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coalescentAccelerando, if you don't know, is the umbrella name for a near future short story sequence, written by Charles Stross and published in Asimov's over the past few years. Now the stories have been edited together to make a novel.
The first thing that strikes about it is how absurdly, unashamedly cool it is. Vernor Vinge has blurbed it as 'a sustained work of radical optimism' and, at least at first glance, he's right. This the future as a good place, as geeks might want it to be.
Meet Manfred Macx, meme-broker. He gives away ideas for a living, and as a result doesn't need money. He thinks 'very long term - at least twenty, thirty years' (and in the process anticipates the overall plot of the novel). The rest of the world might be hung up on capitalism, but he's living in a whuffie economy already. That, and the glasses, is probal why, in my head, he looks like Cory Doctorow.
The novel begins with Manfred arriving in Amsterdam to make someone else rich. He has a busy couple of days; among other things, he establishes a legal precedent and helps a bunch of uploaded lobsters escape from humanity's light cone. And this is just the start.
The first thing that strikes about it is how absurdly, unashamedly cool it is. Vernor Vinge has blurbed it as 'a sustained work of radical optimism' and, at least at first glance, he's right. This the future as a good place, as geeks might want it to be.
Meet Manfred Macx, meme-broker. He gives away ideas for a living, and as a result doesn't need money. He thinks 'very long term - at least twenty, thirty years' (and in the process anticipates the overall plot of the novel). The rest of the world might be hung up on capitalism, but he's living in a whuffie economy already. That, and the glasses, is probal why, in my head, he looks like Cory Doctorow.
The novel begins with Manfred arriving in Amsterdam to make someone else rich. He has a busy couple of days; among other things, he establishes a legal precedent and helps a bunch of uploaded lobsters escape from humanity's light cone. And this is just the start.
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Date: 2005-06-02 11:05 am (UTC)O/T
Date: 2005-06-02 11:23 am (UTC)* No, not the author of Cloud Atlas. The comedian.
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Date: 2005-06-02 11:27 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-06-02 12:10 pm (UTC)It wasn't until "Lobsters" appeared in Asimov's and I saw the illustration and thought that's wrong that I stopped to think what my mental image of Manfred was like and realised it was a taller, thinner version of Charlie. With less hair. (Or, as is now the case, more hair.) (I hadn't met Cory at that stage; but I do think of Manfred's glasses as being Buddy-Holly style, with the electronic hidden in the thick horn rims, rather than looking ultra-high-tech.)
I've been telling people for years Accelerando was my favourite book of 2004. Unfortunately it seems I underestimated the process by one year. :o)
I continue to be gobsmacked at how accurate Charlie was at future tech extrapolation in the first story (lobster uploading and concrete rubberisation aside). The story was written in 1999 and set in 2012, and during the intervening six years our society has moved along pretty much a straight-line course technologywise towards the scenario depicted in "Lobsters". It helps, of course, that almost all the tech existed in at least an embryonic form in 1999, but even so; "Lobsters" is very much future-facing, and segues so seamlessly into the headlong plunge towards the Singularity in the following stories that it gives me hope I might make it to the
shipsdeep tech after all.[Disclaimer: I have not yet read the novel version of Accelerando.]
BBC News online is reporting today (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4599299.stm) worries about people abusing oxytocin, spraying it into crowds at political rallies to make people more trusting. Oh boy do we live in a cyberpunk world!
Yes, Am I
Date: 2007-05-15 04:12 pm (UTC)Yes, Am I
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