[HN Gopher] Accelerando (2005)
___________________________________________________________________
Accelerando (2005)
Author : wallflower
Score : 170 points
Date : 2024-09-05 02:33 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.antipope.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.antipope.org)
| gnat wrote:
| Such a good book. This is the book that cemented exponential rate
| of improvement in my mind.
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Why do you view it as "improvement" ?
| XorNot wrote:
| An extremely relevant question since Economics 2.0 is
| portrayed entirely as a failure state in the book.
| wombatpm wrote:
| That was only because of the digital lobsters
| goatlover wrote:
| Don't know that AI corporations converting the Earth to
| computronium and kicking humans off to go live in the outer
| planets is improvement.
| mulderc wrote:
| Loved this book, curious how it holds up but have way to many
| other things to read to find out for myself.
| XorNot wrote:
| Discovered this here a few years ago, wound up basically taking
| up the next 2 days ploughing through it unable to put it down.
|
| A case where the title implies a journey it'll deliver on.
| riffraff wrote:
| I think this is a classic by now, with reason.
|
| I think some of the concepts in the book are both very prescient
| and very disheartening, e.g. the autonomous corporations that
| keep haggling with each other way past their usefulness to the
| beings who created them.
| askvictor wrote:
| One of my favourite bits is how most of the mass of the inner
| solar system gets converted to Computronium consisting almost
| entirely of legal bots battling other legal bots.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| The bit about jamming up democratic representation by
| creating living copies of individuals that have a
| particularly-useful mindset to those who want to jam up the
| system is the part that stuck out to me. Fortunately, I don't
| think it really has an analogue in the modern day (other
| than, perhaps, "when you have the capacity to craft culture,
| the culture you craft around you will become self-
| reinforcing").
| sangnoir wrote:
| > Fortunately, I don't think it really has an analogue in
| the modern day
|
| How about conglomerates having defense contractor _and_
| mass media /news subsidiaries? An on-the-nose author may
| write a newscaster who says that they were "brought to
| tears by the beauty of the war machines" on air, or some
| such.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| It was a fairly new concept in 2005 but the idea that the
| evolution of life as determined by the play of energy on the
| surface of the globe terminates in inwardly-facing capitalist
| computronium predates Accelerando. While I'm unaware of the
| intermediate steps the idea took to get to Stross it's the
| thesis of many of the various essays that Nick Land scattered
| across Usenet in the nineties and probably goes back to
| Lyotard's writings in the eighties and earlier.
| faloppad wrote:
| One of the best novels from when sci-fy was as positive, great
| read.
| throwaway111555 wrote:
| Positive, but not for humans.
| goatlover wrote:
| I didn't really get a positive feeling reading all the way
| through it. I know the AI cat "pet" had a positive outcome in
| it's liberation, but I didn't really feel that way for the
| humans.
| Semaphor wrote:
| Very cool story for anyone into far-future, post-humanity, and
| trans-humanity. I also discovered this here, in a comment.
| senectus1 wrote:
| FYI guys, this excellent author posts here on HN :-)
|
| This is my fav of his books, but his others are often just as
| gripping. Glasshouse is my 2nd fav.
| valbis wrote:
| ok so I've been hearing of this for a while. Seems to be somehow
| similar to Diaspora, which I didn't enjoy that much and I have
| currently put on hold (I am around halfway through). Wonder if I
| would like it.
| nicopappl wrote:
| Diaspora is a book for Math PhDs, involving a lot of physics
| and math theories. Accelerando is a book that anyone can read.
| Involving hyperintelligent cats and sentient shrimps (actual
| shrimps, not aliens).
|
| I would recommend it not just for the philosophical aspect (it
| has a very interesting way of placating transhumanism) but also
| for the entertainment aspect (aforementioned shrimps, did I
| mention the Iranian space program?)
|
| Stross is a very approachable author, Accelerando is not his
| most accessible book, but if you can go through half of
| Diaspora, you can easily go through the entirety of
| Accelerando.
| valbis wrote:
| I don't mind technical fiction, and I love a good hard scifi,
| but I guess the part of science I am most interested on (when
| I read literature) is the psychological one - Blindsight is
| by far my favourite sci-f. However I am totally up for trying
| Accellerando, so thank you for the reccomendation, you sold
| it to me :P
| lproven wrote:
| I think you mean lobsters.
