Best of H+: The Reluctant Transhumanist – H+ Magazine

By: RU Sirius & Paul McEnery

Singularity, 2012: God springs out of a computer to rapture the human race. An enchanted locket transforms a struggling business journalist into a medieval princess. The math-magicians of British Intelligence calculate demons back into the dark. And solar-scale computation just uploads us all into the happy ever after.

Stripped to the high concept, these visions from Charlie Stross are prime geek comfort food. But dont be fooled. Stross stories turn on you, changing up into a vicious scrutiny of raw power and the information economy.

The God of Singularity Sky is really just an Artificial Intelligence, manipulating us all merely to beat the alien competition. The Merchant Princes (from a series of novels by Stross) are just as rapacious as anything on Wall Street, and a downstream parallel universe is just another market to exploit. The Atrocity Archives gives us a gutpunch full of paranoia on the far side of hacking and counterhacking lurks an unspeakable chaos. And for all our engineering genius, Accelerandos paradise is won at the cost of planetary destruction, with humanity cul-de-sacd as our future heads off into the stars without us.

For his latest novel, Halting State (released in June 2008), Stross savages the fantasy worlds we escape into for fun and profit and invites us to peek underneath the surfaces as our chattering gadgets dress up reality with virtual sword-and-sorcery games, all underwritten by oh-so-creative financial instruments.

All of Strosss highly connective pipe-dream superstructures are wide open to the one geopolitical prick that will pop them all like the balloon animals they are. Be warned. Take care of the bottom line, or your second life will cost you the life that counts.

Its no surprise that Stross is a highly controversial figure within Transhumanist circles loved by some for his dense-with-high-concepts takes on themes dear to the movement, loathed by others for what they see as a facile treatment of both ideas and characters. But one thing is certain - Mr. Stross is one SF writer who pays close attention to the entire plethora of post-humanizing changes that are coming on fast. As a satirist, he might be characterized as our Vonnegut, lampooning memetic subcultures that most people dont even know exist.

H+: With biotech, infotech, cognitive science, AI, and so many other sciences and technologies impacting the human situation, it seems that most social and political discourse remains back in the 20th century at best. You talk sometimes about being a post-cyberpunk person. How do you deal with the continued presence of so many pre-cyberpunk people?

CHARLIE STROSS: As William Gibson noted, the future is already here: its just unevenly distributed. Most people run on the normative assumption that life tomorrow will be similar to life today, and dont think about the future much. And Im not going to criticize them for doing so; for 99.9% of the life of our species this has been the case, barring disasters such as plague, war, and famine. Its a good strategy, and periods when it is ignored (such as the millennial ferment that swept Europe around 990 A.D. and didnt die down until 1020 A.D.) tend to be bad times to live.

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Best of H+: The Reluctant Transhumanist - H+ Magazine