A Brief Review of Charles Stross's Accelerando

I should preface this little review by saying Accelerando by Charles Stross is one of my favorite novels. Easily the most interesting thing I've read in years. And a book I can hardly wade through long enough to get to the ending.

Simply put, as a writer Mr. Stross is a great Computer Scientist (Which is one of the degrees he holds, by the way.) but not much of a craftsman. Like another favorite author of mine, Neal Stephenson to read a work of Mr. Stross's is to be assaulted by one idea after another. Most come from the bleeding edge of information technology, of course, but they're packaged for easy consumption. Encoded, if you will, into the very fabric of the story and woven throughout – explained and explored in any number of ways. It's, you know, good science fiction stuff. Really gets the first part of the genre. The fiction part, on the other hand, Mr. Stross is less impressive with so unlike Mr. Stephenson his ideas float on a story that's structurally unsound. Which is not to say Mr. Stross is a bad writer, mind, I mean - here just look at how the novel opens:

Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.

It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it's going to be.

That, in my admittedly amateur opinion, is damn fine writing. It spells out what the character of Manfred Macx – one of the novel's main protagonists and the patriarch of the family tree that the novel follows through the generations and centuries – is all about. It hints at what the book is all about. The themes the book's going to explore (at least for that chapter) are all hidden there right in plain sight. It's loaded with sensory details and the casual ease of well-crafted wordsmithing. And I don't know about you but it sure makes me want to read the rest of the book.

Let me save you the bother, though, because it can be a bit impenetrable. Because while Mr. Stross clearly knows how to write my problem with him is that the quality of his writing just isn't quite up to the quality of the ideas he's writing about. Those concepts that he throws out in rapid-fire fashion just burn through the pages and leave the actual plot and characters a little gray and colorless. Which they really aren't – Manfred is the ultimate philanthropist, a venture altruist who's moved beyond money and creates idea after brilliant idea solely for the betterment of others. He's the ur-geek, the very Platonic idea of someone so smart that they're walking fifteen minutes into the future and bringing things back for the rest of us. For example, one of his ideas is to create a program that will run through all the possible iterations of an idea and then make patent applications for them, then Manfred sends them to a place called the Free Intellect Foundation (Something like Creative Commons) - all so that they can't be monopolized by any one individual or company. And that's just where he starts the book off. I'm not going to ruin his journey for anyone not interested in the book but suffice to say it spans vast distances of time and space as the future catches up with him It's there that the book loses me, by the way, because by its end it's become not about the ideas I find so fascinating but some of their logical outcomes. The book takes us through the Singularity and out the other side as technological changes accelerate in ever greater cresting waves – hence, I'd imagine, the title. It all gets a little too incestuous and what I affectionately call “clanky” after the cold, robotic denizens of the worst sorts of sci-fi. The first few chapters – where the story focuses on recognizably human characters not too distant from the modern day – are a much better read.

Fortunately, the book is written as a set of interlocking novellas so although there's a definite overarching plot each piece can be read in isolation. It's like reading an anthology of short stories all by the same author on the same topic (Which is another reason I like the book so much, of course. It's all very modular). But, well, you don't have to take my word for it. Mr. Stross and his publishers have been kind enough to provide the entire text of the book for download under a Creative Commons license – making it, essentially, free to read. That's, after all, where I first ran into the book. Not the whole thing but one of its constituent parts – the novella Lobsters which makes up the first chapter of the book. That was more than enough to convince me to get a paper version of the story as my dog-eared and well-worn copy will attest. It's the one I hand out to anyone looking for a good book because, well, I've got more than enough to spare. That hardcover, though, was itself a gift so I still haven't put any money from my pocket into Mr. Stross's. Not for that book, mind, although you can rest assured I have a few others. Still, I don't think Mr. Stross stays up nights thinking about it – he's one of those rare authors who realizes there's other reasons for publishing something than lining his pockets, I think. So, if you feel like supporting a writer who doesn't want your money then check out Accelerando. Really, what do you have to lose? It's never cost me a dime and it's set off more than a few fireworks inside my mind so, of course, I'm just trying to repay the debt.