jeezus, Dutch. Here I thought, after viewing the author's weblog + forums, I was the only person who thought this story was a cheap, watered down version of William Gibson + Neal Stephenson.

Ugh. Overworked, academic sentences. No real characters. Painfully stilted dialogue. Wince inducing prose ("Despite being engaged for two years, he and Pamela never had intromissive intercourse." "Just then a bandwidth load as heavy as a pregnant elephant sits down on Manfred’s head and sends clumps of humongous pixellation flickering across his sensorium ..." "if she’s finally decided to conscript his gametes into the war against impending population crash, he’ll find it hard to fight back."). God, the fact that the character has a name like Manfred Macx + it's not intended to be funny/ironic.

It's also painfully obvious that the author inserted himself into the story (and not in a Miller-Bukowski-Vonnegut-Kerouac sort of way) and is living out some kind of uber-geek fantasy. Which is fine, but don't ever show it to anybody and for Christ's sake don't publish it.

It occurred to me, too, that this might be a parody/satire, but somehow, I just don't think it is.

How the hell did this get nominated for a Hugo award?

The scariest part is that "Lobsters" is part of a series .. which is now up to part 5.