Accelerando, By Charles Stross

Accelerando starts in the early 21st century and extends across several centuries thereafter. Charles Stross writes about the life and times of one Manfred Macx, his associates, and descendants as they live through the continuous acceleration of technological progress culminating in the Singularity (which Stross treats as the moment at which the rate of technological change becomes fastest). Stross looks at the possible sociological, economic, and technical effects on society of first the expansion of human intelligence using various technological enhancements, the uploading of human minds into computers, and the merging of human minds with their technology, ultimately reaching the point of the solar system being taken apart to create a shell of computer elements enclosing the sun and hosting a virtual habitat as big as the galaxy.

OA Relevance: Extremely High

Stross has apparently been reading the same books OA has. Nearly every concept in the OA universe is touched on here, from intelligence augmentation to uploading to Matrioshka brains and wormhole linked interstellar communication and transit systems. Stross’s timescale is much shorter than OA’s and much faster, creating a sense of what a ‘hard takeoff’ type singularity might be like instead of the ‘grand scope of history’ approach that OA has taken. The strongest sense I got was sort of Orion’s Arm on amphetamines with an espresso chaser.

The latter parts of the story might also be looked at (with some minor differences) as life with all its problems in some parts of the OA universe.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

Stross’s imagination and ability to combine lots of transhumanist concepts is top notch. His treatments of future economics, memetic weapons, and transapient manipulation of lower level minds are of particular relevance to OA style worldbuilding as is his take on the possible mental augmentations that humans might make to themselves given implant technology. His treatment of transapient technologies is well-done although not likely to really demonstrate anything new to anyone really familiar with the OA universe. Nevertheless his ability to cover such a wide range of ideas in the scope of a single book is impressive.

Perhaps the only real divergence from an OA perspective is that Stross does relatively little with biology or provolution technologies. Computing and communication are the main drivers of his technological
timeline. This is not to say that such things are absent, just that they are mentioned only briefly and in passing at different places in the story. What is done is done quite well however. Perhaps my biggest quibble is that there is little acknowledgement of what role hacking technologies might play in a society where people augment their minds with brain implants and Direct Neural Interfaces expanding their mental processes into external hardware. We do see what the effect of suddenly losing access to ones computing resources might do to a person.

Overall Rating: Excellent and Highly Recommended.

The best of Stross’s work to date. If you like the OA take on the future you’ll like this one as an alternative but similar examination of what the future might bring.

More about the reviewer, Todd Drasher, here.