Run away

I am grumpy this morning, grump grump grump, because I must finally sit down and write a report for a publisher on a book manuscript so impossibly, scarily weird and bad that reading it is a physical difficulty. I've never experienced anything like this, ever. Not in my wildest dreams. But—well, there's a passage in Count Zero that keeps coming to mind. It's where Turner plugs a biosoft memory file compiled by a truly artificial intelligence into his head, and suffers the consequences:

It came on, again, gradually, a flickering, nonlinear flood of fact and sensory data, a kind of narrative conveyed in surreal jump cuts and juxtapositions. It was vaguely like riding a roller coaster that phased in and out of existence at random, impossibly rapid intervals, changing altitude, attack, and direction with each pulse of nothingness, except that the shifts had nothing to do with any physical orientation, but rather with lightning alternations in paradigm and symbol system. The data had never been intended for human input.

EXACTLY. That's so exactly what it's like, I could save time by just sending the publishers that paragraph. Ha ha. But seriously, I've delayed writing this report for about three weeks because the book scares me so much. It's like some weird 1950s behaviourist pluvialis-in-box conditioning experiment. It's so horrible to read I don't want to go back to it. Ever.