Review of Accelerando, by Charles Stross
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 *******. 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.
December 6th, 2006 - 04:10
Accelerando is an exponential rush into a cliched future, accompanied by a boredom level that approaches infinity at the asymptote.
*chuckle* Good one.
(I didn’t get very far into Accelerando myself. I tried, but I thought it was boring from the very beginning.)
December 6th, 2006 - 10:21
Accelerando may be cliche in the SL4 world, but that’s about it. And if boredom reached infinity at the asymptote, you’re saying the boredom becomes infintesimal. Or maybe you’re saying the book is infinitly almost becoming boring?
Or maybe I’m the one who doesn’t get asymptotes ;)
December 6th, 2006 - 10:51
While I agree that Accelerando had its flaws, I still enjoyed it. Some of it (one liners or not) was truly funny (at least to me). Since becoming a transhumanist, I’ve found serious flaws with virtually all science fiction. Instead of giving up on sci-fi, I try to look past the flaws and treat it more like fantasy.
December 6th, 2006 - 14:12
If you loved to hate Accelerando, why not try Greg Egan’s ‘Distress ‘or ‘Diaspora’? :)
December 6th, 2006 - 14:15
Egan is great! I also enjoy “After Life” by Simon Funk, and John Wright’s Golden Age trilogy.
December 6th, 2006 - 15:16
The only thing that kept me reading to the end was the sub-plot about the superintelligent species in another galaxy that was trying to hack into the computational substrate of the whole universe, as the pages left to read approached zero, I knew it would be left dangling. Sure enough, it was. How disappointing. Stross, in an interview, said he disagrees with Vinge about how you can’t write about going through the singularity. I think Stross ended up proving Vinge right. The real singularity, the one involving the “universe hacking”, Stross didn’t bother with. Instead, we got the Corporations Gone Wild sideshow.
December 6th, 2006 - 17:05
While all your points are well made, from the perspective of transhumanists examining a document that appears to discuss their agenda, I think you may have missed the point (that, admittedly, the sf scene often deliberately obscures as a defence against mainstream criticism) that science fiction is fundamentally entertainment first and foremost. Even Egan (whose books I adore) doesn’t take his work utterly literally.
As an analogy, you’re acting like Fugazi fans who complain that the Ramones just aren’t true to the punk ethos. You’re right – but you’ve missed the point. The Ramones weren’t aiming at Fugazi fans (although they’d not be upset to have Fugazi fans enjoy their art); Stross wasn’t writing a transhumanist manifesto, but a piece of entertaining fiction for people who know and appreciate (and in many cases sympathise with) the tropes of transhumanism.
I have a lot of respect for transhumanism as a movement – but reactions like this don’t do your ‘geeks-with-social-issues’ reputation any favours, in this case with the people who are politically closest to the beliefs you espouse. Chill out, guys. It’s just a book, y’know? ;)
December 6th, 2006 - 18:15
I enjoyed Accelerando.
I think the best that a book about the Singularity can do is to come up with ideas. Any attempt to be more predictive than that has a very low chance of succeeding. Might as well have a fun story line to illustrate the ideas.
I find the legal attack vector quite plausible post-singularity. When everybody is backed-up to the n’th degree, physical attacks may become completely irrelevant. Economic, legal and reputation attacks might be the only viable vector.
December 7th, 2006 - 02:46
> The real singularity, the one involving the “universe hackingâ€
Anything less than that is almost not worth to mention, if you write a book on the edge.
What Accelerando isn’t, after all.
Universe hacking may end up in a grand failure or in a grand success. It may begin in a PC in 2014 or something, it may begin in CERN when the first self replicating subatomic particle is created in 2010 …
But the book with this kind of plot, might be quite boring and unconvincing to the public.
One can’t make a really good novel about the Singularity. Maybe one can make a good Singularity.
December 7th, 2006 - 04:33
“Much of cyberpunk fiction, like Accelerando, seems as staid and old-fashioned as when it first started showing up in the early 1990s.”
*blink*
1980s, surely?
December 8th, 2006 - 17:10
For all its flaws, if you want a fundamentally better book you’ll have to write it yourself, because nothing better exists. I would point out three virtues of Accelerando, which generally do not exist elsewhere:
1. It offers a future history of social, cultural, economic, and political phenomena up to the Singularity. It is not just a narration of what happens to a few viewpoint characters. Given the convention that novels are about individuals rather than whole societies, the reader will have a tendency to treat the essayistic future history as background, and try to divine the book’s meaning by focusing on the Macxs. But I would seriously suggest turning that around, and focusing on this impersonal intermatter as the real story.
2. It pulls no punches regarding the big-picture insignificance of anything that humans do. That’s not a new theme in literature, because we’ve been aware of the vastness of nature for a long time; what’s new is the idea that even the things we might identify as specific to humans – intellectual and cultural activity – are insignificant when we do them, because they are also carried out on an incomprehensibly grander scale by superintelligences. Stross does not belabor this point, but it is an implication of his cosmology: everything genuinely important about the history of mind in the cosmos takes place at the level of interactions among superintelligences. The slowdown in change towards the end of the book, noticed by McCluskey, is not accidental; the locus of change has moved into the new M-brain; we are looking at refugee outsiders, because they are the only entities whose stories we mere-human readers will still be able to understand. – I haven’t read the Golden Age trilogy, which Michael recommends, but I can see that it’s set 10000 years from now, and you still have (immortalized) humans hanging around, and apparently being the principal actors in the solar system. I can’t judge the quality of the writing, but as a concept, it sounds a-priori unrealistic compared to Stross’s.
