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  • Racing the future
  • Taylor Evans (bio)
Joshua Raulerson, Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013. x + 254pp. £70 (hbk).

The story of the Singularity goes something like this: every 18 months or so, the number of transistors that can be fitted onto an integrated circuit of a particular size for a particular cost doubles, as it has done more or less regularly since 1965 when Gordon Moore first ‘blindly extrapolated’ the future of integrated circuits. Fifty years later and Moore’s Law has not only held exceptionally well, but has been generalised to become the governing concept for all Western technological development. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is perhaps the most prominent booster of this Exponentialist paradigm, but the sense of infinite, accelerating progress is everywhere, arguably taking hold in the very core of capitalist ideology itself. What happens when progress progresses so quickly it exceeds our ability to adapt? Technological speculation, like gravity, seems to have a maximum density beyond which information can no longer escape, and when such a point is reached we are faced with a singularity. ‘Only now … is awareness of history’s quickening pace beginning to dawn, because we are at long last approaching what Kurzweil calls the “knee of the curve”: the point at which the long-dormant exponential function will “explode with unrelenting fury”, making things very strange indeed, very quickly indeed’ (Raulerson 7). With Singularities, Joshua Raulerson confronts this impending estrangement by looking from within the Singularity discourse for those texts that sketch out a vision of life beyond the event horizon.

Singularities is a tough book to review. On the one hand, it received an honourable mention in the 2014 Science Fiction and Technoculture Studies Book Prize, and it is not hard to see why. Written with clarity uncommon in academic prose, Raulerson has produced a book that at its best offers novel and important interventions in the discourses of political economy and contemporary sf. Even at its relatively weaker points, Raulerson’s study delivers compelling interpretations for a variety of contemporary sf and technoculture theory, contributing to a project that effectively captures a [End Page 387] comprehensive portrait of the way the technological Singularity sees itself. It is, in short, an excellent academic monograph, so far as it goes. This is where the other hand comes in, because the study stops short in some key aspects of its analysis. As effectively as Raulerson captures the Singularity gestalt, he never breaks out of the narrow technoutopian framework that is the native habitat for most Singularity discourse. There is very little attention paid to the broader context out of which the Singularity thesis emerges, either in its material, pop-cultural or science-fictional manifestations. That the proponents, audiences and authors Raulerson considers most central to the Singularity discourse are uniformly white and overwhelmingly male occasions little comment and no analysis.

Raulerson’s study focuses on ‘postcyberpunk’ sf, a somewhat ad hoc subgenre ‘first proposed by the sf writer and editor Lawrence Person’ that Raulerson favours ‘not just because it maintains the generic sovereignty of sf as a distinct literary enterprise, but for its suggestiveness of influence and continuity within that tradition’ (20). His basic method runs as follows: we can see inside and beyond the technological Singularity by using works that engage with the novum in a generically sophisticated way: ‘In some sense, then, postcyberpunk sf responds to [Vernor] Vinge’s contention that to understand the Singularity “you have to be there” by simply assuming that, to all intents and purposes, we already are’ (21). These postcyberpunk fictions ‘on the whole offer a profoundly egalitarian, pluralistic, gender-conscious and fiercely embodied response to the Singularity thesis’ (22), one which Raulerson explicates and expands across an introduction and three tightly argued sections.

The sections may, however, be a bit too tightly argued to fully validate Raulerson’s claim, for however ‘egalitarian, pluralistic, and gender-conscious’ this postcyberpunk sf is, it is the product of a strikingly homogenous collection of authors; Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, Greg Egan, Rudy Rucker, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Charles Stross and Vernor Vinge collectively define the boundary of ‘postcyberpunk sf’ for the purposes...

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