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If this were a movie, I'd be blinking myself awake in a chair, belly stuffed full of popcorn, remembering vaguely that there were lots of explosions and weak acting, and feeling a bit silly for having hoped it was going to be something else.

I really wanted to like this book. And I did, when it was called Excession. Banks has had these problems before in other novels, but here it really all comes together. It's a Culture Novel by the tropes.

Seriously, there's nothing in this book that you haven't seen before. Wacky minds? Check. Ultimately meaningless emotional sideplot involving humans? Check. Massively competent SC operative awkwardly standing by the sidelines? Idiot slapstick military trying to take on an Abominator class and failing? Check. Over the top self obsessed villain? Check. And the guy who's supposedly pushing all of this -- the head of the Trapeze gang -- is such a hollowed out shell that even fighting for his life in simulations is so boring that he's going through the motions.

So... yeah. Don't bother.

Worth reading just for the unadulterated, adult perspective of a straight woman who talks about female desire without apology or shame. She likes sex. She likes that men like sex. There are some people that she likes more than just sex, but she doesn't try to limit or hide herself, and when she doesn't feel like having sex with someone (notably an ex fixing her computer), she's more than happy to hand the guy a box of tissues.

The oddest thing about this book is that by being the perfect male fantasy, even accidentally, she points out male fantasies for what they are -- men who think they want sex start crying and say they want relationships, men who think they're insatiable are surprised when they're sated, men who think they're far too straightlaced to do anything risque find that given the opportunity, they'll take it.

Predictably, as soon as this book was published, the author found herself outed and "slutshamed" for daring to have casual sex. The real tragedy is that what she was and is doing is really feminism in its purest form -- acting as you want to act, treating yourself and everyone around you in a responsible manner. It's a pity that's still a shocking idea to most people.

Reading Makers is some bizarre inversion of Pride and Prejudice where instead of examining courtship rituals and suitability for marriage, the writer is obsessed with startups and business plans.

Reading this book was like being in a coffee shop (Coffee Bar, specifically) next to a coked up newly minted MBA trying to sell his virtualized social media company to an investor over the phone based purely on the amount of buzzwords he could cram into a sentence. Except for the sex scenes. Oh god. The TSA prostate exam was more realistic.

I started skipping through pages, picking out bits of dialog where they weren't talking about business ideas or propping up each others' egos by telling them how great they were really. Then I started skipping pages. Then finally I realized that, 300 pages in, I realized that the person I most liked in the novel was the rat-faced reporter who was trying to poke holes in their glorious bubble driven reality.

I put the book down and walked away.

Read Feed. Came in. Bought this book two days later.

What I love about this book is not just the society it has, where the Internet is a given and the house is smart enough to ask you how you'd like to be showered. It's not just that everyone, from the security guards to the truckers to the flight attendents are armed to the teeth and would be voted Most Likely To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse in any other novel.

It's about the young kids who are smart enough and crazy enough to poke zombies with sticks and post it on their blog for attention, who grow into smart and crazy adults who by their nature can't resist poking at what the government gets up to when no-one's looking.

Because the problem isn't the zombies. It's the culture of fear that surrounds the zombies. It's about what that does to society, and what society is willing to do to itself just so it can feel safer at night. And it's about what happens when there's finally someone willing to look.

Not nearly as dumb as the cover would imply -- the RSS icon on the front cover made me think that blogging somehow caused zombies to happen. The reality of the book is much smarter, in that it's about a world in which zombies are a chronic problem (virus based, with ANYTHING over 50 lbs that dies for any reason coming back bitey) and blogging is the primary means by which society communicates. Because everyone is damn terrified of going outside or travelling.

The main characters are Georgia (named after George Romero), Shaun, and Buffy. They're young but intelligent, and inclined to take risks that most of the populace wouldn't even think of taking. They exist in a society very different from our own, more advanced in places and with a degree of functioning paranoia from a world in which taking down zombies is taught alongside CPR and defensive driving. And then they get picked to cover the next presidential campaign.

The story from there is interesting, and the characters are solid and there are ZOMBIES in abundance. The actual politics is ludicrous and the villain may as well come with a "Kiss Me, I'm Evil" apron on him, but it's very nice to read a novel that not only takes the internet into account, but is based around it as a means of communication in the same way that you see cell phones in movies. The world in Feed is the Future, and they take their technology for granted and depend on it for survival, without being impressed or flashy about it. That's an achievement in itself.

Honestly, I don't know whether it's from reading way too many neuroscience books or just reading too many philosophy books, but there was nothing I felt was added to my experience from reading this book. It's a discussion of consciousness from a philosophical perspective that takes the neuroscience into account -- but having taken the neuroscience into account, there's little left to do besides document it and equate it to the "internal" experience. This is unproductive in itself, because the nature of the illusion is that it feels real, even when it is provably a neural correlate to the outside reality.

Where the book did become unexpectedly fascinating was in its discussion of the validity of consciousness to an Artifical Intelligence -- silicon based consciousness is as "valid" as carbon based consciousness, there are any number of ethical questions involved in what can "legally" be done to them.

That being said, this is a solid book that is arguably much broader than "The User Illusion" or "The New Executive Brain", and is done from a philosophical perspective that may be much easier to digest.