I rarely blog about short story collections, and haven't been consistently blogging all of my Charles Stross novels, but I do feel compelled to jot down some thoughts on Accelerando. This is, yes, a short story collection from Charles Stross; but it reads much more like a novel than I expected it too. It might be a bit closer to a classic serialized story, as the stories were originally published in various sci-fi periodicals, but they do tell a unified, fairly linear story.
MINI SPOILERS
The stories in Accelerando were written around 2000-ish, and are set in their near future, which is chronologically near our own present. That's one of the things that first caused me to fall in love with Stross through novels like Halting State, where it's science fiction but science that is extrapolated just a few years out from today, based on very firm research being done today.
The main character for most of the book is Manfred Macx, who in many ways is an archetypal cyberpunk protagonist - he even unironically dons mirrorshades at one point. He's very much a Free Software Foundation type of person, creating things and then releasing them for the world to use for the benefit of all mankind. He is pretty strategic in his directions, though. Depending on his idea and the situation, he may grant it to a particular person or entity who he thinks will accomplish the most good with it, and be willing to follow any guidelines he has in mind. Others are just copylefted to the net.
In this future, there is some form of "social credit" system, although I don't think Stross ever uses that specific term. Macx is broke in a traditional sense since he doesn't have any money, but thanks to the massive goodwill he's generated over the years, he doesn't want for anything - he can always find a place to stay, a computer to borrow, a seat on an airplane. This puts him at odds with Pamela, who at the start is his lover but becomes his nemesis: she is a freelance agent for the IRS, a kinky dominatrix who has very traditional values when it comes to raising a family and supporting the government. She is exasperated at Macx, who could easily have earned millions or billions of dollars that could be taxed by the United States, but instead has opted for non-pecuniary remuneration.
Macx reminds me a lot of William Gibson, specifically how he is always living just a little bit further in the future than anyone else. He accomplishes this by always being constantly online, monitoring all the gossip and announcements and speculation: he can draw the connections before anyone else because he has his eyes in every subculture. If Macx didn't exist, his ideas and inventions would still come into being, but some time later, most likely by some corporate group or avaricious entrepreneur. As the book continues, we learn more about the nuts and bolts of how Macx does what he does. There's a stunning sequence when Macx is mugged and has his glasses stolen; this results in the loss of his memory and even his personality. More startling, his mugger becomes Macx, carrying out his schemes and planning new ones. We come to realize that Macx has offloaded most of his memories to digital storage, which he can access on demand through his glasses - well, "access" implies a passive "pull" model, but what Stross depicts is more of an active "push" model. Macx has previously set up agents that take care of the grunt work and just notify him when he needs to take some specific meat-space action. But those "agents" really are, in some way, Macx too - he created them, and when people interact with Macx, they're interacting with the version of him as mediated by his programs.
I won't do a blow-by-blow of all the stories, but the thing I loved most was how it telescopes out into the future. Those early Macx chapters are all very believable and feel like they could be happening now - if Google Glasses had taken off and gotten multiple generations, if the FSF had acquired a truly wealthy benefactor. Macx is pointing the way to the future, but eventually the future arrives and overtakes him. Of course many other people, and eventually everyone, adopts the augmented intelligence he has championed. However, he draws the line at implants, which he sheepishly admits feel weird to him. But the younger generation doesn't have the same qualms, and so their augmentations are an order of magnitude faster and better than Macx's. He fades into a secondary supporting character, and eventually a revered but irrelevant elder as his biological daughter comes to the narrative foreground.
One major change is a sort of "fuzzing" of individuality and eventually reality. If you note someone else who seems interesting to you, you might offer to share some subroutines with them; if they reciprocate, those parts of your greater-self personalities may run a simulation of what your lives together would be like. Because they are just digital, they can run at much faster speeds than biological life, so they could run an experiment of many years of cohabitating in under a minute. You could then each check the results of the collaboration and use that to decide whether to explore greater intimacy together.
