Book review of Accelerando, by Charles Stross, and associated wibbling

[lethargic_man]

"Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich." So opens "Lobsters", the first instalment of autopope's mind-blowing novel Accelerando.

I first read "Lobsters", in its original short-story incarnation, in 1999, and spent the following four years referring to the book, gradually taking form as a series of award-winning novelettes, as my favourite novel of 2004 (okay, so I was one year out). It uses the "crammed prose" technique pioneered by Bruce Sterling in his mid-eighties novel Schismatrix, only more so, resulting in a truly white-hot flux of ideas. As autopope puts it:

Schismatrix by Bruce Sterling "boils down the three-percent beer of space opera into a jolting postmodern whiskey" (Vincent Omniaveritas, Cheap Truth #15). Accelerando takes the thin beer of cyberpunk and methylates it. (Clue: tastes like white lightning, isn't necessarily good for the consumer. But at least it isn't thin beer any more.)

The density of ideas is astounding: there are entire other authors' stories (the giants whose shoulders autopope stands on) summarised in a single sentence. Someone once told me it was impossible to understand this book without being an avid follower of Slashdot. (That's not entirely true, as I don't read it, but a diet of SF and keeping an eye on science news sufficed to substitute.)

The book tells the story, through three generations of an exceptionally dysfunctional family, of humanity's progress into a technological singularity. The idea of the Singularity is that if you look at human history on any scale, technological progress increases exponentially, as a consequence of population growth - the more people there are, the more technologists there are to come up with new ideas - and that today tech is moving forward so fast we're approaching the point it will shoot forward beyond the ability of people from beforehand to comprehend, indeed, soon beyond the ability of unenhanced humans to comprehend.

"But when did it happen?" asks Donna. "My audience, they will to know your opinion be needing."

"Four year ago, when we instantiated this ship," Pierre says promptly.

"Back in the teens," says Ang. "When Amber's father liberated the uploaded lobsters."

"Its not happening yet," contributes Boris. "Singularity implies infinite rate of change achieved momentarily. Future not amenable thereafter to prediction by presingularity beings, right? So has not happened."

"Au contraire. It happened on June 6, 1969, at eleven hundred hours, eastern seaboard time," Pierre counters. "That was when the first network control protocol packets were sent from the data port of one IMP to another - the first ever Internet connection. That's the singularity. Since then we've all been living in a universe that was impossible to predict from events prior to that time."

"It's rubbish," counters Boris. "Singularity is load of religious junk. Christian mystic rapture recycled for atheist nerds."

Which ties in nicely with some thoughts of mine on the subject. A good case could actually be made for dating the Singularity to the invention of writing circa 3100 BCE (in both Sumeria and Egypt). The same century or two also saw the invention of the wheel and how to make bronze... and the rest, of course, was history (as everything beforehand was prehistory).

Or how about the invention of agriculture and cities at the end of the last Ice Age roughly ten thousand years ago? Once again, the pace of development has rocketed since, compared to beforehand. There's a graph, too, in Stephen Oppenheimer's Out of Eden showing the rate of technological progress accelerating exponentially over the last two million years, before going vertical at the end.

One of the impressive things about Accelerando is how it portrays a believable picture of the Singularity as realistically achievable within the course of the twenty-first century. Little of the technology in "Lobsters" did not exist in at least an embryonic form in 1999 when the story was written. Indeed, viewed from that perspective, the story constitutes an incredibly accurate piece of future prediction (though that was not, of course, its aim): Between then and now, the world we live in has moved on pretty much a straight-line course towards the 2012 (or 2015, in the novel version) depicted in the story. Future prediction at that length of time is a difficult trick to pull off; autopope has, it seems, the rare knack of being able to look at embryonic technologies and see which are destined for success, and which doomed to be stillborn.

Yet, whilst "Lobsters" contains little new, it's decidedly future-facing. By "Troubadour", the second of the nine stories that comprise the novel, the technology has moved ahead of the present-day, yet the transition from "Lobsters" is so seamless that you have to look hard to notice. This trend continues throughout. Manfred Macx, agalmic entrepreneur (rysmiel: "one of Stand on Zanzibar's synthesists on speed") waxes lyrical in "Lobsters":

"We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!"

Bob looks wary. "Sounds kind of long term to me. Just how far ahead do you think?"

"Very long-term---at least twenty, thirty years. "

Very funny, the naive reader thinks: yet it does, indeed, happen, and is portrayed convincingly. After reading SF of this kind, any SF which does not feature technological acceleration of this form, which postulates futures in a thousand years time barely a century advanced from today, looks staid and out-of-date unless there's a good in-story reason for it.

Of course, autopope is not the only person writing stories about the Singularity; Vernor Vinge and Ken Macleod are well-known other examples that spring to mind (not to mention Sterling's "Swarm", one of the stories that led up to Schismatrix, being, written in 1983, the earliest example of a technological singularity in SF I have read). Yet by its nature it is impossible to write about the Singularity from the inside. One of the things about Accelerando is that it stays on the inside of the progression into posthumanity for longer than anything else I've read, before the viewpoint moves off, quite deliberately, into the sidelines. And where it finishes up at the end of the novel is really most unexpected given the premises from where it started. But you're going to have to read the novel yourself to find out.

My only negative comment is that, after taking the time to review the stories as they passed through my old, Edinburgh-based writers group, autopope promised me a place in the acknowledgements in the front of the book, but then forgot. (The acknowledgements does mention someone I even introduced autopope to, but then go on to say "If your name isn't on this list, blame my memory - my neural prostheses are off-line".) It would seem egoistical to actually point this out to autopope for remedying in the next edition, so it seems I'll have to settle instead for putting up with being mildly narked.

(Anyhow, if you'd like to read the book but are put off by what I wrote above about it not being aimed at the general audience, I'd be happy to recommend two or three novels to read first, to ramp you up to be able to deal with this one. :o))

Comments

[fanf]

There have been multiple technological improvements which have changed the world in ways that were impossible to predict (or at least very difficult). It's arguable whether these were true Vingean singularities: I'd say that what is required is a sustained and increasing rate of change that un-augmented humans can't keep up with. Unpredictability is necessary but not sufficient.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

How do you define augmentation? Is a stick and a clay tablet augmentation?

[fanf]

Hmm, good point :-) I suppose the question is: is it possible to have an infinite rate of technological improvement?

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

If you define a singularity as something beyond which you cannot predict from the other side, I think you can argue for there having been several in human history; writing, at very least.

talking about science

[(Anonymous)]

I just saw all "Back to the Future" films and thought about what Emmet Brown said about Jules Verne stories. At that time rockets (an example he gave) were just science fiction but nowadays it is not anymore. I know that Jules Verne invented submarines and the giant squid. Submarines are existing now and there is indeed such an animal. It just looks a bid different then people believed at that time. What else in those books that exists today?

Re: talking about science

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

Actually submarines existed before (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Submarine#Early_history_of_submarines_and_the_first_submersibles) Twenty Thousand Leagues Beneath the Sea; Verne was extrapolating the technology of the time, not coming up with something new altogether.

Likewise, the idea of giant squid goes back a long way in sailor lore, though it's only in the twentieth century that the existance of such creatures has been documented scientifically.