|
| _Accelerando_ is a fixup of a bunch of short stories, and
| one was "Lobsters".
|
| https://reiszwolf.wordpress.com/2020/04/11/lobsters-%E2%80%A.
| ..
| Animats wrote:
| Fun to re-read that. So many dated references - Windows NT!
| Communism in Russia! Patents being valuable!
| stuaxo wrote:
| These size books by Charlie Stross are great fun, especially with
| the quick pacing.
|
| For some reason on longer journeys I keep trying his longer ones
| and don't get on with them at all.
| pixelpoet wrote:
| Best (fiction) book I ever read, and I will always associate it
| with the amazing psychill album I discovered at the same time
| (Easily Embarrassed - Idyllic Life).
| cafard wrote:
| A friend picked this for our neighborhood book club. Having read
| it, I told him that he should provide a cheat sheet for less
| technically inclined readers, covering for example "Thompson
| hack" and "Turing-complete". He did not--I think that he might
| have suggested that I draw it up--and it became one of the least
| popular books to have been read in the club's history.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Recommend Dune, next time, for extra lulz
| throwanem wrote:
| The cheat sheet is built in!
| shagie wrote:
| Followed up with Anathem (by Neal Stephenson). It took me
| three tries to get into the book before going audible on
| it... and then realizing its a _really_ neat philosophy text
| wrapped around a plot.
| thiagocsf wrote:
| Charlie is on Mastodon, toots regularly and actually replies to
| others
|
| https://wandering.shop/@cstross
| gpderetta wrote:
| cstross is also here on HN.
| flir wrote:
| He's _everywhere_ , and not just as a PR presence, he's
| actually involved. I've had a couple of interactions with him
| on Reddit where he politely drive-by corrected me (a real
| brush with fame for me). Add to that everything he's written
| on antipope
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=antipope.org) and I
| find it amazing he gets commercial work done at all.
|
| The first third of Accelerando is a tour de force - the
| ideas-per-page ratio is just phenomenal, and 20 years ago it
| left me feeling future-shocked. But it's pulp, in the sense
| that it's very much rooted in the time it was written (the
| curse of near-future SF). If anyone knows of any works that
| idea-dense but written in the 2020s, I'd love to hear about
| them. Short fiction especially.
| dogtimeimmortal wrote:
| Wow, cstross posts on reddit! That really makes me want to
| read his next book.
| flir wrote:
| Not sure if sarcastic or not (and I'm normally pretty
| good at that).
|
| https://old.reddit.com/user/cstross
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| It's easy: Write 2 good hours a day, maybe more if the
| spirit moves you. Then post for 6 hours.
| amonon wrote:
| depending on your personality this is a recipe for
| enlightenment or neuroses
| photonthug wrote:
| > If anyone knows of any works that idea-dense but written
| in the 2020s, I'd love to hear about them. Short fiction
| especially.
|
| Fails for the 2020s part, but check out Greg Egan if you
| haven't already (his Diaspora is mentioned elsewhere in
| this thread). Dark Integers is a short-fiction collection.
| Also Vacuum Diagrams, by Stephen Baxter. These three
| authors are, IMHO, the absolute pinnacle of hard scifi. But
| be advised they are definitely kinda optimizing for being
| idea-dense. For more literary stuff with deeper focus on
| story structure & consideration of the individual
| characters, etc, you might want to look elsewhere.
|
| EDIT to say, Dennis E Taylor is more recent and on
| reflection definitely deserves a mention. Also an ex-
| programmer-turned-author IIRC. The Bobiverse series is
| aimed at a wider audience of more casual nerds than the
| stuff above, and more of a recap of "big ideas" from other
| scifi without the head-spinning future shock of stuff like
| Stross and Egan. But it's solid nevertheless and easier to
| call it "fun". And despite the artistic license with the
| more dreamy far-future tech that's available to
| protagonists in the not-so-distant-future.. Bobiverse is
| kind of a "scifi procedural" flavor, so that probably makes
| it appealing to people who like stuff like Weir's the
| Martian.
