Saint Clare Marlborough 2006 Sauvignon Blanc

Recently, I’ve been putting my wine notes on Cork’d. But I made a mistake with tonight’s wine and forgot to tell the system whether I was entering it to review, to add to my “cellar”, or to add to my wishlist — and then when I tried to fix the problem, it complained that the wine was already in the system but couldn’t find it. So I’ll review it here…and that means I don’t have to use the compressed 100-point scale, either. Not all bugs are harmful!

At any rate, the wine we had with dinner was Saint Clare Marlborough 2006 Sauvignon Blanc (probably purchased at Costco). Both Diane and I liked it (more than half the bottle vanished); it has a good bit of acidity, a medium finish, and lots of grapefruit notes (with a little kiwifruit mixed in). We had it with a spicy spaghetti sauce and Indian vegetables — it didn’t really hold its own against that competition, but it was still pleasant enough for a cool evening.

One more by Charles Stross: Accelerando

I came to Accelerando with a false hope, one I’ll disabuse you of right away. The back cover blurb from Vernor Vinge made me hope that this book would tell the story of the Singularity Sky Singularity, the one which created the Eschaton. It doesn’t.

And unlike the Eschaton, which is a deus ex machina which mostly stays offstage, the transcendent results of Accelerando‘s Singularity are very much a presence throughout the novel.

Well, it’s not really a novel. It was originally published as nine short stories in Asimov’s, and it shows — there is a good bit of repetition and reintroduction (though nothing as obtrusive as in Harry Turtledove’s series). So we get to meet our protagonist, Manfred Macx, many times, along with the other members of his dysfunctional family, as they play out their personal drama against the Singularity as it approaches, happens, and leaves them struggling with the results.

And that’s the weakness of the book — humans can’t comprehend the Singularity. Stross tries hard to show it through its effect on the human (and then post-human) characters, but in the end, it’s Just Another Damn Book Of Magical Stuff (sentient business models? I’d settle for sentient business modelers!).

The book was enjoyable — Stross has a nasty sense of humor at times, and I really enjoyed some of the allusions he threw in to other SF — but the last three chapters were effective at making the point that a post-Singularity world would be incomprehensible, by being rather messy themselves.