I just finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. It is a fairly long sci-fi novel in the cyberpunk subgenre that deals with the concept of the Singularity. It traces a family through successive generations of existence and… non-existence.

What I mean by that is that in Stross’s futuristic world, the definition of human has modulated past the point that we ourselves would be able to recognize it. Through his history of the future, he described a range of existential options from the archaic way humans are naturally, to neural implants offering pervasive internet presence, to posthumans who have evolved past the point where normal human intelligence could understand them all the way out to aliens, uploaded (and endlessly downloaded and re-downloaded) consciousnesses, simulations of consciousnesses and entire galaxies which have become gigantic thinking machines beyond all comprehension.

It is, needless to say, a dizzying view of the future. A quote by Cory Doctorow on the book’s back cover suggests that the book makes psychedelics obsolete. While that’s a bit far-fetched, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the book. Especially in the beginning, as Stross unloads terms and concepts at the reader at an incredible rate. It can make for some very slow and tedious reading as you get up to speed with the changes in the world he’s describing. Stross seems also to have gotten rather ahead of himself too, as the book is punctuated with expository passages set in a different font which are strictly there to dump data on the reader about what’s happening in the world and universe. They aren’t especially disruptive to the reading experience, but they do often read as though they were simply outline notes created for the book, which Stross was unwilling to excise from his final version.

For all the technical data and the grand scope that Stross is trying to pull off, I also feel like the characters themselves get lost in the shuffle. The actual people in this story seem far less important and interesting to the author than all the whiz-bang technology he is describing and its implications for the future of humanity and posthumanity. Despite being shuffled back and forth among various members of the family which plays the pivotal role in Stross’ future, I never really felt like I could connect with any of them, that I knew what any of them really thought or felt, or frankly that I much cared.

My main drive then to crunch through this overly long book (415 pages) was to acquaint myself with a sci-fi vision of what the Singularity will be like, and how it will impact people. Towards that end, Stross seems to conclude that escaping death and escaping the body and the universe will not allow us to escape the problems and weird foibles of simply being human. It is a moral that would have been driven home a lot stronger, however, if his characters had been portrayed as more human.

It’s hard to say if it was Stross’ own viewpoint coming through, of if he was just trying to accurately extrapolate a thoroughly scientific worldview into the future, but the book takes a rather hardline stance against religion. It seems that any time religion is portrayed, it’s done in a rather negative light, as sort of kooky or antiquated. He mentions a few times some new religions that are proselytizing in the future, but never really goes into what they look or feel like, which I think is too bad. Instead, the over-riding religion of this book is science. Mind is equated with soul, and immortality is achieved by making back-up copies of the mind ad nauseum. Consciousness and all of life is reduced to computer jargon. This passage from page 399 I think illustrated in a nutshell a great deal about what this book’s underlying message or at least worldview seem to be:

“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that pre-dated the singularity used to be the inevitable halting state for all life forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

What this character seems to be forgetting (and I don’t want to mistakenly attribute this viewpoint to the author by means of this one character’s dialogue) is that science too, by way of the vehicles of science fiction and transhumanist speculation is also a “transmissible memetic virus” which is beginning, more and more, to promise us life beyond death. Maybe not for us, but perhaps for our children. When such technology does indeed arise, what kind of “life” will that really be granting us? These are the questions posed by Stross’ Accelerando…