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Ted Chiang and Sam Hughes are two high-concept writers
| from the 00s-10s decades yet to be mentioned if anybody
| feels like looking for more to read.
| lproven wrote:
| Just always remember: it's a dystopia. It's not a happy positive
| uplifting book: the conclusion is intended as a genocidal,
| catastrophic nightmare.
| api wrote:
| I've found that dystopian sci fi has to be clear about this to
| the point of bashing the reader over the head with it, which
| unfortunately can ruin it as art.
|
| Think of 1984 as a classic example, though good writing rescues
| that one as art. If the author hadn't included a "Hannibal
| Lecture" from the party boss about what The Party actually was
| there would be trads and neoreactionaries praising it as a work
| about how great it is to have a state that provides meaning.
|
| If you don't do that you get people who think for example that
| Paul Atraides in Dune is Luke Skywalker and the monopolistic
| feudal system is good when he's more of a tragic villain in a
| dystopia.
|
| People even think the world backdrop of Neuromancer is cool.
| That would not be a cool place to live. The arc across the
| three books is really showing the twilight of humanity and the
| ascent of machine intelligence. We are reduced to the street
| life that William Gibson saw in the downtown East side of
| Vancouver while the machines take over.
| 0xEF wrote:
| Like you, I find that sci-fi and its derivatives is where
| many readers often miss the point. It's not a overly "happy
| ending" genre, which I think is important to provide balance
| to all the literary genres as a whole, since many of them
| aren't exactly trying to make the reader depressed. That's
| not so much the goal of sci-fi authors either, but instead to
| make the readers _think,_ which, yes can and often does drive
| is into the darker parts of what society, humanity and
| existence has to offer. It 's important to have a functional
| place to approach these things, in my opinion, which is why I
| shy away from the utopia/optimistic stuff in the genre that
| rarely seems to gain the popularity the more darkly
| speculative and dystopian stuff does.
|
| It's not for everyone, I guess. But it should be. Your 1984
| example is fantastic since we are seeing this exact thing
| play out in US politics today, with a tyrannical group trying
| to usher in a police state and the sycophants that walk lock-
| step right along with it, enamored by the delusion that they
| are the good guys because their demagogues don't explicitly
| say the quiet part out loud.
| XorNot wrote:
| William Gibson would object to the notion that the Sprawl is
| a dystopia though - at least not directly as one.
|
| His point about it was that the conditions of the sprawl are
| a good deal better then the conditions huge, even the
| majority, of humanity live in today.[1]
|
| [1] https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-
| apo...
| themadturk wrote:
| Plus, he considers that to be a positive world because it
| survived the Cold War, which definitely seemed doubtful in
| the 1980s.
| possibleworlds wrote:
| Exactly. It's a fantastic book and extremely fun, but in
| Stross' own words: "In the background of what looks like a
| Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are
| happening."
|
| http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-she...
|
| On it's origins (extreme burnout as a programmer in a high
| growth environment during the dot com boom):
|
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
| OgsyedIE wrote:
| Read this years ago and reread the first two chapters just now.
| Brilliantly written and within the conceit of "what if
| technological and aerospace advancement continued beyond the
| materials limits to the thermodynamic limits and private entities
| became exponentially emancipated from states and the old moral
| panics never re-emerged" the content of the book is almost all
| good but for one thing that we now know to have aged horribly.
| That thing is augmented reality.
|
| Every augmented reality device more advanced than subdermal
| hearing aids to have ever been built has found only a very small
| minority of users who actually enjoy the damn things. Most of the
| human race doesn't like augmented reality technology, smart
| vision, heads-up displays or VR in any way.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I would love to have a HUD that could remind me of stuff and
| add extra information to my surroundings.
|
| The closest we've had was Google Glass but the tech isn't quite
| there yet to be able to have a powerful yet light device.
| animal531 wrote:
| That's just because those technologies haven't advanced "beyond
| the material limits" yet.
|
| VR is amazing, but I don't play much with mine because its such
| a hassle to set up, manage the cables and having to wipe off
| the sweat during the warmer months. The same goes for
| everything else, once I can get for example map AR that
| projects directions for me and its a small clip on that goes on
| my shirt or whatever else, then that's going to be a game
| changer.
| loa_in_ wrote:
| VR equipment is amazing, what we're missing is VR centric Linux
| distributions, for the ecosystem to benefit from creativity of
| the commons. Right now odds are that if you can afford playing
| in VR, you probably are too busy with other business to get
| creative with it.
