Transhumanist and Creative Commons CTO Mike Linksvayer has written something you don’t see too often – a negative review of Charles Stross’s Accelerando. In the comments, he muses, “one person’s dense content is another person’s thicket of cliches”, well put. Here is the review:

I expected to enjoy Accelerando by Charles Stross and have a really hard time finishing Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. The former includes cool stuff like mind uploading, space colonization, and singularity. The latter is set in an incredibly challenging environment (in terms of holding my interest)–a theme park. I experienced the reverse.

Manfred Macx, an open source entrepreneur of the future (very approximately), has a kid with his IRS agent luddite wife. They and their descendents carry their family squabbles across the universe and singularity. As this incredibly non-interesting story unfolds, Accelerando takes every opportunity to reference dot com bubble, transhumanist, and obscure political cliches and inside jokes, without any real depth.

Accelerando was originally written as ten stories, many of which won awards, and several of which I can imagine being enjoyable as shorts. The book is way too long.

If you (can put up with lots of crap) enjoy science fiction, you’ll probably like Accelerando. Everyone else, skim the Accelerando Technical Companion to pick up any missing memes.

Peter McCluskey, economist, Bayesian, and member of our local transhumanist junta, is even more critical:

Accelerando is an entertaining collection of loosely related anecdotes spanning a time that covers both the near future and the post-singularity world. Stross seems to be more interested in showing off how many geeky pieces of knowledge he has and how many witty one-liners he can produce than he is in producing a great plot or a big new vision. I expect that people who aren’t hackers or extropians will sometimes be confused by some of his more obscure references (e.g. when he assumes you know how a third-party compiler defeats the Thompson hack).

He sometimes tries too hard to show off his knowledge, such as when he says “solving the calculation problem” causes “screams from the Chicago School” – this seems to show he confuses the Chicago School with the Austrian School. He says that in the farther parts of the solar system:

Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.

But most of what I know about the physics of computation suggests that warmth is a problem they will be trying to minimize.

The early parts of the book try to impress the reader with future shock, but toward the end the effects of technological change seem to have less and less effect on how the characters lives. That is hard to reconcile with the kind of exponential change that Stross seems to believe in.

He has many tidbits about innovative economic and legal institutions. But it’s often hard to understand how realistic they are, because I got some inconsistent impressions about basic things such as whether Manfred used money.

His answer to the Fermi paradox is unconvincing. It is easy to imagine that the smartest beings will want to stick close to the most popular locations. But that leaves plenty of other moderately intelligent beings (the lobsters?) with little attachment to this solar system, whose failure to colonize the galaxy he doesn’t explain.

Numerous things annoyed me about Accelerando. Near the end, Stross felt compelled to use a relatively recent phenomenon – legal litigation for the purpose of burying someone – as the framework of a space battle above the atmosphere of Jupiter. Like, they’re terrified because barristers are coming to fire their tort guns at them. Seriously. In virtual reality situations, his characters always choose the most boring and uninnovative environments to dwell in, like a 20s-style cocktail lounge. Reminds me of Star Trek, which frequently fell back to contemporary culture to hold the viewer’s interest. In an effort to connect with readers that don’t really care about the future, but in effect want it to mirror the culture and style and psychology of the past, Stross seems to avoid with anything genuinely new, preferring a daytime soap opera set against the backdrop of molecular nanotechnology and uploads.

The third part, “Singularity”, opens with the quote, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” by P. T. Barnum. It doesn’t have much to do with the chapter, aside from possibly-maybe referencing the presence of a starwisp called Field Circus, but hey, it looks edgy, so why not toss it in?

Much of cyberpunk fiction, like Accelerando, seems as staid and old-fashioned as when it first started showing up in the early 1980s. “High tech and low-life”, as Wikipedia puts it, unfortunately gives its readers a crappy stereotype of the future to anticipate, and through self-fulfilling prophecy, actually desire. It’s like we can’t allow ourselves to imagine that technology will advance without giving up something else entirely, like honesty in government or cleanliness in the streets. That is why in cyberpunk novels, the government is always corrupt and the streets are always dirty. In Stross’s future vision of a solar upload empire, AI-run pyramid schemes and adbots are viewed as the primary existential risk.

Accelerando is not classic cyberpunk, but it maintains the cyberpunk ethos throughout. The way it tries to bring together all the members of the Macx family at the end is a convoluted disaster. Filled with badass-wannabe characters (I’ve met people on Haight and Ashbury with more edge) puncutating their faux-hip dialogues with awkwardly-placed swear words, Accelerando is a science fiction story that’s only interesting if you’ve had literally zero prior exposure to transhumanist ideas. For transhumanists, the themes and concepts are mostly old news. Accelerando is an exponential rush into a cliched future, accompanied by a boredom level that approaches infinity at the asymptote.

Update: Anders Sandberg references an article critical of the economics in Accelerando.