It's taking me forever to finish reading Charles Stross's Accelerando, a post-cyberpunk job made up of interconnected short stories following a single family line's fortunes before, during, and after the human race achieves a technological singularity. I've been reading the thing for nearly a week already. I have a Marquez book to read. I have two Kirby omnibuses to spelunk into. But I'm still reading Accelerando, which may have lost track of its own point about fifty pages ago. In the earlier sections I was gripped by the characters and their awkward relationships with one another while being interested in the science. As we rush on, they start to sound more and more like blank spokesmodels for Stross's ideas about post-singularity economic models and technology. Economic systems form a backbone for the novel, but earlier on it's kept in check by the characters.
They do come back though, the characters. Manfred Macx is resurrected in several forms over the course of the later sections. Why? Because he's a pervasive character and he genuinely interested me by being a positive character who still managed to be fucked up (much like his second wife, Annette). Later on, all that starts to fade and characters become mouthpieces while Stross begins to fall into Clarke's Trap, where the Idea is Hero and outweighs the narrative itself.