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good book. great ideas, execution got a little muddy halfway through ( )

Schroeder is a fairly recent discovery for me. (Why is it that I tend to love Canadian SF authors? Do I have some sort of deep-seated genetic affinity?) I haven't read everything by him yet, but I've liked everything I've read so far. 'Lady of Mazes; is admittedly not my favorite selection by him so far, but I still quite liked it. It reminded me of Elizabeth Bear's Jacob's Ladder books - but better.

It took a while for me to get into it. The multi-layered virtual reality these characters live in is challenging to understand - and the reader gets dumped right in.However, once the spray from the splashdown settles, the plot picks up - and there are plenty of plots. Unravelling the various motivations and mysteries, as this virtual world unravels, is a lot of fun. ( )

From Jo Walton's list of books that made her excited about scifi. I suppose I see why LoM ended on her list -- the exploration of the end stage of augmented reality/VR is good. For example, Schroeder has the wonderful concept of the 'cliff test'. You take people and change their subjective reality so it seems they are falling off a cliff. If you've been raised in customized VR, you assume it's an illusion. A normal human freaks out and has an adrenaline response. LoM envisages a society where, essentially, everyone would fail the cliff test. But despite much, much ingeniousness of similar quality, the basic story elements and characterization didn't grab me. As it became clear that it was trending towards a post-human deity vs. post-human deity slugfest I lost interest. ( )

Well, Schroeder finally breaks the streak. This could have been really cool, with its ideas about virtual realities and government-through-emergent-behavior.
Unfortunately, the 3 main characters were all dull and whiny. ( )