Trying to See Past “The Singularity”: Accelerando and Glasshouse

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Trying to See Past “The Singularity”: Accelerando and Glasshouse

10/26/2006

“technological singularity” coming in our future, after which the human world will be a place so dramatically different as to render those who come after “posthumans.” I’m not sure that’s useful labeling, but I would very much like to be around when the singularity happens. Here’s one reviewer’s take on this:

But do not squander your pity on a few precocious undergraduates contemplating a 40-year-old television series — save it instead for the contemporary science-fiction novelist, whose job requires him not only to reflect perpetually on technology's philosophical consequences but to create such technology ceaselessly out of pure imagination. It is a job made more complicated by some scientists' predictions that mankind is rapidly approaching a moment of singularity: a time when technology will have advanced so dramatically and so thoroughly that, in the eyes of our offspring's offspring, our Power Macs, Xboxes and BlackBerrys will seem as antiquated as water clocks, astrolabes and dignified political discourse now seem to us. Thus it falls upon the future-minded sci-fi novelist to envision a world consistent with the present day and yet different from it in every way possible, and when he's done playing God, to perform the more astonishing miracle of actually producing a novel.

These two novels both take place during or after “the singularity,” and there is a mind-rush of ideas and perspectives in every paragraph and sentence. I found it exhilarating. But Glasshouse can be hard to read on occasion because your mind wants to fly over here, and over there, but he brings the human story down to modern terms in a way that lets you have plenty of motivation to keep on following the story line.

I think Accelerando is the better book, but I think I enjoyed Glasshouse even more. Without giving away too much, I will just say that in Glasshouse the circumstances the characters are put in make for some very entertaining – sometimes subtle and sometimes not – analogies and references to the world we live in. Very timely. Probably the most obvious was when a gaggle of pregnant Stepford-type wives head out to “fix” things with the phrase, “Let’s roll.”

If the events of the day are getting you down, here in the waning years of “pre-singularity” times, then spend a few hours with Accelerando or Glasshouse this weekend. I guarantee you a drug-free exhilaration, an escape into a wonderful future that I hope we all get to experience for “real” some day.

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"Trying to See Past “The Singularity”: Accelerando and Glasshouse," Campus Technology, 10/26/2006, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=39136

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