Lobsters

Stross, Charles. "Lobsters." Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2001.[1] Anthologized in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel, editors (San Francisco: Tachyon Publications, 2007).[2]

Mentioned in Sandor Klapcsik's review of the anthology in SFRA Review #284 (Spring 2008): pp. 15-16, which see for his comment that "Lobsters" is one of the stories in the anthology that "focus strongly on techno-geek culture."[3]

Reviewed at greater length by Alex Willging, 7 August 2012, series of reviews on Rewired stories.

As is the case with all stories that delve into that terrifying landscape of the technological singularity, this tale is chock-full of future shock. Manfred Macx is an American entrepreneur who specializes in coming up with ideas, getting instant patents on those ideas, and then giving them away to other people to get rich off, all while maintaining his own comfortable existence as a wanderer.

This story finds him in the Netherlands, where he makes contact with a group of enhanced Russian lobsters who want to escape their human handlers and make a new home for themselves as uploads to some bandwidth node in space.[4]

See for enhancements, mental uploads, and long-range digitalized transportation, applied to crustaceans.

RDE, finishing, 7Jan21