| pbmonster wrote:
| A VR centric Linux distribution is not going to solve the
| fundamental problem of people getting sea sick from doing 3D
| stuff in VR, of how sweaty and disorienting wearing the damn
| things is, of the cables getting in the way and the minor
| inconvenience that displays of text are almost completely
| unusable due to insufficient resolution.
|
| The hardware still needs to gain an order of magnitude in
| several dimensions.
| klibertp wrote:
| Apple Vision Pro can display legible text, and the pass-
| through camera's resolution is also enough to read printed
| text. At least, that's what I read about it.
|
| At this point, the only dimensions to improve would be
| weight and price.
|
| However, motion sickness is a real problem. With
| sufficiently good pass-through, it might not be that bad,
| but in my Quest 3, I get motion sick after 15 minutes at
| most when gaming. It's a bit better in pass-through mode,
| but most software doesn't seem to support it.
| Filligree wrote:
| Have you tried chewing on a ginger root beforehand?
| pbmonster wrote:
| > Apple Vision Pro can display legible text, and the
| pass-through camera's resolution is also enough to read
| printed text
|
| It's not even close to sitting in front of the cheapest
| full HD office monitor, not to speak of a modern 4K
| screen. I don't think anybody seriously writes text for a
| living with a Vision Pro in front of their eyes right
| now.
|
| Maybe they'll fix all the other problems those headsets
| have, and the average consumer will accept a regression
| in image quality - just like when we transitioned from
| CRT monitors to LCD screens (it took something like 15
| years until LCDs caught up with the best CRTs available).
| lawlessone wrote:
| > (it took something like 15 years until LCDs caught up
| with the best CRTs available).
|
| I actually think colours still feel wrong.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Modern room-scale setups go miles towards dealing with the
| seasickness (at the cost of constraining your active space
| to a room-scale, so you have two abstractions for motion).
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I agree it's about how people tend to allocate their focus.
| But I think it's more about dopamine than money.
|
| I can't even be bothered to leave my terminal and work in a
| browser. The idea of trying to wrangle so many degrees of
| freedom as VR has... It just doesn't sound like something I'd
| ever get around to volunteering for because progress would be
| too slow to be rewarding.
|
| Linux happened at all because people were content to work in
| text. High fidelity environments are just too much work for
| too little gain. Sure, some folk bother with a gui, but even
| fewer would bother with a 3d one.
| pmontra wrote:
| > Most of the human race doesn't like augmented reality
| technology
|
| Exactly. The technology is the problem. I'd love to use
| augmented reality and I always did but not if I have to wear a
| helmet (it weights a lot, subjectively and maybe objectively)
| or contact lenses (I can't wear them anymore) or glasses
| without prescription lenses or anything else that has been more
| or less technologically viable up to now. Make it as easy as
| smartphones or earpieces and everybody will use it. How? No
| idea.
| gmuslera wrote:
| What so far seem to have aged badly is the concept of devices
| interacting with your brain directly (unless massive cultural
| engineering), augmenting thoughts or whatever. Would you give
| permission to Apple, Google, Amazon or Microsoft to put
| thoughts directly in your consciousness? Ads and political
| manipulation are 2 things that the current us see as immediate
| and very probable misuse of that capability.
| amonon wrote:
| I would not but I think the general public is not against the
| idea. Most people interact with social media on a daily
| basis, for example, and it certainly has a strong effect on
| users thought process.
| goatlover wrote:
| A little bit different than actually having a chip in your
| head doing these things, which I do think most of the
| general public would be very skeptical abiout, particularly
| as doom and gloom have overtaken much of the technical
| optimism about the future. And corporations are seen as
| leading us to a dystopian outcome.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| Have you checked your screen time lately?
| thom wrote:
| The first time I read this was over GPRS on an HTC Typhoon
| smartphone running Windows Mobile during my 2-hour commute to my
| first job in tech after university, and anything seemed possible.
| Surprised to be sitting here years later feeling much the same.
| lxgr wrote:
| Sony PRS-505 e-reader for me, shortly after Doctorow's also
| Creative-Commons-licensed "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom".
| I felt exactly the same.
