correct about crypto? Fine, great. Just go be right somewhere else. I just don’t want to hear it. And while I would have listened to it once in this novel, it gets explained again and again. Enough to notice, and enough to feel like I was being preached to. Boy, its a cute idea, but so many things in sci-fi are. And often, they wouldn’t really work.

All things considered, the blockchain proselytizing was likely less than 1/100th of the book. But it still felt like too much. And it ended up drowning out so much less.

Yes, I will read the next one too. I am invested. I will also keep reading Suarez. Let’s hope this doesn’t keep coming out of him.