This past September I worked with Isaac Bergman on a book review of Accelerando.
If you recall, I posted some choice quotes from the book that I thought were highly creative and very original.
And despite my qualms with how it handles human action, I still think the book presented some very innovative, cutting-edge thinking.
The book review was published this past Friday over at Mises.org and we have received a number of responses, including one indirectly from Charles Stross, author of the book.
From the Extropy.org mailing list, Stross states:
I couldn’t care less. Being denounced as a “second-hander intellectual mountebank” makes it fairly clear where the author of the hatchet job is coming from.
Why should I waste my time on him?
This reminded me of a couple quotes. The first is the D&D playing comic book store owner from The Simpsons, whose sarcastic rebuttals followed the philosophically deep form: “Worst. Review. Ever.”
It also reminded me of a pompous Ayn Rand, who pretty much took the cake in her undiplomatic handling of critics, likening them to lice, vermin, and cockroaches.
Defending the undefendable
Now, why did we even write the article?
Simply put, for the same reasons why economists Peter Klein and Robert Hanson have problems with how economics is treated by science fiction authors.
Because in many cases they are treated as an afterthought.
In some ways, it is the same problem that plagues artificial economies in games such as World of Warcraft and Everquest.
These developers - for whatever reason - did not take inflation (e.g. Mudflation) into account when pumping the marketplace full of fat loot… and then complain when enterprising individuals build a lucrative aftermarket that rationally calculates the value of both the widget and fiat currency (it is also the same issue that entertainment firms deal with on a daily basis in terms of scalpers and even “legal” aftermarkets such as Ticketmaster. See “Diary of a Scalper” from the latest edition of Wired as well as variable pricing in general).
The “second-hander” comment simply means that in terms of economics, the author is intellectually dependent on someone else. While this may have been harsh, I think this is fairly clear throughout the book that Stross did not have these portions of the book peer-reviewed by independent parties.
In fact, on nearly every page he shows his own mastering of a plethora of technological concepts, however I believe it would behoove him to have consulted an economist of some kind before publishing it. After all, he accepted typo corrections via a web forum and he could have used the same method for economics saliency.
As far as a hatchet job, I think that Isaac and I were not only professional, but also thorough. Besides, when is something a hatchet job? Only when it criticizes the book?
We tried to cite cogent references that illustrate our qualms (for the record, our original review was 50% longer and truth be told, we had 4-5x as many quotes we wanted to dissect than our editor cut) — and comparatively speaking, I doubt he would have received the same courtesy from The New York Times review editor or even Salon.
So in summation: cool science and technology but a little rough around the edges in terms of realistic social interaction. And in the future, I hope that authors continue to add this kind of cultural complexity to the mix.