Decelerora
1. Adam Roberts reviewed Accelerando by Charles Stross.
2. It’s a good review, and if I had read it earlier, I wouldn’t have read the book. The blurb, Vernor Vinge’s endorsement, other reviews I’d been given, and the table of contents all indicated the setting was within the Singularity. This was my interest in reading the book. Roberts points out that Stross side-steps the Singularity and we learn almost nothing of it.
3. Roberts criticises Stross’s weak definition of the Singularity, but I would go further. Is change exponential, in which case there is no point of inflection? Is it a sigmoid function, in which case there is still no singularity? It’s all mathematically very muddy.
4. Roberts praises the novel’s ideas while criticising its style. He describes the latter “aesthetic maladroitness” as “outrageous infodumping”. The usual sense of “infodump” is “explanation”. In fact, Stross explains very little, he just adorns the text with a myriad of loaded words. This isn’t a novel of ideas, but of incantation. Where Roberts says the novel leaves imagination “prodigiously untrammelled”, I would say it is the reader’s imagination that is given free reign—in fact, forced to work—because the writer has realised so little.
5. The biology comes from Galton, the neuroscience is circa Freud, the economics is pure DotCom Bubble. The novel absurdly asks us to believe in implants, bio-engineering, AI and uploads in just a few years’ time. Shaky science is expected in science fiction, but I expect it to be in service to some philosophical point. The deepest thought Stross gives us is that copyright is the greatest evil to ever befall mankind. There are no mentions of war or climate change or Africa or homosexuality. The text acknowledges September 11 but doesn’t know what to do with it. Poor priveleged white boy.
6. Roberts describes parts of the novel as variously “sub-Moorcockian”, “envelope-pushing in the 1970s”, “exists in the shadow of Vinge”, and owing to Gibson and Sterling. Throw in some Egan and Doctorow and that’s about it. This is backwards-looking pastiche potboiler comfort science fiction.
By Christopher Miles, 1 hour, 4 minutes after the fact
Ouch!
By Rose, 1 hour, 50 minutes after the fact
Uh oh. I just half an hour ago came home from the library with Accelerando because I read Saturn’s Children last night and had read this was better. I did like Halting State, though it had its flaws.
By plok, 2 weeks, 2 days after the fact
I would’ve been sharper with Stross about this one, though I do like him…but he’s got a certain tendency that sometimes forces me to compare him with Mark Millar, which is that he paints himself into a corner, and then just as you say he has to incant his way out. Altogether it’s too full of slick pose-y stuff I don’t care about, as well as science shortcuts, flung jargon, and general offhanded philosophical faits accompli that leave me very irritated with him in that special Larry Niven way: “oh, well all you have to do is get a couple kazillion pounds of neutronium and spin it up to half-c…and presto, your problem’s solved! More Irish Coffee, please.” Thank you so much for explaining to me how very easy it all is, Larry, now pardon me as I have to go scream swearwords into a bag. I don’t know. I like Stross a lot (much more than Millar!) (more than Niven too!) but all the casual talk about Turing Oracles and such does not quite become gonzo cyberpunk poetry, and so it leaves me unsatisfied at the end of the book when it is simply explained to me that the good guys rocked their way out of that pickle due to how awesome they are. Teethgrinding: if it was supposed to be a lighthearted romp (that’s the way it read as individual stories on first publication) it’d be fine and fun, but it obviously isn’t really supposed to come across that way as a sustained narrative, clearly there is something here that you the reader are intended to believe in enough that you can cheer for it, and that part sours all the rest of it.
He’s done it a couple times now, where the science just slips away from him, and all that’s left is a big earnest flourish that only works if you excuse it. The fun is fun, but somewhere under it all is this weird Wired-era political bias that’s really frustrating to slog around in. He’s done much better story fix-ups than this. And, he’s also done much worse economics, so…there you go, I guess.
I like the guy, though.