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The Matryoshka Macxes

(Edit: The title is spelled wrong, it's a weblink fix.)

Accelerando
by Charles Stross

In 2001, I read the story "Lobsters", the tale of futurist and Linux-stule business-plan-speculator Manfred Macx. Along with his ex-wife and tax collector Pamela, his life takes a ninety-degree at the end of the story, and the author evidently realized that there was more to the story. Post-singularity life is an obsession of Mr. Stross's, and this book handles it better than any other attempt.

Accelerando tells us the story of the Macx family. (This affectation is pronounced "Max", according to the author. Our first clue that Manfred is not entirely un-self-serving.) We follow the story through the eyes of manfred and, later, Amber, his daughter, and finally, Sihran, Amber's sorta-kinda-son. We also see the re-architecting of both the solar system and the human race, neither in an entirely satisfactory manner if one had to live with these folks.

I'm being very vague, since the best bits is this book are when we're surprised by a plot turn. Some of it doesn't live up to the hype I generated in my head for "Lobsters". That's because I mostly avoided reading these stories as they came out, and kept building this book up in my head. Also, because for the most part, with the exception of the first story, we're not making anything in them, we're reacting to alrady-existing environments and situations. It's a valid and good way of telling the stories, but distinctly different in tone.

In some ways, Accelerando is an experiment in telling post-singularity tales that are specifically not predictive, a kind of antithesis to old-style predictive science-fiction. This has produced some of his best work, and certainly his best science-fiction.

Whether Accelerando, in its nine stories spread across three generations, is a proper novel can be left as an exercise for the reader. The continuing narrative of betrayal, family duty, money, and copyright law certainly doesn't feel bolted together. Quite the contrary, the stories are not at all self-contained to all but the most attentive readers. Reading them as they appeared must have been a disorienting, if fascinating, experience.

Highly recommended to anyone who is interested in grand futurism, open-source, or artificial intelligences. Also available at http://www.accelerando.org

Tags: books