Title: Virtually Unreadable
Product review: The ideas explored are fascinating, but the prose used to do the exploring is wildly uneven. While there are chunks here and there that approach coherence, to a large extent the writing consists of a sort of manic hyper-caffeinated chattiness that at times verges on hysteria. Liberally peppered with irrelevant asides that careen from topic to topic without differentiating fact from wild speculation, the book is also repetitive and poorly edited. There's also an annoying habit of taking commonly used terms and arbitrarily coining new names for them ("minting" for nanotech assembly, the titular "spike" for Vinge's singularity). The jacket blurb casts this as accessible pop science writing in the tradition of Arthur C. Clarke's "Profiles of the Future." While somewhere under all that verbiage Broderick seems to have a basic command of the subject, trust me -- Clarke he ain't.
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