There's a recurring subplot about the question of personhood and rights. Early on, Macx is contacted by a colony of lobsters who had been uplifted by a revanchist Soviet Union. They have become self-aware and long for their freedom. Macx arranges for this; specifically, though, they want to leave their lobster bodies behind, and instead become a digital intelligence that is beamed into the depths of outer space. Meanwhile on Earth, people have become more comfortable with concepts of cloning: someone might choose to clone a beloved elder who has passed away, or create cloned versions of their own offspring in the event of some calamity, or the classic gambit of cloning yourself. Besides biological cloning, though, there is digital cloning too. Near the end of the book, technology has advanced to the point where people can upload their consciousness into, well, "the cloud"; once there, it's possible to "fork" your "self", creating two (or more!) copies that start off as identical but may be set on separate tasks. In one example that's great because it's so mundane, a person encounters a loquacious talker when entering a party. He has wanted to talk with this person for a while, but knows that doing so will eat up all his time at the party. So he creates one fork to stay and participate in this dull conversation while the other fork continues mingling with other guests. Ultimately those forks can reintegrate, at which point their memories will join together and synthesize.
So you end up with a variety of conscious entities: AI who have become sentient, non-human animal species that have grown intelligent, humans who have augmented their consciousness with digital agents, humans who have uploaded their consciousness and become purely digital, and, eventually, created beings who have always been digital. Macx can see where this is headed decades earlier, so one of his priorities is to ensure that "human rights" are carefully reconsidered and updated for the coming era of multiple intelligences.
Another thing I've always loved about Stross is how he thinks about the girders that underlie the worlds he creates. How does the economy work in a Berkeleian universe where people experience life through direct neural stimulation rather than through their biological sensors? Well, it ultimately comes down to bandwidth and compute power: these are the actual limited resources; within the digital world, actually experiencing, say, a stage coach or a steamboat or a jet plane are all equivalently "expensive". In the italicized sections fronting each short story, Stross describes how much computing power is held within biological brains versus computers, and notes the point where this crosses over. One of the most striking developments comes when the insatiable demand for additional computing power leads to the demolition of planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, and eventually the gas giants will be taken apart, their raw material reworked into "computronium", the engineered matter that will expand the grid of digital power. This sounds shocking, but does make a lot of sense: a tiny ping-pong-sized ball of computing power can hold enough capacity for an entire world to experience full lives.
There is an early, brief discussion of the Mormon church in Accelerando, and by the time it reached the end I thought it was surprisingly aligned with some aspects of Mormon theology. Stross isn't Mormon, of course, but in some ways this felt like a Mormon book in the way that, say, Ender's Game never did. The idea of researching ancestry and praying for the salvation for the previously deceased sort of segues into a world where you can collect all known information about a person, and essentially take a crack at "re-souling" them. Of course, for a pre-digital-age person this will be less likely to match who they "really" were, but it still may satisfy the needs of their "summoner"; people who have lived more of their lives digitally can more accurately be studied and reborn. And the explosion in resources does give each person the capacity to essentially have their own universe to create and guide and even populate with new sentient life: the only limit is the amount of matter in the Solar System.
Much like with Halting State, I found myself thinking of Neal Stephenson novels while reading this, but Stross wrote his books earlier. Halting State's MMORPG reminded me of T-RAIN in REAMDE. Accelerando has a lot of overlap with Fall, particularly the idea of digitizing consciousness and living in a purely digital world. In Accelerando, though, this is just one step along a long process, and the veil between living and dead seems at most porous, at least irrelevant; in Fall, there's a much more severe chasm between the living and the dead, mostly due to the different speed at which Bitworld runs.
The few blurbs I've seen about Accelerando describe it as a collection of stories about the singularity, which it probably is, but I did like how the characters within kind of pooh-pooh that idea. There's an early discussion about the singularity, and everyone has a different idea about it. Some think it's just around the corner. Others think it's impossible. Others think it happened centuries ago. Others think it's meaningless. That variety of opinions felt very real to me, which leads to the surprising groundedness of this book.
END SPOILERS
I haven't gotten much into the actual plot of the book, especially the back half, so I'll just note that it's highly entertaining, surprising and rewarding, as I've come to expect from Stross. This book has been a great read, bursting at the seams with ideas. It's kind of shocking that it was written two decades ago; while we aren't living in this world, it did an amazing job at predicting many developments, and even better at anticipating the concerns we'd have today. Overall this is much more of a hard-sci-fi book than, say, the Merchant Princes or Laundry Files series, and I'd definitely recommend it to anyone interested in a nice meaty speculation about our digital future in the universe.