Now, I don’t necessarily believe the Singularity will happen (and I think that is rather beside the point), nor do I particularly agree with the concept that the Singularity is a boring or unrealistically utopian vision of the future. Then there’s the other side of the posthuman coin: the Singularity. How do you threaten your protagonist when the answer to everything is, "Nanotechnology!"? This makes you very powerful, and thus from a story perspective, somewhat uninteresting. (This is particularly evident in episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation.) Once you have the ability to manipulate matter at the subatomic and quantum levels, you are essentially a wizard. It’s perhaps a corollary to that adage: sufficiently advanced technology can let you escape any plot hole. He remarks that, after a certain point, nanotechnology essentially becomes magic in a Clarkian, sufficiently-advanced kind of way. Stross addresses this problem in an essay that, I believe, made it into the afterword of my edition of Scratch Monkey (I don’t have my copy at the moment, so I can’t double-check, and I don’t know if it’s available online somewhere). As I read more widely, I began to understand the conundrum that many science-fiction writers face. I had been lucky, in that I had read several great posthuman stories and very few poor ones. But I was too enchanted by the siren song of nanotechnology, mind uploads, and strong AI. Others wiser than me in the ways of posthumanism have written about it before, and I should have listened. I had an epiphany that I swore, in my hubris, I would never experience. Postsingular just left me feeling quite cynical about the potential for such stories. I’ve felt rather burnt out when it comes to posthuman SF ever since my last foray into the subgenre.
Many of them are still possible within our lifetime, though, which is interesting. Few of the changes Charles Stross lays out in this book have come to pass, which isn’t surprising. We’ve just entered the tail end of 2013, fast approaching the middle of decade the second of the twenty-first century.
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