Accelerando

Accelerando by Charles Stross

Category: SciFi Grade: B

This is the geekiest book I've read in years. It's part of sub-genre of SciFi called CyberPunk - an arena that was kicked off by incredible book years ago called Neuromancer by William Gibson. The key element to the genre is so-called "augmented" humans - people who have been enhanced with computer technology to improve their ability to remember, think and communicated (hence the "cyber"). The entire book is in geek-speak. E.g. early in the book, instead of eating breakfast, the main character "mechanically assimilates a bowl of cornflakes". See what I mean?

So bottom line -- I can't imagine there's more than one or two of you out there reading this who will put up with this for more than a few pages. And its kind of a shame because its not a half bad book. If you've been following this blog for a while, you might remember me talking about a book called The Singularity is Near by Ray Kurzweil. That was a non-fiction speculation about the convergence of various technologies in the coming century that would increasingly blur the lines between "natural" and artificial intelligence. Its fascinating and scary stuff and will pit our grandchildren and their children up against decisions about what constitutes human.

Accelerando is a fictional (and sometimes comical) treatment of the same subject. It's spans the first three or four centuries ahead of us. Fairly near term, the human race as invented the ability to add external improvements to their mental ability (not far fetched and not too far down the road). Once this starts, you quickly end up with two classes of humans - augmented and unaugmented. In almost any field, the augmented humans outperform their less capable brothers and sisters because they can think orders of magnitude faster. Of course, we're in to slippery slope territory here and, what comes with augmentation is the ability to back up, copy and continually enhance our "selves". It addresses issues like - what happens if I go star traveling and, while I'm gone, a copy of "me" runs in to debt or gets in to trouble. What's my responsibility when I get back?

You can see that the story is going to get very twisted. Between the complex story line and the geeky language, its very hard to follow but, in the end, worth it. I can't imagine any of you will read this and its a shame.