Charles Stross: Accelerando (2005)

Edition: Orbit, 2006

I first read Accelerando soon after it came out, but, although I found it fascinating, I wasn't able to put together a review. It's an incredibly ambitious novel, describing one potential fate of the human race: it aims to be as iconic a part of the science fiction genre as Neuromancer or Snow Crash. The novel is very much in their tradition of speculation about the interaction between computers, human minds, and the universe.


Accelerando follows three main characters, Manfred Macx and his daughter Amber, then her child Sirhan (not forgetting their cat, the most intelligent of all of them) as they explore the developments in computing which Stross suggests will occur during the twenty-first century and beyond. These begin with spectacles which provide a virtual reality overlay on the real world, to implanted computers and networked enhancements to memory and cognition, to the conversion of the solar system itself into a giant molecular computer, in which uploaded post-humans live in simulations. Manfred is pretty recognisable, just beyond the edge of the way that many people live now, with some interesting technological toys and a radical lifestyle (spent registering patents that he makes available for free use and living off favours from those who benefit from them). Amber is stranger, as most of her story takes place as a simulation on a tiny space ship/computer where she is empress over a virtual court based on fifteenth century France. Sirhan is an adolescent who experienced multiple simulated lifetimes as his education yet has not so far decided which gender to be.

While the themes are similar to those explored by Gibson and Stephenson, being a future based on the technology available at the time of writing, I suspect that Accelerando will not prove as influential. Both Neuromancer and Snow Crash proved self-fulfilling prophecies, Neuromancer inspiring developers of the Web and Snow Crash developers of virtual reality environments such as Second Life, the accuracy of their predictions coming as much from this as from authorial prescience. Both novels take place over a fairly short internal timescale, a few weeks during which the IT environment remains effectively static, and this means that they can really serve as models for developers to emulate. Accelerando, as its title indicates, is about the process of change, and this means that the worlds described in it are a moving target, and there is far less space for Stross to go into evocative details.

Apart from the IT, all three books have other things in common. Most obvious is that they all portray the current political realities based around nation states as effectively obsolete. This seemed very far fetched in the mid-eighties, when I first read Neuromancer's suggestion that corporate entities would be the main powers in the world (rather than running things from behind the scene, as has been suggested happened in Bush's America). Stross's post-capitalist world seems more likely now than it did when I first read Accelerando, before the credit crunch. The short sightedness of financial institutions and the consequent loss of trust by their customers, combined with a fairly clear and longstanding inability of governments to understand, legislate and innovate for the Internet seems to me to make the sort of changes that are the background to this novel not just possible but likely. Snow Crash, where the Mafia deliver pizza and Federal organisations are just an embarrassment is obviously satirical and not very likely in the real world; Stross's idea that the Russian Mafia enforce music copyright is less extreme while still satirical.

Any novel which covers three generations is ambitious, and Accelerando also describes a possible ultimate fate of the human race. From a futurological point of view, some aspects are questionable. The timetable, for example, depends on Moore's Law continuing to hold well into the future: it is not a natural law, just an observation, and depends on increasingly fast technological innovation which seems unlikely (at least in the current economic climate). The scenarios which are described in the novel are mostly well known speculation (in particular by Frank Tipler, who is indirectly mentioned through the "Tiplerite" religion, dedicated to bringing about his vision). Stross may well be the first science fiction author to produce a novel which centres around these ideas to this extent: novels dealing with the final destiny of humanity are surprisingly rare in science fiction, except when treated as satire. Accelerando does suffer from one of the major problems of science fiction which deals with big themes: when you have beings who are vastly more intelligent than any human (including the author and his readers), how is it possible to make their actions comprehensible? Stross does this mainly by keeping his narrative centred on those who remain close to baseline human, who stay recognisable to us, even if strange. (I'm not sure the people depicted at the end are quite strange enough, given how different they are to us; they should be more difficult for us to understand than our culture would be to someone from the nineteenth century, and I don't think that they are.)

Accelerando is fairly effective, and manages to remain sufficiently straightforward to be readable right to the end, despite the proliferation of virtual copies, clones and a wide variety of types of post-human with far greater intelligence than those who choose to remain principally flesh and blood, no matter how augmented. There are some lapses of judgement, such as the sudden adoption of an arch tone at the start of the final section. There is perhaps too much explanatory material. Each chapter has a section summarising the present situation, basically a summary of IT developments during a decade of the twenty first century. There is a lengthy, but amusing, FAQ for newly resurrected individuals given in full and taking several pages. And I always find a novel written in the present tense to be constantly mildly irritating. But, considering its ambition, Accelerando is very successful - 8/10.