|
| Also, at least part of the novel was apparently written on a
| PDA according to Charlie :)
|
| > Manfred's on the road again, making people rich ...
|
| > I typed those words on a Psion 5. A perfectly-formed
| miniature computer with keyboard and screen, 8Mb of RAM, a 16Mb
| CF card, and a 22MHz ARM processor running an operating system
| called EPOC32, which was the missing link ancestor behind
| Symbian. It has a serial port and an infra-red interface by
| which it could talk to my mobile phone, a tri-band Motorola GSM
| device that had an infrared modem that supported the dizzy data
| rate of 9600 bits/second over the air.
| klez wrote:
| WTF, I started reading this yesterday! Talk about coincidence.
|
| I won't read other comments here because I want to go in blind,
| but I'm afraid I already spoiled something for myself (even
| though I supposed the book would take that turn) just by looking
| at the comment page.
|
| At the moment it looks like run-of-the-mill post-cyberpunk-near-
| future fare, but I suppose it will take a different direction
| altoghether.
| mab122 wrote:
| When reading this for first time (like two years ago) it struck
| me how many issues of accelerando world we actually have right
| now in ours. In fiction they are just hyperboled to extreme
| (sometimes for comedic appeal).
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/the-craz...
|
| > [...]
|
| > one technique that suited me well back then was to take a
| fire-hose of ideas and spray them at the reader until they
| drowned. Nothing gives you a sense of an immersive future like
| having the entire world dumped on your head simultaneously,
| after all.
|
| > [...]
|
| > Now we are living in 2018, round the time I envisaged [the
| first chapter of Accelerando] taking place when I was writing
| that novelette, and the joke's on me: reality is outstripping
| my own ability to keep coming up with insane shit to provide
| texture to my fiction.
|
| > [...]
|
| See also :
|
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/04/reality...
|
| And maybe :
|
| https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/08/dead-pl...
| icaruswept wrote:
| Very high density of ideas that make you stop and go "shit,
| that's exactly how it'll turn out." Blew my mind.
| miki123211 wrote:
| It's kinda wild to me that Stross literally wrote about
| cryptocurrency, smart contracts (the legal corporations in
| Accelerando written in Python 3000, AKA what is now called
| Python3) and cryptocurrency thefts (the robbing of a
| decentralized bank due to a bug at the beginning of "halting
| state"). All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention
| Ethereum, which is where most of that smart contract stuff
| started.
| Rhapso wrote:
| He stopped the trilogy after rule34 because it was coming
| true...
|
| He has done a wonderful job of speculative fiction. Exposure to
| his work when i was a teenager definitely set me on my course
| to be who i am now.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| Me too. Especially Accelerando. I didn't think it was
| formative until I read it again as an adult.
| amonon wrote:
| I should read it again in light of that. I did find that
| Stross's early work (Accelerando, Singularity Sky, Iron
| Sunrise, Colder War) heavily influenced my worldview and
| path in life. I haven't touched Accelerando in over a
| decade although I go back to the other novels on occasion.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It may have been the timing of it, but whatever the cause
| I've been trying to find my way into the Free Intellect
| Foundation ever since.
| greesil wrote:
| For me, I've found his series the Laundry Files to be
| formative. And yes I'm worried about the proliferation of
| too many computational devices in the world. Also,
| interdimensional elves.
| throwanem wrote:
| I'm finding this inclines me to class it with _The
| Fountainhead_ in the category of books I 'm glad found me
| at the wrong time.
|
| Nothing against you, the work, or the author -- who, by all
| accounts including my own, deserves to be found in much
| better company than I have just implicitly placed him! Only
| that in both cases I think I would not much like the person
| I might have become for the radical influence of such a
| work.
| ttepasse wrote:
| Stross has a talent for keeping an eye on the weirdos of the
| net without necessary sharing their belief, so I'm rather sure
| he was aware of the Cypherpunks of the 90s where a lot of this
| stuff originated.
| sangnoir wrote:
| He also was a SWE at an online payment processor startup
| during the dotcom boom.
| alecco wrote:
| > All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum
|
| Cypherpunks were working on this since the 90s (or even 80s).
