As much as I enjoy Charlie Stross’ books (and I both enjoy reading them immensely, and reading them early immensely), I keep stubbing my toes on all of the little nuggets of wrongness strewn throughout them. The earlier parts of his new Accelerando feature a number of different remarks about politics and economics that makes me wonder whether his older-than-the-state-of-Texas apartment suffers from older-than-the-state-of-Texas hallucingenic mold. The little details get less irritating the further in spacetime the story gets away from today’s reality, but then, hundreds of years in the future, lightyears away, we learn via a what TJIC calls “a little writer fart in the storyline”, that the Singluarity was made possible by a very specific Islamofascist urban renewal project:
Manni’s primary adult ghost lives in some of New Japan’s virtual mindspaces (which are a few billion times more extensive than the physical spaces available to stubborn biologicals, for the computational density of human habitats have long since ceased to make much sense when measured in MIPS per kilogram). They’re modeled on presingularity Earth. Time is forever frozen on the eve of the real twenty-first century, zero eight-forty-six hours on September 11: An onrushing wide-body airliner hangs motionless in the air forty meters below the picture window of Manni’s penthouse apartment on the one hundred and eighth floor of the North Tower. In historical reality, the one hundred and eighth floor was occupied by corporate offices; but the mindspace is a consensual fiction, and it is Manni’s conceit to live at this pivotal point. (Not that it means much to him – he was born well over a century after the War on Terror – but it’s part of his childhood folklore, the fall of the Two Towers that shattered the myth of Western exceptionalism and paved the way for the world he was born into.)
C’mon, Charlie! Are your post-singluarity superbeings running on processors made from silicon, or from felafel?
Repent, Westerners! You’re in the way of the mankind’s great future!
UPDATE: overall a good book (unless you care about plot and characters - it’s just a platform for Charlie’s ideas), though. Pretty much goes without saying. Which is why every time I stub my toe on these bits of WTF, I think “WTF???”