Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Notes on Charles Stross' Accelerando

I just got done reading Accelerando by Charles Stross and I'm gonna talk about it! Since I actually like the book, I'm not going to give any spoilers. Or I think I won't.

It's a big, sprawling post-cyberpunk novel about three or so generations of post-humans. That's the big thing with modern science fiction writers - post-humans. Y'know, what's left of humanity after we've used biotechnology and cybernetics to move ourselves well past the limitations of our flesh, and the new sentient species that will develop in such an environment, AIs, uplifted animals, things like that.

The characters are generally interesting, if not always likable, and enough happens to keep a body interested. One of the problems a lot of science-fiction writers have is that characterization is often fairly irrelevant to the book, but Stross' characters are people and he spends a fair bit of time developing relationships in believable ways (albeit with technology that is nigh magical).

Stross' language is very high brow. I actually had to look up a couple of words, which is pretty rare for me at this stage of the game. Accelerando is also written in the present tense. This makes his language a fair bit pretentious - but it's mitigated by his generally straightforward grammatical structure. Yeah, he uses a lot of big words and everything is present tense, but otherwise his writing style is pretty tight which makes it readable - perhaps even a little good, at least the big words part, because it projects competence.

It is also a book that is about a lot of things and then, curiously, nothing much at all. This is, alas, a big problem with science-fiction.

First, the book is crammed with ideas. Part of the book addresses the Fermi paradox. One day some folks were talking about the possibility of superintelligent alien life and Enrico Fermi chimed in, "Then why haven't they come around for a visit?" It's a false paradox. It's superficially easy to imagine why superintelligent aliens haven't stopped by for a visit - the universe is a big place being at the top of the list. Others include, y'know, "They have, we just didn't notice it. Or we don't believe the people who have seen it." But it's something that, when projecting oneself into the future, mentally speaking, as a science-fiction writer must often done, sounds intriguing. Why haven't superintelligent aliens come by, lately?

The second big idea that he tackles is the idea of a technological singularity. It's simply a fact that the rate of technological development has skyrocketed in the past, say, couple hundred years. People who believe in a technological singularity believe that at some point the speed of technological advance will become so rapid and deep that it is impossible to really imagine what they'll be doing with it. (Whether or not this is true depends on a great deal; I, myself, don't know if it'll happen because I don't think we have enough information to meaningfully talk about it, but it's called science-fiction for a reason, right?) What will happen to people, to humans, if a singularity hits?

There's a lot of other stuff, too. Like . . . future shock! It goes on and on.

Second, the book is full of weirdness. Which I like. The future is likely to really weird. Cavemen wouldn't understand the least little bit about our society, and it's commonplace that barbarians do not understand advanced technical civilizations - you can see the future shock in Mongol armies faced with Chinese civilization in the 13th century. They didn't understand what the Chinese were doing, and it was seriously suggested that they kill all the peasants to lessen their profound future shock. So, it's probably impossible for a science-fiction writer to write something that's "too weird". Even if they get the details wrong, and they will of course, the weirdness will probably be about right.

Third, the book is full of superhuman intelligences. Indeed, it's full of vast, inscrutable intelligences.

So, what comes out of this? The book is frantically paced. Stross keeps hitting you with weirdness and ideas, interleaved with personal melodrama, and its easy to be staggered by it all.

But, in the end, I'm not sure that the book ended up being about anything at all. Sure, a lot of ideas were touched on, but at the same time about a trillion plot threads were still in the air. And, ultimately, despite being about these post-humans, while things were weird, Stross is trapped by being a human trying to imagine things smarter than he is - smarter than anyone is. Despite the weirdness, and despite assertions of futurism, the big ideas are actually all pretty modern - stuff like anarcho-capitalism, which has been a staple of science-fiction since the first days of the cyberpunk movement (and has its roots back in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, though at the time the term anarcho-capitalism didn't exist it's clearly what they've got on Luna). But, really, what could you expect? Stross is, himself, just a human, like the rest of us.

He also seems to lack the courage of his convictions. When you have transcendentally intelligent beings, described as being "weakly godlike", it's . . . absurd for the humans to even remotely guess what they're doing. The comparison is between a human's intelligence and a tapeworm's intelligence. I don't imagine that a tapeworm goes around accurately assessing what humans are doing, but some of that goes on, too, in Accelerando.

That said, the book is smart and has interesting characters. And while, perhaps, I'm a little less future shocked than many of my peers and find many of the ideas in the book passe - for crying out loud, try to imagine a future society that isn't anarcho-capitalism! - the book is going to provoke thought from anyone who has even a passing interest in futurism. So, if you're in for a weird future in a smartly written science-fiction book with strong, if not stellar, characterizations, you should take a look at Stross' Accelerando.

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