William Gibson: Pattern Recognition (2003)

Published: Viking, 2003

One of the oddest feelings when reading (or, even more, re-reading) science fiction from the past is when time has often caught up with it, and you are reading a novel of the future set at at date which is in your past. This is particularly the case with novels which were important to you personally, which were influential, and which contain much accurate prediction, as is the case for me with Gibson's first novel, Neuromancer. Almost thirty years after its publication, Gibson produced Pattern Recognition, his seventh novel and the first which is not really intended to be science fiction. (I would bet that most libraries, like the one from which I borrowed the copy I read, shelve it with that genre, however.) Five years later still, it is Neuromancer which seems to me the more contemporary of the two novels; much of the detail in Pattern Recognition seems to have dated quite quickly.

The novel is an Internet Age thriller, but unlike Neuromancer or most other novels that might be slotted into that subgenre (such as Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, or Jeffrey Deaver's The Blue Nowhere), it is not about hackers, programmers or geeks. Its central character, Cayce Pollard, works as a marketing consuultant, a guru on what is cool who has a phobia about logos. Her hobby is the study of a series of film clips, mysteriously appearing one by one on the Internet, which she discusses with fellow obsessives on the Fetish:Footage:Forum (F:F:F). Where do they come from? Are they meant to form part of a single narrative film? Do they have any particular order? what are the motives and influences which govern their production? Do they have any meaning and if so what? When Cayce realises that someone else has been in the flat where she is staying on a visit to London and used her computer, she begins to feel that there might be a bigger picture behind the film segments. The discussions on the F:F:F don't seem to be dominated by conspiracy theorists, but she finds it hard not to connect the films aand the break in with the disappearance of her father on September 11 2001.

Even though Pattern Recognition is not science fiction, it is still ahead of the pack: this must be one of the earliest treatments of what is now called viral marketing (a term I am pretty sure I hadn't heard myself in 2003). There are people being paid to go round bars and mention products approvingly to strangers: I don't know if this actually happens in the physical world, but there are certainly bloggers who are paid to give good press by marketing departments. However, other details seem behind the times: did people still rely so much on physical media for swapping data as recently as five years ago?

Cayce is quite a passive heroine, but her odd phobia makes her quirky and interesting. A reaction to logos does not seem to me to be a very believable problem, as the processing required to recognise the nature of an image is surely too high level for such a visceral reaction as an allergy. Its origins are left unexplained, which makes it seem more divorced from reality. Clearly it is a satirical element, pointing to the emptiness of modern life, where such banal symbols are held in high regard, whether or not the products they adorn are worthwhile. They are such a clever concept, making customers pay a premium to advertise for the producer. Such manipulation seems miles away from the quirkiness of the film footage: but is it?

The film clips themselves are slightly odd as the focus of a novel which doesn't exist in a multimedia format. Of course, the reader can imagine them, though Gibson leaves the exact content of the clips pretty vague other than to tell you things that they don't do - for example, the clothing and backgrounds are sufficiently generic for it to be impossible to work out when they are set. This vagueness is obviously part of the reason why people want to argue about the clips, but it does make them rather lacking as the central focus of a novel, being both timeless and plotless. The passiveness of the heroine together with this indirect focus means that despite the plot of the novel suggesting a thriller, it is not really in that genre - not necessarily a bad thing, but indicating that my initial assessment of Pattern Recognition was not quite right. Since other novels by Gibson succeed very wel lin this department, the diffuseness of this one must be deliberate. However, I still felt that though Pattern Recognition is interesting and worth reading, it is not classic Gibson by any means.

William Gibson: Neuromancer (1984)

Edition: Voyager, 1995
Review number: 1239

Neuromancer is one of the few novels which revolutionised their genre. After twenty years, its influence has only become more obvious - it's hard to think of a serious science fiction novel of the last decade which doesn't owe a debt to Neuromancer, not to mention films like the Matrix.

The story is pretty typical of thrillers, a seemingly simple plot turning out to contain wheels within wheels. Case is a burnt out computer hacker, unable to "jack in" to "cyberspace" (phrases invented, recontextualised or popularised by Gibson fill the novel) because he has been contaminated with a neural toxin on top of drug addiction. He is plucked from what is almost a down and out's existence, fixed up by the finest surgeons using revolutionary procedures all to carry out what would be his grestest coup: to hack an artificial intelligence owned by a mysterious Swiss based family firm.

Computers of some sort had long been part of the science fiction stock of clichés, of course, by 1984. Mechanical minds appeared in the genre before the Second World War, but it was only when real computers began to be developed that their depiction began to have any sensible relationship to what might be projected into the (then) future. It was authors like Isaac Asimov (with his robot and Multivac stories), Robert Heinlein (Mycroft Holmes, the computer running Luna City, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress) and Arthur C. Clarke (HAL in 2001) who began to think about how computers might realistically interact with humans. The interesting thing is just how wrong they were; none of them really picked up on ideas like networking or virtual reality which are the staples of science fiction (and, in the first case, real world) computing today. These authors all had academic connections, and it is a measure of just how obscure the experimental networks of the late sixties which evolved into today's Internet actually were that none of them picked up on the idea at the time. Most technological changes are already the basis for at least one science fiction story; the role of world wide networking in modern life is probably the most important one that is not. Experiences related to virtual reality appear in writers like Philip K. Dick, but they tend to be more drug mediated than the products of computers and come out of the hippy movement of the sixties. In the real world, the early eighties was the period in which computers first began to appear in homes (early Macs and PCs alongside less pwerful machines like the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro). The Internet was still basically confined to the American academic world, with very basic interactive software - early (non-graphical) multi-user games. So the cyberspace portrayed by Gibson was a huge leap, both from contemporary reality and from the science fiction around him; it is not surprising that a new subgenre, called cyberpunk, was immediately spawned following the publication of Neuromancer. It is amazing that Gibson put together his vision of cyberspace before the invention of the Web; it would not be going too far to claim Gibson as one of its conceptual parents.