| There was a very active mailing list way back then with
| experiments and a lot of discussions. Bitcoin was revolutionary
| but it was built on top of a lot of existing work.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptocurrency#History
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cypherpunk
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| You can write smart contracts in a Python inspired language
| also https://github.com/vyperlang/vyper
| kragen wrote:
| that smart contract stuff did not start with bitcoin and
| ethereum; i think the term 'smart contract' was coined at
| agorics inc. in the early 90s, and was in common use among
| cypherpunks (the folks that gave you openssl, pgp/gnupg,
| bittorrent, wikileaks, tor, and, as it happens, ecmascript 4)
| throughout the 90s, when 'know your customer' still sounded
| like dystopian future science fiction rather than a widespread
| international treaty obligation
|
| for some of the history, i suggest reading markm's eulogy for
| norm hardy: https://erights.medium.com/norm-hardys-place-in-
| history-cecf... and this other bit of oral history:
| https://community.agoric.com/t/agoric-privacy-aspirations-
| ho.... also, this oral history interview with ann hardy, rip,
| who was the ceo of agorics and wrote the operating system that
| preceded keykos at tymshare:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xIWMvtM02NA (594 views)
|
| the difficulty with smart contracts was figuring out how to
| decentralize them, and in particular how to decentralize
| payment, because an insecure smart contract isn't really a
| contract at all. previous efforts using centralized authorities
| (digicash, e-gold, peppercoin, mojonation, agorics itself,
| arguably tymshare) largely collapsed trying to negotiate the
| regulatory environment, though some failed in more conventional
| ways, like due to the innovator's dilemma. bitcoin found an
| inefficient but practically workable solution to the problem,
| which many of us had speculated was inherently unsolvable.
| satoshi's insight was to find a way to redefine the problem
| into something solvable, something many of us rejected for a
| long time. len sassaman famously rejected it until his death
|
| like stross, i became disenchanted with the libertarian vision
| starting in the 90s, and abstained from bitcoin because i
| theorized that, if it worked, capitalism would destroy
| civilization. since then, my point of view has shifted due in
| part to moving to argentina, where i've been experiencing
| alternatives to capitalism, which make capitalism look pretty
| good by comparison
| abecedarius wrote:
| Oh, thanks for that agoric.com link, new to me.
|
| I think Nick Szabo coined 'smart contract' in his 1996
| Extropy paper. He had worked at Agorics and I don't know how
| much of it is their influence; from my pov the agorics papers
| were extraordinary, while I kind of bounced off that
| particular Szabo paper. Before Agorics, there was Amix which
| MarkM called something like the first smart contract
| platform, retrospectively. (I visited the Amix office during
| an 80s visit to SF, btw, but I didn't know anything about
| them then. Current DeFi people might see it as a stretch to
| apply the same term.)
|
| Speaking of Extropy, Accelerando's universe owes a whole lot
| more to the extropians list.
| kragen wrote:
| oh, thanks! you could totally be right about szabo's paper;
| he was prominent on cypherpunks but i don't trust my
| memories of the language people were using on cypherpunks
| that far back
| GTP wrote:
| I tried reading it some months ago but quit after some chapters.
| At a certain point, it gave me the impression of randomly
| throwing in some technical terms (not related to CS, there's also
| other stuff) just to sound smart. I can have got the wrong
| impression of course, but it didn't meet my taste.
| speed_spread wrote:
| My perception when I tried to read it was that it was just
| getting off it's own word soup, like I caught the author in a
| feverish and very private session with himself. Being somewhat
| traumatized, I haven't tried anything else by Stross since
| then. I like density but at some point, you gotta tell a story.
| It was obviously a secondary objective in that case.
| rkachowski wrote:
| what were the terms and examples that feel like word soup? it
| has been quite a while since i read it, but i remember the
| ideas being quite self consistent (with some serious sci-fi
| conceit of course)
| speed_spread wrote:
| I don't remember a specific word or sentence being
| problematic, just a general torrent-of-consciousness from
| someone else that prevented my own brain from forming
| images and putting things together as I read. I felt the
| author was really trying too hard being edgy while at the
| same time not giving a fuck about the intended reader.
| "Look how many novel concepts per paragraph I can fit!"
| Huh, ok bro. Might as well just write a list...
| throwanem wrote:
| That's a deliberate technique in prose pacing, especially
| common in cyberpunk and allied sf subgenres.
