Accelerando is the title of a science fiction book by Charles Stross that follows an extended family as they live through the extraordinary event known as the Singularity. For those who don’t know, the Singularity is the apocalypse for the evangelistic digerati: rapturous translation to glory and everlasting life for those who embrace it, and banishment to irrelevance, disconnection, and death for those who refuse to accept.

Vernor Vinge first introduced the idea of the Singularity in 1993 at a symposium sponsored by NASA, saying that if it can happen, it will happen, probably within 30 years (which as of today leaves us a little more than 15 years). The Singularity is the creation of a superhuman intelligence; such an intelligence, Vinge says, would immediately begin to set its own agenda and would no more continue to be a tool of humanity “any more than humans are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.”

Vinge himself points out that this prediction is not his alone, which is true; there have been a lot of stories and essays written about and around it. This probably sounds like an old idea to you, but it’s much more than Terminator or The Matrix. Both of those are about machines getting incrementally smarter or stronger than us, and so the resulting conflicts come across as almost more racial or national.

What makes the Singularity interesting as a story is that it posits a qualitative change in intelligence—afterward, history is not about humans or even interpretable by humans anymore. It’s this last part that makes it hard to write about—by its own definition, it’s the moment after which all existing predictions must fail. I do think that Arthur C. Clarke’s book Childhood’s End makes a decent attempt at communicating the feeling, although the event is not framed as a conscious technological breakthrough.

Accelerando illustrates this sort of qualitative change repeatedly, each of its nine chapters resuming history at a point barely imaginable at the end of the previous chapter. Stross solves the problem of trying to describe the goals of the posthumans by increasing the intelligence gap: the posthuman civilization gives rise to a post-posthuman superorganism no more capable of having a dialogue with human beings than we do of having a dialogue with tapeworms or amoebas, and so his viewpoint remains (of necessity) with human beings who have been elevated and transformed but not absorbed.

In his discussion of the Singularity, Vinge stated that if the Singularity is, for some reason, impossible, then the alternative is that technological progress will taper off, saying, “It would likely be seen as a golden age…and it would also be an end of progress.” Stross manages to have his cake and eat it too, as the unabsorbed humans in his story do enter such a golden age, but are obliged to “live furtively in the darkness between these islands of brilliance. There are, it would seem, advantages to not being too intelligent.”

Stross’ prose is lyrical, and the book is as fun to reread as it is to read. It reminds me of Psychoshop, by Bester and Zelazny, managing to maintain a coherent narrative while the characters involved change dramatically. Minds, bodies, and personalities are shuffled, transmuted, and shared, and yet are somehow still recognizable. A colleague to whom I loaned Accelerando said that he found it disturbing because it kept asking what it meant to be human without answering the question. Concisely put.

It’s also an outrageous story that doesn’t take itself entirely seriously, and it’s this quality that causes me to regard it with more gravity than other, more earnest, stories. Both a good joke and a good piece of speculative fiction start with an odd premise and then obey the logic of whatever unfolds to its destination. I’m reminded of the short story “A Logic Named Joe” by Murray Leinster, which, written in 1946 and predating the word “computer” (that’s what Joe is), manages to make an astonishing number of correct predictions about the PC and Internet revolutions that would happen 50 years later, despite, or because of, its light approach.

Although I find Stross’ forecast compelling, I imagine that the Singularity is probably the moon base of this generation’s nerds, the seemingly inevitable future which somehow never arrives even though apparently everyone in the know is already packing their bags. But don’t let that keep you from reading Accelerando anyway. Besides being entertained, you’ll also be able understand what I mean when I say “Matrioshka brain,” “canned primates,” and “the Wunch.” Yes, I’m afraid I am going to say them! You may as well be prepared.