3. Accelerando presents a conception of how the Singularity might happen, that’s actually original in some of its particulars. Again, you have to look deep into the intermatter to see this, but I think it’s there, in Chapter 5. (((SPOILER ALERT))) Stross’s Singularity is the Acceleration, and it comes when Mercury is dismantled, suddenly creating the biggest cyberspace ever made, bigger by many orders of magnitude than everything else existing. Before this happens, you have an upload civilization distributed throughout solar space, engaged in planet-scale megaengineering; from a material perspective, the dismantlement of Mercury is just another megaengineering enterprise. But it creates a cyberspace that the majority of that upload civilization migrates into, and once it’s in there things accelerate far beyond what the outsiders can follow. – That is a distinctive, logical and complete conception of how a Singularity might happen. You might say it’s Singularity through bulk computing capacity, rather than socially localized transcendence through iterated self-enhancement (the SIAI model). One may regard the less democratic ‘localized hard takeoff’ model as more plausible, but Stross’s idea is still an intellectually respectable one; its premise is just that in all the diverse transformations explored prior to the Acceleration, no advance was ever produced such that one individual, or small coalition of individuals, was able to outweigh the intelligence of society as a whole.
This issue was explored in a debate between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky, I think in an Extropian symposium about Vinge’s Singularity. Eliezer made the case that cognitive technology will produce a “big win” that creates a singleton power (Nick Bostrom’s term), whereas Robin, as an economist and social scientist, suggested that power will remain diffused throughout society, thanks to division of labor and the impossibility of pulling ahead of the pack so rapidly that no-one else ever imitates you and catches up.
December 10th, 2006 - 19:27
Hi all,
I find it quite telling that you did not write a critical commentary on Accelerando yourself but preferred to wait until you found others to quote.
Personally I consider Accelerando to be a genre redefining masterpiece and agree with an earlier poster that if you wanted something better you would have to write it yourself – which I doubt is within your ability.
Best regards,
Stefan
December 11th, 2006 - 08:30
Personally I consider Accelerando to be a genre redefining masterpiece and agree with an earlier poster that if you wanted something better you would have to write it yourself – which I doubt is within your ability.
No need to get personal – ’tis only a book review!
December 14th, 2006 - 14:29
I generally liked “Accelerando”. It is definitely of the cyberpunk genre, but is updated to take in the idea of transhumanism and the singularity. It is essentially a novelized form of “The Singularity is Near”. The description of it ‘being to cyberpunk as Napster was to the music industry’ is fair.
I view “Accelerando” as kind of an updated version of “Schizmatrix” (written by Bruce Sterling in 1985).
March 8th, 2007 - 04:21
The third part, “Singularityâ€, 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?
Your powers of deduction border incompetence. This is a prominent and recurring theme. Examples….
“Have you ever been to Brooklyn?”
“No, why –”
“Because you’re going to help me sell these lying bastards a bridge. Okay? And when we’ve sold it we’re going to use the
money to pay the purchasing fools to drive us across, so we can go home.
———————————————
“So you brought the Slug home instead, occupying maybe half your storage capacity and ready to wreak seven shades of
havoc on –”
——————————————–
“I believe everything it said was intended
to make us react exactly the way we did.”
March 8th, 2007 - 13:09
If people spent more time reading non-fiction and educating themselves in the dynamics of the real world, they wouldn’t get all huffy when I criticize their fiction worlds. :\
DON’T TAKE THE REVIEW PERSONALLY, FOLKS.
I plan to read Charles Stross’s Cthulu spinoff books, or whatever. But Accelerando was a WIRED-reader, BoingBoing-esque cyberpunk yawnfest.
March 8th, 2007 - 17:56
What actually gets me huffy, personally, are straw man arguments and/or misrepresentations.
Ironically, that includes projecting assumptions onto people.
June 9th, 2008 - 06:53
Thank you for this review! I’ve hated this book since I read it but could only ever find people who liked it. Now I feel human again!
November 7th, 2010 - 11:39
I, in my now apparently obvious naiveté, loved the book; I realize that it may not be for everyone for when I gifted a copy to my good friend, she didn’t seem to enjoy it despite being an avid sci-fi fan herself.
That said, Michael, the work is to be treated as a work of entertaining fiction not, as mentioned by another commenter, a transhumanist manifesto. Stross, even when he is apparently “[trying] too hard to show off his knowledge” he doesn’t come off half as arrogant as many of your articles and comments and his “boingboingesque” pop-transhumanism isn’t trite or without worth simply since the ideas are in the common/pop memeplex or by your standards lack realistic depth. Star Trek isn’t lacking in entertainment value or inherit value simply because it’s not an accurate description of our actual future, it’s goal is simply to be entertaining and it’s okay to enjoy it just as such.
As one who enjoys works of fiction, I find Stross’s literary style fresh and boisterous. He has a quirky wit, an entertaining (if not entirely fictitious) extrapolation of current transhuman memes, a playful optimism, and a snappy, frisky pacing which lends the author his unique literary voice.
December 15th, 2010 - 00:03
People as money or extincted by corporations was a funny piss take of the classic sci fi Chilling Warning as well as being a credible one itself