|
| The basic insight is that prose which reads faster with less
| complexity _feels_ faster, as if the events it describes
| occur at like pace. That 's why a skillful writer rarely
| brings an adverb to a gunfight. It's also why clubs don't
| play melody-heavy stuff at 60 BPM, or even the liveliest
| among Mozart's string quartets.
|
| The variation here discussed modifies that approach by
| increasing the pace and _not_ reducing the complexity. The
| intended effect is more or less as you describe: to dislocate
| the reader among ideas and concepts that seem to flow too
| fast to grasp. Given what the text seeks to express in this
| way, the technique fits perfectly. (The novel 's not called
| _Accelerando_ for nothing! If you aren 't familiar with that
| word, now may be an unusually enlightening time to become
| so.)
|
| Granted, it doesn't sit the same with every reader. But it is
| very much the product of deliberate design, not mania, and
| deserves to be understood as such.
|
| (To be clear, I don't _like_ Accelerando; with one exception
| I judge it the weakest of Stross 's work, and it's very
| unreflective of his later work with a more practiced hand.
| But that I don't appreciate the work isn't the same as saying
| no respect is due the skill and artifice that went into its
| making - it's a piece I don't enjoy, but not a piece that's
| _bad._ )
| shadowgovt wrote:
| I can see that. Having read several of Stross's works, this is
| one of the ones that's less "gelled." I'd call it,
| structurally, an outlier relative to his other stuff; it's
| going a lot of places _very_ fast and not leaving much time for
| the reader to get on the same page as the author.
|
| Very compelling for the concepts it raises and plays with, but
| his other works do a better job of telling a story.
| shagie wrote:
| It isn't gelled as much because it wasn't really meant to be.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando#Plot_summary_and_b.
| ..
|
| The publication dates of the short stories spans a bit over
| three years.
|
| https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?91976 and
| https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?99386 and so on...
| each published separately. Consistent characters (possibly
| with some editing when brought into a single collection) but
| they appear to be written as short stories that are slices of
| the life of clan Macx and Aineko. As short stories, there's
| less opportunity for lasting character development.
| Hortinstein wrote:
| I remember this being an incredible book when I read it back on
| my moto droid phone in 2009ish on Kindle app...time to listen to
| it on audible. The biggest thing I remember is it invoked some
| deep thoughts from me on what is conscious and whether
| transferring consciousness to another medium would still the same
| person. Seemed (and still seems) to me that continuity would be
| broken...but isn't that true when we go to sleep and wake up? I
| loved this book because it provoked a lot of questions like this.
| Been meaning to revisit it for years.
| Filligree wrote:
| A lot has been said about uploading.
|
| A whole lot.
|
| Multiple libraries worth.
|
| I'm not going to replicate all that in this comment box.
| However, as far as sleep is concerned: No, your brain doesn't
| shut off during sleep. Everything keeps running except for some
| interconnects, mostly it's a mode switch.
|
| The same isn't true for concussions, and concussions usually
| come with short term memory loss. One might imagine that's
| because you lose information that only exists as ongoing
| electrical patterns.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >One might imagine that's because you lose information that
| only exists as ongoing electrical patterns.
|
| Or you know, the literal physical damage to your brain cells
| from impacting the inside of your skull.
| Filligree wrote:
| There's some of that, no doubt, but other events that cause
| electrical shutdown and reset--even without the trauma--
| still cause amnesia.
| flir wrote:
| Also worth considering anaesthetics in this context, because
| nobody's totally sure what's going on there.
|
| > One might imagine that's because you lose information that
| only exists as ongoing electrical patterns.
|
| Cue _Exhalation_
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Yes, this. It's hard to express how disconcerting this is to
| someone who hasn't experienced a concussion or neurological
| fainting spell.
|
| I passed out one night alone after an undiagnosed
| neurological condition resulted in what was, as best we can
| tell, a seizure. Hit the floor and stayed there for an
| unknown length of time, because I didn't have a clock handy.
| The experience of, for want of a better term, "recohering" to
| find oneself awake and covered in one's own cold urine is
| _very_ different from the experience of waking up. There 's a
| distinct discontinuity of self that you don't get from waking
| from a dream.
|
| I still have the distinct sensation that for some
| undetermined length of time, _I_ simply wasn 't there. It was
| a spiritually and epistemologically haunting experience.
| Vecr wrote:
| Did the author ever admit he was confused about Russian cosmism
| or is he still going on about that?
