baffo Male, 37, Engaged. Rotterdam, Netherlands

This book has been described to me as one of the classics of scientific journalism, and I must agree. It is clearly written, in a nontechnical yet non-fluffy way. Ideas, devices, people come to life on these pages.
Of course, time has passed: this is a 1973 book, and the references to terrorism and the fears of the USA are fatally dated. But it does not really matte, the intelligent reader will be able to make his mental adjustments.
And one does hope that the safeguards of the atomic energy industry have improved vastly during these thirty-five years.

OK, maybe I should have known what I was getting into. But at the same time, I did not anticipate that about half of the book would be written in a severely irritating Scottish English transcription. Local color (even local colour) is fine, particularly in dialog, but still:

Does "Ah feel rain droplets hittin my heid n shoodirs, n ah look up" add something, as opposed to "I feel rain droplets hitting my head and shoulders, and I look up"? Letting aside the believability of "droplets" as an element of stream-of-consciousness in this particular character - a particularly disgusting human specimen that does not seem very much inclined to droplets and other subtleties.

This comment refers to the 180-page novella "Kingdom of Fife" that constitutes about half of the book.

I don't think I will read more Welsh. It just does not resonate.

Seems to me that now that he has abandoned the future and cyberspace, Gibson's old tics and cliches have become a bit irritating. I mean, I am all for mysterious Cuban-American semiautonomous spy organizations, gifted with superhuman cryptography abilities, martial arts skills and even musical talents. I really dig that. But it would be easier to digest if set in a complete freaky futuristic allucination, rather than in contemporary slightly boring US.

I read this because I had greatly enjoyed "No Highway" and "On the Beach" by the same author. I have not been disappointed. The book feels incredibly exotic, it reminds us of how different the world was in the post-WWII decade as far as many things go - modes of travelling, affluence, racism, class prejudice...

I did not like so much the Smilla book, and I am not liking so much this one. Postmodern attempt at telling a story from many different vintage points, but it seems to me that the dreamy atmosphere is lacking in something. What exactly? Perhaps lightness.

Reading through this book is, for this reader, like plodding through a mudflat.