Accelerando (Singularity)

Having read some of the author's short stories and loved them, and being a fan of all forms of science-fiction, I snatched up "Accelerando" when I saw it in a store. I took it on holiday with me, where in two weeks I read seven books. At the start of the holiday, I read the first 100 pages of "Accelerando". On the plane trip home, with nothing to read, but I left the book unfinished.

Despite the enthusiasm with which the author writes, and the great dialogue and narrative, the story just doesn't go anywhere. For two hundred pages the main character spoke to other characters and had his external memory stolen, leaving him semi-amnesiac. But that was all. He found his memory, which was stored in his intelligent glasses. I didn't find any motivation to read on.

The book's full of awesome ideas. There are a lot of ideas for tech, for how the world might be, how it might look, what its people will be like - there are philosophical questions, emotional tangles, relationship difficulties. But there are so many of these that the story goes nowhere. It's interesting to read, but there's no drive to continue the story, because the first half of the book has little story indeed. In fact it seems to be structured in smallers stories lumped together to form a disjointed novel, with gaps of years in places and few stories threads picked up from the last chunk. Really, it's too much of a good thing - far too much. Why the author didn't incorporate these ideas into a focused series of short stories, for example, and take advantage of them, I have no idea. He instead wastes them in a novel that passes them by immediately, while at the same time managing to slow the actual story to a crawl.

It's a shame I never finished this book. I tried. I've only ever failed to finish one other book in all my life, and I'd hoped it would be the only one. I'd only recommend "Accelerando" if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience. The ideas are truly wonderful, as is the snappy style. It's just a shame it gets in the way of the actual plot.

Charles Stross is full of mindbending ideas, bur in this book they don't translate into a fully rewarding story. In my edition of the book, the publisher didn't bother to say that this is a collection of interconnected short stories - a factoid that I had to learn elsewhere. Furthermore, interconnected short stories (presented as nine chapters here) are fine in themselves, except in this case they are not fully self-contained because Stross has attempted an overall thematic structure for the whole collection. But the whole collection doesn't come together either, because of the imperfect connections between the chapters. This makes the book rather disappointing and exasperating for the reader, because Stross's great ideas zoom by in snippets making up a fractured overall storyline that becomes increasingly incomprehensible as the book chugs along. I had to read the book jacket blurb several times to remind myself of what this book was really about, eventually resorting to outside sources, because the storyline becomes lost under a parade of futurist ideas, bizarre characters, and strange cyberspace settings that zoom by with hard-to-decipher connections to the main point..

With those complaints being made, the forward-thinking reader will surely discover in Stross a huge imagination and intellect, with cosmology-sized ideas. In this collection of stories Stross reconstructs the universe as made up of infinite quantities of data processors that operate as a cosmos-wide network, with species intelligence as the lynchpin for awakening the artificial intelligence of supposedly inert matter. Stross also has a collection of intriguing tech-savvy protagonists, especially the heavily wired venture altruist Manfred Macx. With all the great ideas on display here, Stross could have expanded these nine interconnected stories into nine self-contained powerhouse novels, That's probably what he should have done. [~doomsdayer520~]

Having read Stross' Halting State already this year, I kind of knew what to expect- high lingo density with tenacity for accurate futurology. Accelerando starts (Part 1, Scenes 1-3) in a future much like Halting State, actually- rich in tech, internet connectivity and hardware interface. A few years down the line (Part 2, scenes 4-6 ) and we experience the plot around Jupiter and a little bit beyond with a wave of socioeconomic change, the approach of the `singularity,' and an unyielding torrent of new technologies. For the finale (Part 3, scenes 7-9) we're confronting a reality which makes little sense to us upright monkeys: seemingly magical wonders, bizarre family reunions and galactic neighborhoods. All in all, it's quite the trip!

Part 1: Slow Take-off - 3/5 - Slow indeed.
Scene 1: Lobsters - 4/5 - Uploaded lobsters demand freedom!
Scene 2: Troubbour - 3/5 - Marriage on the rocks.
Scene 3: Tourist - 2/5 - Specs swiped! Sweat it out.

Part 2: Point of Inflection - 5/5 - The jovial Jovian gang.
Scene 1: Halo - 5/5 - Maintaining a Jovial kingdom is tough work.
Scene 2: Router - 5/5 - Jovian & Extra-solar parallel stories.
Scene 3: Nightfall - 4/5 - Oh, now what do we do?

Part 3: Singularity - 4/5 - Post-singularity? Duality or...
Scene 1: Curator - 3/5 - Another branch, another headache.
Scene 2: Elector - 3/5 - Saturn settlement faces challenges ahead.
Scene 3: Survivor - 4/5 - We're, like, so outta here.

