u/bascule

I recently re-read Charles Stross's Accelerando, which is a collection of interconnected short stories (i.e. a book). I'd read it over a decade ago but forgot a bunch of it and this is the first time since watching Pantheon.

While Accelerando and Pantheon deal with many similar themes, including post-singularity takes on consciousness and the various directions it can go in a world of consciousness-as-software, mild spoilers but I guess I didn't fully remember the ending which I now realize has a number of things in common with Pantheon.

I won't go much deeper than that because it's easy to get into spoiler territory, but (re)read it and I think the parallels are incredibly clear.

One thing Accelerando gets deeply into which I wish Pantheon delved into a little more is forking: in Pantheon we sometimes see characters like MIST split into copies of themselves to execute some task or so forth, but then they come back together into a single person when they're done, whereas Accelerando deals with forks who effectively become completely different characters after they fork.

Spoilers: >!Pantheon never gets into whether there are other Maddies out there with their own entire-star-systems-as-supercomputers, but Accelerando hints at the universe being full of them!<

I'll leave you with this character chart for Accelerando and how they map onto Pantheon characters:

• Manfred Macx: David Kim
• Amber Macx: Maddie Kim
• Aineko: MIST / >!SafeSurf!<