Clearly, Neuromancer is a science fiction novel of immense importance. But it is less easy to decide just how good it actually is. There is no denying that the plot becomes hard to follow, particularly towards the end, for example, or that the characters are not among fiction's most rounded. It is also obvious that, apart from the computing related ideas, Neuromancer owes large literary debts. Mostly these seem to be filtered through famous film versions - Philip K. Dick is the most obvious (via Bladerunner), but also the detective stories which became film noir and William S. Burroughs. These influences are the ones which, alongside the interest in computers, continued to define cyberpunk. It is really the innovative computing which makes the novel; combined with the atmospherically sleazy future in which the novel is set, it has an impact which makes these criticisms seem unimportant.

Pat Cadigan: Tea From an Empty Cup (1998)

Edition: Voyager, 1998
Review number: 1148

Tea From an Empty Cup takes advantage of the establishment of the cyberpunk subgenre to concentrate on one aspect found in many of its stories, leaving most of the standard ideas lightly sketched in. It is a novel about the way that people might interface with computers in the future, and is in fact almost entirely concerned with virtual reality multi-player games.

When police officer Valentin is called to an artificial reality (AR) arcade to investigate a murder, she doesn't expect to become involved in murky dealings connected with some of the most popular online scenarios (things like "post apocalypse New York"). She enters the particular scenario being accessed by the victim when he died, even though deaths due to being killed in AR are mainly an urban myth (and suggestion in his mind didn't cut his throat), as does Yuki, who is (independently) looking for her missing lover. Both these characters are AR novices, showing the contempt for it that non-gamers already tend to feel for those obsessed with computer games.

The purpose of these two characters is rather too clearly to allow Cadigan to describe her ideas about AR. Two novice users is overkill, and this combines with the fairly unimaginative ideas about how things might develop from today's technology to make the novel sometimes feel like a journalist's article about the MUDs, MOOs and the like. It is a severe problem with Cadigan's writing here that Tea From an Empty Cup frequently reads as though it is a poor copy of one of these articles. I have rarely read a science fiction novel whose extrapolation of future trends is so unimaginative.

Most cyberpunk novels take a selection of ideas from the genre and put them together, a technique which can provide depth to the story. But the concentration of Tea From an Empty Cup on just one means that it seems shallow compared with the religious ideas in Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive or the cultural satire of Stephenson's Snow Crash. The shallowness in Cadigan's writing is exposed even in the subject she concentrates on by the fact that it seems dated already in comparison with Neuromancer, a novel written the best part of two decades earlier.

William Gibson may think that Cadigan is "a major talent" (as quoted on the cover, this is what persuaded me to try the novel, along with the interest of the idea of a criminal investigation pursued jointly in AR and reality). If Gibson is right, little evidence for it comes across in this novel.

Richard Kadrey: Metrophage (1988)

Edition: Gollancz, 1988
Review number: 627

The problem with cyberpunk as a subgenre of science fiction is that there were too few top class writers involved. Apart from William Gibson and Bruce Sterling (and perhaps K.W. Jeter), it would be hard now to name another cyberpunk writer from its heyday, the mid eighties. The influence of the genre - which is considerable - is really the influence of Gibson and Sterling, together with that of the film Bladerunner.

Kadrey's first novel is one of the forgotten cyberpunk also-rans. It is told from the point of view of a drug dealer in decaying Los Angeles, who gets caught up in the events which surround an epidemic of a new virus rather like leprosy which is decimating the city. There are naturally clear parallels with the AIDS scare, at its height at the time of writing, but Kadrey doesn't really have anything of interest to say about contemporary events, something which prevents his novel being first class.

Like many first novels, Metrophage wears its influences on its sleeve, and it is actually quite interesting to catalogue them as you read it. The principal immediate influence is of course William Gibson, and the earlier writers who helped form Gibson are many of them clearly direct influences as well, from William S. Burroughs to Raymond Chandler. The whole coverage of AIDS and especially suspicions that it originated in a laboratory is the one thing without which the novel could not have been written, though earlier plague themed science fiction such as The Andromeda Strain probably plays a part.

Metrophage is not a great novel, but (for the unsqueamish) it is an enjoyable read.