Book Review: Accelerando

Charles Stross

2005

Awards: Locus
Nominations: Hugo

Rating: ★ ★ – – –

I’m angry at Charles Stross. I’m angry at him for making me like Apocalypse Codex, thereby gearing me up to be excited to read this book, and then having it turn out to be so annoying.

The story is set a couple hundred years in the future, just at the time when our computers are reaching the point of singularity. The combination of processors and circuits that make up our technological network is becoming alive; able to think, adapt, and grow.

Our computing power has also progressed to the point where we can spin off virtual, aware, thinking copies of ourselves. This lets us go off and do ten different things at once (all in virtual, networked environments, of course), bring our copies all back together and reintegrate their separate experiences into our main host body.

Oh, and, also, we have been able to make contact with an intelligent alien race by sending virtual copies of ourselves off into space and setting up a virtual meeting space in a common location with them.

In order to provide enough energy to support all this processing, unfortunately, we have to use our own solar system as a power source. We are dismantling the planets and asteroids, starting from Mercury and moving outwards, turning all the organic material into a ring of metallic, rocky debris surrounding the sun, each piece of which turns the sun’s light into energy. When we are finally finished, we will be left with no planets but only concentric rings of solar-radiation-conducting chunks of rock, acting as a massive power source for all our virtual environments. Stross calls this a “Matrioshka Brain,” and says it can keep us all alive—virtually, of course, in virtual environments—practically forever, after our “fleshbodies” are gone.

Into this situation steps our cast of characters. Main character #1 is Manfred Macx, an “Artificial Intelligence emancipationist.” He somehow makes his living by giving away information—variously and vaguely described by Stross as ideas, innovations, property rights, patents, future information, and paradigm shifts—for free. He does it for the principle of the thing, as sort of a white-hat hacker or an open-source activist. The grateful people to whom he gives these things often give him things in return in a sort of low-pressure, optional barter transaction.

Then there is main character #2, Manfred’s daughter Amber Macx. She is a technological whiz and a charismatic leader with a penchant for drama. She (or a virtual copy of her) spends a lot of her time flying around the solar system in a ship the size of a Coke can, holding audiences in virtual environments. She is the one who pioneered contact with the extraterrestrials, and she is one of the first to realize that the dismantling of the solar system might be a problem.

There are also others, of course; Manfred’s second wife, Annette, who wears mirror-shaded glasses and wearable computing in what must be a nod to Neuromancer, and a sentient robotic cat, Aineko, who is a little odd, in that he is a male calico.

                                                                             

Together this motley crew—under Amber’s leadership—must figure out what to do to save humanity (if, indeed, it warrants saving).

Accelerando uses the premise of unlimited technological possibilities to avoid having to craft a coherent universe for its characters. The concept of virtual reality allows Stross to suspend rules arbitrarily, breaking them and then re-applying them as needed in order to make the plot move forward. It inserts total virtualization into real life in a completely unfettered way that ends up feeling aimless and meaningless. And silly.

On the one hand, anything goes. One crew member on Amber’s ship likes to go around as a velociraptor, for some reason, and her stepmother chooses to appear as an orangutan for a while. Amber likes to decorate her virtual spaceship variously as a fifteenth-century castle or an ancient Persian market. Avatars and objects appear and execute complicated behavioral patterns with a gesture, a wave of the hand, with no apparent programming necessary by anyone, either in the present or the past.

But, at the same time, there are odd restrictions in this otherwise do-anything virtual reality world. At one point, for example, Amber goes virtually to Venus to talk to a virtual avatar of a Venusian entity in a virtual Venusian environment. But she still has to limit her time there, because her avatar won’t survive in that environment for long. Why is that? Why would an avatar need oxygen or heat shielding?

Why did this bother me? I don’t think it’s because it’s a little surrealistic. Roger Zelazny’s writing can be very surreal, and is a thing of beauty. I also don’t think it’s because part of it takes place in a virtual environment per se. Snow Crash and Neuromancer both did that too. But their virtual worlds held together dramatically because they existed according to rules that were internally consistent.

I think it is because it feels flippant. It seems too sloppy, too much like magic. Boom! That guy is now a lobster. Isn’t that funny? It is like a piece of abstract art that you’ve been told is a work of genius, but you have a sneaking suspicion that it’s actually been painted by a child.

It also makes me feel like he’s making the story up as he goes along. The plot wanders wildly from side to side and yanks you around. Key plot points are left extremely vaguely explained, from Manfred’s profession to the Matrioshka Brain. In the end, it made me not really care if the solar system was saved or not.