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Trying to See Past “The Singularity”: Accelerando and Glasshouse
10/26/2006
By Terry Calhoun
“How do you cope with a universe in which human scale thoughts are about as significant to the real course of events as the barking of dogs is to air traffic control?”
As I write this, I am putting down the book I just finished at the downtown Washington, DC, airport: Glasshouse by Charles Stross. I recommend it, as well as a previous book by Strosser, Accelerando. I finished the last 100 pages or so of Glasshouse while sitting up against the glass in the terminal on a very gray day, hogging the single working electrical outlet on a two-outlet panel, listening to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (with headphones).
“It’s hard to say who you are these days, but you ride on anyways . . . don’t you, baby?” was an appropriate phrase to hear as I finished this book, and the uncertainty created by human-designed modifications to bodies, brains, memories, and personalities certainly makes it hard for the characters to know who each other is. Here are some comments by Strosser regarding the singularity an Accelerando:
The singularity isn't my brain child (that honour g'es to Vernor Vinge) but since Vernor introduced it to general circulation in the hard SF field, people have been scared of exploring it. It was one of those immensely powerful structural magic wands that destroy traditional fictional plots. How do you cope with a universe in which human scale thoughts are about as significant to the real course of events as the barking of dogs is to air traffic control? I decided that I was going to go and do a head-first exploration of the issue, by writing a generational saga following three generations of posthumans right through a hard take-off singularity in the mid-twenty first century. (Comments in their entirety can be found here.)”
I didn’t expect to race through this book, but it was a surprisingly good read. Something interesting on every page, and the characters resonated with where I’d like to see our culture headed. Not specifically the technology at work, but the attitude. The design of the technological substrate for the culture hints at a world where humans can honestly say that they do in fact live in a world created by intelligent design: Our own.
You know already, of course, that we’ve gotten to the point where humanity continues to live inside the biosphere but has now gained the power to inevitable modify the biosphere, whether we want to or not, which is the basis for concerns about climate change. Only time – the next couple of decades – will tell whether we get past this point in our species’ evolution. If we do, then The Singularity becomes a likely possibility.
Many people see a
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