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| Read this book for the first time recently, a huge amount of
| prescient ideas in there.
|
| I wrote a blog post exploring how far away glasses like Manfreds
| are: https://fleetwood.dev/posts/a-first-principles-analysis-
| of-c...
| ubermonkey wrote:
| This novel and the two unrelated Eschaton books are in the very
| short list of books I reread periodically. I feel like they're
| something special.
| shagie wrote:
| Accelerando and Glasshouse fall in a "the ideas of one feed into
| the next" sequence that I find interesting to read in sequence...
| the first four of which are available on the web.
|
| COMP.BASILISK FAQ https://www.nature.com/articles/44964
|
| BLIT https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/blit.htm
|
| Different Kinds of Darkness
| https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/different-kinds-o...
|
| Accelerando https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-
| static/fiction/acceler...
|
| ("Luckily, infowar turns out to be more survivable than nuclear
| war - especially once it is discovered that a simple anti-
| aliasing filter stops nine out of ten neural-wetware-crashing
| Langford fractals from causing anything worse than a mild
| headache.")
|
| Glasshouse by Charles Stross
|
| (side trip to The Peace War and Marooned in Realtime by Vernor
| Vinge as additional material for an alternative singularity)
|
| Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams (mentions averting a
| Vingeian singularity, though I see it more of a Strossian
| singularity that's at risk - and you've got suggestions of plot
| lines and backstory in Glasshouse that are not suggestions but
| rather main plot elements in Implied Spaces)
| Pamar wrote:
| Personally I liked Implied Space more than anything by Stross.
|
| I.e.: for me Williams > Stross as an author in general.
| mietek wrote:
| Many thanks for linking to these excellent stories by David
| Langford.
|
| I would like to recommend pretty much every single SF story and
| novel by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Czajkowski).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adrian_Tchaikovsky#Bibliograph...
|
| Additional recommendations:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39316191
| shagie wrote:
| The COMP.BASILISK FAQ is in the 'futures' section of Nature
| ... which has a number of other good short stories.
| https://www.nature.com/nature/articles?type=futures
|
| ---
|
| For Adrian Tchaikovsky, I really liked the Children of Time
| series and the exploration of believable non-human minds. The
| last one got a bit weirder, but still very good.
|
| The Final Architecture is on my to read list (currently going
| through all of Coyote series by Allen Steele).
| mapt wrote:
| You'd think of all the ideas introduced, the money-making ones
| would be the first.
|
| Why haven't algorithmically-maintained corporate swarms destroyed
| liability law yet?
|
| Did it happen and I didn't notice, or was it simply judged
| unnecessary since we extended the concept of limited liability so
| far with corporate actors?
|
| If you haven't delved, this author's entire bibliography is
| fantastic.
| tivert wrote:
| > Why haven't algorithmically-maintained corporate swarms
| destroyed liability law yet?
|
| I haven't read the book, so what exactly are you talking about?
| Is it swarms of shell companies?
|
| I think software engineers often confuse the legal system for a
| computer program, and become enamored with "clever hacks" to
| defeat it, but forget that programs (and the legal system) can
| be patched.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Precisely. And they have the shortcut of violence; while in
| theory someone _could_ do something like "create shell
| companies faster than the legal process can crack them open,
| thereby hiding one's activities behind an infinite regression
| of spheres," in practice that's fraud and if the authorities
| glom that your _meta-_ project is that, they can throw you in
| jail (or your proxies in jail) until you're willing to
| divulge what's actually going on.
|
| A truncheon and jail cell are the ultimate debugger.
| tivert wrote:
| > while in theory someone could do something like "create
| shell companies faster than the legal process can crack
| them open
|
| I don't think that even works in theory. It's not like a
| shell company is a computer process that totally ceases to
| exist after it terminates and can longer be investigated:
| there's all kinds of logging and record keeping for a real
| life company. The authorities can start investigating a
| _defunct_ shell company and trace it back to its origin
| (which then will reveal the whole "infinite regression of
| spheres").
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