I like KSR, and I understand the distinction that’s being made here, but everyone—e v e r y o n e—in that book was an asshole. The good guys were smug assholes. The bad guys were grumpy assholes. In between you had psychotic assholes, catatonically depressed assholes, colonialist assholes, worker drone assholes, refugee assholes, mystic assholes, eco-fascist assholes, and corporatist assholes. I’m pretty sure the robot factories were assholes too, if we could have examined their code.
If you could teleport Musk into that universe, and I am all for trying to do just that, he’d be one of the nicer people in it. I guess it says something about the author’s skill that I made it through a very long book where I didn’t like a single character. (The rest of the trilogy wasn’t quite as bad on that point, but neither was it as compelling.)
