/siberia/ - Off-topic

This was a frustrating book to read and not in the ways a lot of people accuse it of being (I don't think it's valid to criticise a sci-fi book for using technical terms). Each of its nine chapters was originally written as a short story, meaning the pacing is unfortunately completely wack and sometimes you go from a really interesting story to something completely unrelated. I also have some problems with the way the story itself is told, and the future being envisioned, but despite my complaints I devoured the book in only a few days and enjoyed reading.

Accelerando is an unending deluge of interesting and amazing ideas about the future of technological progress. It is about the singularity from its beginning to its end, and it is fascinating and really fun reading about how it progresses. The civilisation comes out of the other end is unexpected and kind of frightening. Every decade or so in the story there are asides which tell you about the state of the solar system. The speculative civilisation simulation is the main draw here and it is genuinely engaging, though there is also a human story. I do have criticisms of the future imagined in this book, which I'll talk about later. It also is a little bit dated in a few places, especially at the beginning.

The human story has highs and lows. It's frustrated very badly by the disjointed chapters, and is usually less interesting than the civilisation progression. It's especially bad in the last third, where I think the characters become less engaged with the technological progression and things kind of of become a bit more conservative. I actually don't think the characters are all that bad. I really liked Manfred and I related to Amber, though I didn't really care for Sirhan. Maybe it's because I'm coming off of other sci-fi novels with ridiculously flat characters, but I think the ones in this book are pretty good and engaging.

The problem comes from how they turn the plot into family drama. I was not looking for family drama when I started this book, and it massively overstays its welcome (I thought Amber's relationship with her mum, who's the most annoying cuckservative ever, was engaging, but everything to do with Sirhan is just frustrating). My favourite parts of the story were the beginning with Manfred, and the part where Amber is on the spaceship (I liked this part a lot, it was fun), because these are the parts in which the plot is allowed to be about actually interesting things. Oh and there's a cat which helps them out.

Generally I think this book is too conservative about what the future would actually look like. All the pairings are straight and there are only short mentions of changing sex. Sex still exists despite the objective conditions existing to have it be ceased to exist. When the human body can be built however you want, sex will no longer be a contradiction. I also don't really understand why the humans have meatbodies so late in the story, why not just simulate yourselves on a system away from the inner cloud? Or, at least give yourselves bodies that aren't so fragile. The book is also rather euro-centric (apart from one character, who unfortunately drops out of the story for no good reason).

Accelerando is constrained by its liberalism. It is fundamentally a conservative liberal silicon-valley techbro story, though it pretends it isn't. At one point it says "Capitalism and Communism have both become obsolete", but the new system is still a class society with scarcity and EVERYTHING is based on the market, corporations or legal systems. So, it says Communism has become obsolete, but it obviously isn't (even if the proletariat no longer existed, if class society does that just means that it has developed in a way we didn't expect, but the contradiction of class still has to be resolved so communism is still necessary).

At the beginning of the book the main character works for a Eurocommunist and the Italian Communist Party, who are basically a liberal progressive party (well, I guess Stross isn't wrong in portraying Eurocommunists this way). They decline any actually anti-capitalist measures, while 'Stalinism' is decried. Nobody even thinks about doing anything against the law in this book.

<spoiler> You might think I'm just complaining for the sake of complaining here, but this does actually kind of ruin the future presented here. The book posits the end-stage of any civilisation going through a singularity is a star-system wide matryoshka brain consisting of godlike intelligences trading experiences and knowledge on the market, without any space for members of the original species unless they alter themselves so far that they are no longer that species, and without any will to expand outside the now-moribund star system. The whole economics 2.0 system of corporate superintelligences eating each other inside a matryoshka brain is really cool and scary, but like, this is just because this system developed from capitalism.

I'm unsure the technological singularity is even possible under capitalism due to its inefficient resource allocation, but if it is, it certainly could end up like this. I'm not a mechanicist. But this eventuality is not the certainty that Stross writes it to be. A communist or post-communist development would not allow economics 2.0 to even exist, since with this much energy there would be no market, no money, no sentient corporations, no scarcity and no gods allowed (though of course artificial beings would be treated the same as humans). Such a civilisation could then start colonising the space it has access to (probably just our galaxy and its neighbours), turning the matter into computing power until the accessible universe is alive and happy. The fact the post-capitalist system is just taken as the way things are in Accelerando detracts from the story since it makes no sense. It's also just annoying hearing about corporations and markets and shit all the time. Slag those sentient corporations to give space for true technological progress.</spoiler>

Overall I very much enjoyed reading Accelerando and I recommend it, despite its flaws. It's really fun and thought provoking, and the characters aren't all that bad. I don't know where to put it because 4 stars feels too much but 3 stars too little, since it is a really unique and interesting book. So I'll give it a 4 since I think it deserves it.

(also I would have added a part in this review about how I think accelerationism and the belief that the singularity is inevitable is rubbish but I forgor before posting)