Stross seminar

… that Charlie chose as his late-Heinlein [1] legacy text [2] for Saturn’s Children - and not, say, Time Enough for Love. Friday, for all its flaws, is a good act to follow. Its eponymous heroine’s problem is that she’s human, but hardly anyone recognises her humanity - a situation with real-world resonance enough. She needs to find a place where she can be herself and belong.

Stross’s heroine, Freya, has a more intractable anguish. She’s in love with humanity, and particularly fixated on the male of the species, her One True Love. Unfortunately for her, Homo sapiens (along with almost all eukaryotic life) has been extinct for centuries. For a femmebot like Freya - a hard-wired sex machine so much a creature of male fantasy that her bare feet can grow high heels - this is deeply frustrating.

After the living, life goes on. Humanity’s final and perhaps fatal achievment has been to create its own replacement, in the multifarious forms of robots, who have gone loyally on to create their dead creators’ Golden Age SF dream of the Solar System. Their minds are modelled on the human brain, mangled by Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, and driven by impulses they have inherited without understanding. The result is one of the most physically attractive and ethically revolting societies conceived in SF: a system-spanning, star-striving community most of whose inhabitants are slaves.

Given this set-up, it’s surprising how much fun there is to be had. Freya may pine for her One True Love, but she’ll take sex where she can get it - and in an environment where almost any object may be conscious and randy, this results in a great deal of consensual polymorphous perversity. She is screwed by a space shuttle (within which she is securely strapped). She is fucked by a hotel (which is called Paris, though I waited in vain for the matching hotel-name shoe to drop). There are more allusions to kink than you can shake a rod at, some of which (I suspect) whizzed right past my head. There’s a scene where the set-up of endless porn movies segues into the breathy language of romantic novels. There’s an even funnier scene where a femmebot meets a robot gigolo.

Intellectually, too, it’s fun. The long-running argument between Evolution and Intelligent Design provides something of a running gag. (The Darwinists have ancient texts from the Creators, the ID advocates have evidence: blueprints, specs, purchase orders … ) The nitty-gritty of the robot body is original and believable. I could have done with more detail on the (well-sketched) outline of how the ruling class rules through corporate personhood and property rights, using and abusing what remains of humanity’s laws (as well as Asimov’s). There can’t be many SF books where there are fewer infodumps than the reader wants, and it’s a strong point of this one that it is.

Plot … well, it wasn’t a strong point in Friday. It’s stronger here, and complex, but I felt an apologetic authorial nudge when the device Freya couriers from Mercury to Mars turns out to be hidden inside a black-painted statuette of a bird of prey … When the real issue at stake becomes clear, half the novel has passed in the rataplan of Freya’s bouncing around half the planets in the System. When the main plot-engine does catch fire, though, we’re definitely along for the ride, and the ending is a slingshot that does the Heinlein (and Asimov) influence proud.

So, Mr Stross … your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to turn your rights-savvy cold eye on a story about a revolt in an anarcho-capitalist penal colony on the Moon.

1. Charles Stross, months and months ago: ‘Everyone wants to write a Heinlein juvenile! But it’s late Heinlein that got on the best-seller lists! Yes, I know they’re fat! Inside every late-Heinlein there’s a good SF novel screaming to get out!’ Or words to that effect.

2. A term coined by Farah Mendlesohn, by analogy with ‘legacy code’ in programming.

Posted by Ken MacLeod at 05:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Money makes singularities. The most obvious example is hyperinflation, where a gradual rise in prices gets built into expectations and institutions and accelerates, feeding on itself (and the capacity of the printing press to add zeroes) until prices are doubling daily and rising a million-fold within a month. It’s this kind of thing that led Richard Feynmann to suggest that we should talk of “economical” rather “astronomical” numbers. Eventually, hyperinflation collapses on itself, and trillions or octillions of currency units disappear or are replaced by something new, and hopefully more stable.

Singularities can go in both directions. Only in a monetary economy is it possible to generate a depression, in which goods go unsold because those who would trade them lack the money to do so. The downward spiral of a depression shares many of the viciously circular characteristics of a hyperinflation, but in reverse.

But hyperinflation and depression seem simple and comprehensible compared to the explosive growth in financial instruments we’ve observed in recent decades, followed by the equally spectacular implosion of the past year. And, while social democrats can reasonably hope for a return to stable collective risk management, it’s at least plausible that the process of bailing out and cleaning up the current mess will simply set the stage for something bigger, initially better and ultimately much worse the next time around.

On the face of it, financial singularities don’t have that much to do with Moore’s Law and the acceleration of technical progress. But prices are information and money is our oldest and most powerful information technology. Charlie Stross has captured this fundamental fact.

Although the Singularity has long been a staple device in science fiction, allowing us, as it does, to posit radical changes in society and technology without the need for increasingly untenable assumptions about the feasibility of ever-faster physical space travel, Accelerando is the only book I’ve read that really gives me the feel of an approaching singularity event.

Starting at a breakneck pace and picking up from there, Accelerando captures the Singularity in its form and prose. Stross’s super-evolved lobsters and feral abaci make for an account that’s both more readable and, paradoxically, more convincing than supposedly serious works like Kurzweil’s book The Singularity is Near.

The book begins in the near future, just on our side of the Singularity, introducing Manfred, patriarch-to-be of the Macx family, who is a kind of nomadic netrepreneur, using his Internet-enabled sunglasses to make innovations for which he is paid in reputation. The intelligent agents he designs to exploit financial derivatives markets soon develop into self-aware structures (the ‘Vile Offspring’) that outgrow any need for their human creators, who are forced to migrate to the neighbourhood of Jupiter. Subsequent generations of the Macx clan take the story further, in a plot that’s appropriately impossible to summarise.

Stross bombards us with new ideas and new takes on old ones, at a pace that carries its own conviction. The Fermi problem, for example, gets a good treatment. Earth is not the only planet to have undergone its Singularity, and space turns out to be full of products of, and refugees from such processes, exploiting uploads and wormholes to engage in virtualised faster-than-light travel.

At one level of course, the story takes us right back to the founding myth of science fiction, that of Frankenstein and his monster. But, in the early 21st century, we’ve gone beyond monsters, robots and even computers. It’s the disembodied and reified artifacts of law and corporate finance that truly have the power to devour their creators.

Posted by John Quiggin at 07:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)