Customer Reviews

The Accord

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In Keith Brooke's novel, earth is going to hell in a handcart under the burdens of overpopulation and climate change. Noah Barakh is the architect of the the Accord, the virtual reality to which people can be uploaded after their death on this earth, a kind of secular heaven. Straining available computing resources, the Accord soon migrates to some kind of superpositional quantum state (physics a bit dubious here) where it turns out that there will be many Accords, a kind of 'many virtual worlds' interpretation of QM then.

The Accord is actually a love story: brain and brawn competing for the feisty Priscilla. The brawn is elector Jack Burnham, a 'big man' who is used to getting what he wants and utterly ruthless in his methods. What he mostly wants is to possess his wife Priscilla and kill the man she has become attracted to, Professor Noah Barakh. This vendetta moves from real space-time to the Accord virtuality and then through many alternative virtual worlds.

Initially I thought the writing was a bit self-consciously clunky, but the pace soon gets up and the novel becomes a bit of a page turner. Brooke's characters are never less than real and what a scary bunch they are. He has a real feel for the dangerousness of powerful, implacable men. And this is a well-imagined description of what virtuality could really be like. With complex heros and antiheros, sex and violence, high-concept tech-extrapolation and a racy and intricate plot, what's not to like?

This book is a must for all of those who appreciate deeper level fiction. The book's concept is fairly simple, but it wreaks havoc in the lives of the characters involved.

Basically, mix a science fiction story of virtual reality, with the social and religious issues of "heaven," throw in a chunk of love triangle, and this story is the resulting love-child.

A man builds a virtual reality, into which people's minds are uploaded in the form of AI data. When these people die, they are "loaded" into the VR, and live on as if they were still alive, waiting for their fellow humans to "hurry up and die." As stories flood out from the "Accord," the name given to this virtual heaven, the old world starts to collapse as people commit suicide, among other catastrophic events. We see Malthus climb aboard as the new world starts to fill up, and expand beyond its capacity. On the smaller scale, the creator of the Accord falls in love with the wife of a political official that is responsible for funding the project. A very strange and chaotic love triangle ensues when the politician murders his wife for "virtually cheating," and she finds herself in her lover's heaven.

One strange situation in this book is a "mixing" of characters into one person. The author pulls it off very well, and we can see the development of a new character, derived from the old ones. We also see the linear development of singular characters, and again, the author does a good job in this area as well.

Again, I strongly recommend this book to those that are interested by issues of technology, love, and intense character development.

I have just finished reading this book for the second time, and I find that this story makes better sense than Greg Egan's Diaspora.Unlike Egan's novel of post-human virtual realities,the Accord has smoother transitions between our world and the virtual world. Also, it is easier to sympathize with the various characters, even the bad guy! And there is just enough technical detail to make the worlds interesting, rather than incomprehensable.And finally, the transition from a recognizable present to an alien and exotic future in the Accord is handled alot better than the choppy transition in Egan's Diaspora.In conclusion, although these two novels both deal with the same theme of evolution in a post-human virtual reality, Brooke handles the subject matter with alot better skill than Egan.

Imaginative and far-flung, the third quarter is the weakest, but overall very good. Somewhat similar in theme to "The Days of Solomon Gursky" by Ian McDonald, which I'd also highly recommend.

A deeply fractured science fiction story. Prominently features a story of transhumanism, uploading consciousness into a virtual environment. This process plays out against a backdrop of environmental trauma, anti-immigration xenophobia and cut-throat political intrigue, leading through the narrative to the end of conventional history and the transformation of society into a much wider environment where the whole basis of reality is different. Unfortunately that's not what this novel is about, all of the above exist merely as elements in a melodramatic love triangle. This juxtaposition makes for a dull layout on its own terms and renders the under-development of the main SF premise palpable, what's more it becomes progressively more frustrating as a genre reader to see the wild transformation not actually interfering with the course of adultery and homicidal marital jealousy all that much. It's a reinscribing of the banal, the conventional, the relationships linked to life as we know it now which undermines the science fiction future of the book.

There is a lot of fantastic potential in book, and some of it finds its way through: an intriguing bit of background detail, a strong confrontation between rival personalities, points when the politics shine through with a stronger than expected dilemma. On the whole, though, this book is fatally undermined by weakly defined characters that I didn't care about, and Brooke's sacrificing of the setting to his characters makes for a weak novel.

Similar to and better than: End of Days by Dennis Danvers

...yet worse than a book it's similar to which is: Disapora by Greg Egan