Greg Egan: Zendegi (2010)

Science fiction is associated with prediction of the future in the minds of many. Few writers in the genre would feel that this is the main point of what they produce, but sometimes their work can be eerily prophetic. Zendegi is a near future SF novel (written in 2010, with the first part set in 2012), so it is perhaps less surprising that it is reasonably accurate; but actually its portrayal of a popular uprising in Iran has a huge number of similarities to the current spate of pro-democracy demonstrations in North Africa and the Middle East. (The afterword indicates that the events were inspired by the Iranian elections of 2009, which may well have also been part of the inspiration for the demonstrations in Egypt and elsewhere.)

There are two main viewpoint characters, the Western journalist Martin, sent to Iran to cover the 2012 elections, and computer scientist Nasim, who left Iran for the United States with her mother some years earlier, and who is working on a cognitive science project, aiming towards replicating human brain function in computers. Martin ends up staying in Iran afterwards, and this leads to a connection to the two characters when he marries Nasim's cousin. Her work becomes more important in the second part, which is really about the gradual development of artificial intelligence. This is set fifteen years later, and things have changed remarkably little in terms of technology - somewhat surprising, to my mind. Think how much things have changed since 1995, when the Internet was still something that people in general were just beginning to hear about (I worked for an ISP then, and marketing involved explaining what the Internet was to prospective customers).

The thriller like nature of the first part works better than the more speculative virtual reality oriented science fiction in the second. But by then the reader is interested in the characters, so becomes involved in Nasim's work and Martin's life in Iran. It is very odd: for a science fiction writer particularly famous for the hard science in his novels, Greg Egan has produced a story in which the best parts are near contemporary and character based.

This is not at all the sort of story I would associate with Greg Egan, who sticks in my mind mainly for novels like Schild's Ladder, which have far future settings and which deal with ideas based on the more bizarre current cosmological speculation. Mind you, the other Greg Egan novel I have reviewed here, Teranesia, is also set on Earth in the relatively near future, so it's not really a departure: he just doesn't fit into the pigeonhole into which I have mentally put him. Zendegi is more the sort of novel I would associate with Robert J. Sawyer - and would, in fact, make an excellent follow up for anyone who has enjoyed his WWW trilogy.

An interesting thriller, with science fiction elements not quite so good: my rating 7/10.


Edition: Gollancz, 2010
Review number: 1416

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.

Biff Mitchell: The War Bug (2004)

Edition: Double Dragon, 2004
Review number: 1281

There are two, clear, parallel trends in modern computing. One is that the virtual world is going to become more like the real one, in the sense that it will be possible to deceive human participants into perceiving it as though it were real: like the virtual world of The Matrix, internally consistent and believeably solid, yet containing possibilities beyond mundane physics. No illusion destroying tools like keyboards in the way; and no system failures. On the other hand, reality is becoming more like the virtual world, as computers take over more and more (gadgets like Internet connected fridges which eliminate the need for food shopping, for example), and interfaces become smaller and more invisible and intuitive. The War Bug is set in a future in which reality and virtual reality are almost indistinguishable, in which most individuals live complex virtual lives more satisfying than their real existences, interacting with the avatars of other real people and constructed virtual personalities. There are two big hurdles, one legal, and the other technical: the Reality Laws prohibit the construction of a virtual personality which pretends to be real; and no one has yet managed to endow a virtual personality with true sentience. The plot of The War Bug concerns a man who has created a virtual family, a wife and daughter, who are somehow true people and who can convincingly persuade others of this (though Mitchell is more vague about the definition of sentience to link it to this kind of Turing Test like view; he seems to indicate more that it is the ability to carry out introspection). When his secret is discovered, all three are put in great danger from powerful people who control the online world, who want to exploit computer sentience for their own ends. At the same time, an extremely sophisticated computer virus, the War Bug, is beginning to destroy whole virtual communities - how is this, which appers to Abner as a huge pig, connected to his work and his family?

There is one immense hurdle to reading The War Bug, and that is its style. It is extremely colloquial, relentlessly quirky and often exceptionally irritating. The prose gives the impression that it is the act of a strange stand-up comedian. It is well worth keeping going, though, and the style is reasonably appropriate to the content. (I can see that other people would possibly find it amusing, too, but it is not a form of humour that greatly appeals to me, and as a joke it goes on far too long - a criticism I also often feel is applicable to stand-up comedians as well.) The informality of the prose is so great that it presents something of a paradox: it is written in language so colloquial that it becomes hard to read. The chapters are very short, and jump around a lot, which means it takes a long time to understand what is going on and to get a feel for the main characters. Some editing would have been useful here, particularly of the background presented in the very first pages, which nearly persuaded me not to continue.

In some ways this is basically a criticism that certain aspects of this novel are not to my taste; other readers may well love the way in which The War Bug is written. Once I did finally get into it, I found the story fascinating; it deals with philosophical ideas that have interested me for a long time, ones which could be said to be basic to the (intelligent end of) the science fiction and fantasy genres: the nature of reality, and the nature of humanity. The story suddenly becomes gripping at the point where Abner's family is kidnapped by powerful individuals who want to obtain the secret of sentience, in a way that the destruction of the virtual cities and even the deaths of thousands whose avatars were caught up in their ends had not been. Though many of the ideas are not particularly new (reference points include the obvious Gibson and Stephenson, but I felt that there was also a strong kinship with the drug induced virtual worlds of Stanislaus Lem's The Futurological Congress), it is well done and the background shows that Mitchell is a writer with at least some ideas of his own.

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.

Neal Stephenson: Snow Crash (1992)

Edition: Roc, 1993
Review number: 1092

It takes a particular kind of writer to name their central character Hiro Protagonist, even if it is made clear that this is a nickname chosen by him. It amounts to a rather cocky subversion of the idea of a central character, and implies a certain level of confidence.

To a certain extent, this confidence is justified. Snow Crash is a cyberpunk story about a new computer virus which also affects people; this may make the novel sound typical of this subgenre, but Stephenson makes it stand out from the crowd. He brings in a wide range of references (including relating magic incantations to computer viruses, and an information theoretic interpretation of the story of the tower of Babel) which make the novel more interesting than the average Gibson-derived fare (though some of the explanatory sections are rather dully presented). In addition, he has created, in his central characters Protagonist and fifteen year old courier YT, more rounded characters than is usual in a tech obsessed novel, and presented them against a background which is almost a parody of the dark dystopian America common to much cyberpunk.

At the moment, the precise nature of the brain's information processing mechanism is not known, so that we do not yet have the capability to imagine what a computer virus that might affect it would look like, let alone to write one; in fact, we don't even know whether such viruses can exist. One thing which seems very likely is that any such virus will not be passed by showing a hacker a series of zeros and ones, even in virtual reality. Stephenson justifies this with the idea that binary code is something which becomes part of the Chomskian deep structure of the brain of a computer hacker, but I find this very hard to believe (especially as deep structure is a controversial idea itself).

It is the background which is the most interesting thing about Snow Crash. The idea that the US suffers a collapse into libertarian anarchy is fairly commonplace, but Stephenson takes it to an extreme, with little independent nations springing up everywhere in franchises (including ones run by the Mafia and Columbian drugs barons), and massive inflation (billion dollar bills as small change - with Ed Meese pictured on them). All this is to provide a contrast to the virtual world of the Metaverse, far stabler than reality, but threatened by the new style virus.

Perhaps Snow Crash's biggest flaw is that Stephenson is never quite sure how serious he is being, and so wavers between parody and thriller modes. Whichever it is, it is an entertaining early novel, harbinger of even better things to come.