Accelerenado is a nice read. Even though we kind of heard
about the road to the singularity before (e.g. Ray Kurzweil):

One day in this century, machines will have more processing
power than human brains - and that will make for a completely
new society. The singularity.
In Charles Stross' words: "Sometime in this century laboring women
will produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing
10^23 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world,
fab lines will churn out out thirty million microprocessors a day,
representing 10^23 MIPS of processing power.
After that day most of the MIPS being added to the solar
system will be machine hosted".

And obviously human minds will be connected to
the machines. In accelerando we have the meta cortex -
a distributed cloud of software
agents that surrounds humans in the near future -
a thing which is as much a part of the books characters
than the society of mind that
occupies their skulls.

Eventually, human minds are running more on machines than they
are inside human skulls. Death and biology conquered.
No problem, except perhaps for the legal system. I.e.
"the law didn't recognize death as a reversible process.
people pay for having their heads frozen after their death,
but when they wake up all reconstructed in some simulation
and without any rights - was that what they wanted ?"

And off we go to the fourth decade,
where the machines are up to 10^33 MIPS and rising, allthough
there is still a long way before the solar system is fully awake.

People (kind of) with neural implants, that feel as natural
as lungs or fingers, with half their wetware running
outside their skull in a personal metacortex, i.e. cyborgs,
gets the first alien nessage - on where to find the router to plug
into the galactic internet.
This we also kind of expected - think Timothy Ferris here.

The new stuff (for me) comes with the ceti
- communication with extraterrestrial intelligences -
Surely, you need a piece of software, that you put into
your head to allow you to have a highlevel protocol service that allows you to connect to the (alien) router and start the ceti.

After that you transfer yourself into the alien network -
and find yourself in a simulation where you dont need to simulate breathing.
Oh sure, you dont feel all that human if you dont breathe?
But so what, you are a posthuman now !

Eventually you catch up with other superintelligences.
Or at least you know they are out there.
Superintelligences don't go travelling, as they cant
get enough bandwidth to transport themselves from one place
to another through the routers ... and perhaps
they don't really need the outside input anymore -
having become a superintelligence what is there really to learn
from the outside anyhow? (And so Charles Stross neatly solves
the Fermi Paradox for us!).

The planets are all dismantled and used as materials
to build a Matrioshka super brain.
The only question now is if information from such a superintelligence
will ever become apparent to someone looking in
from the outside (think fred Hoyle here)
- or it will just die living nothing behind.
I don't think we really get the answer form Charles Stross
on that one. But he does make the impact on technology on human society, identity and consciousness totally believable. Of course things are really
going to go down this road. It is inevitable.
Highly readable, techno-babble and all, but not all that new.
We kind of heard it before. So now we are certain thats the way it is going to play out. For sure !

Simon

Set in the near future, this group of related stories is about an Earth where technology has run rampant, and humanity's inability to keep up.

Computing power, and artificial intelligence, have passed the limits of human intellect. Nanotechnology is everywhere, reprogramming and replicating at will. Posthumans, with all sorts of biological implants, have rendered people extinct. Corporations have become alive and sentient. New resource allocation algorithms, collectively called Economics 2.0, have replaced capitalism and communism.

This book is about three generations of the same family. Manfred is a freelance broker in intelligence amplification technology in a world where everyone must be 30 seconds ahead of everyone else. Years later, his teenage daughter, Amber, signs up as an indentured astronaut on the first exploration ship heading to Jupiter. It is to get away from a domineering mother who insists that Amber have a "normal" life on Earth. Her son, Sirhan, finds his destiny intertwined with all of humanity. Along the way, most of the planets in the solar system are systematically taken apart by various sorts of mini-robots and nanomachines. There is also a multi-year journey to a specific brown dwarf star a long way away. Building a ship with sufficient life support for people, and propelling it at any reasonable portion of the speed of light is not possible. Therefore, the "passengers" have been uploaded into a nanocomputer the size of a Coke can, and that is sent to the stars.

I thoroughly loved this novel. Cyberpunk fans will also love it. It does a fine job at the near future speculation, it's cool, it's high tech, and it's got a good story. What else does a reader need?

A fix-up novel examining humanity's ever-increasing technological development throughout the 21st century and beyond, culminating in the conversion of most of the mass of the solar system into "computronium". Three generations of the Macx family live through these changes and try to survive the Singularity and the actions of humanity's AI descendants.

The concept of the technological Singularity has been used in a lot of stories in the past decade, but Accelerando is the most complete look at how it could happen and what the effects could be. It starts out in the 2010's with Manfred Macx just starting to utilize always-networked wearable computers and software agents that become primitive extensions of himself and quickly moves on to a point where most of a person's personality may not reside in their physical body at all. The technological extrapolation is fascinating and technological change is portrayed as something moving forward almost with a life of its own that will drastically change the lives of everyone who survives it, but also shows that most of humanity may not survive the changes.

The book is probably not for everybody though. It seems to be specifically aimed at a techno-geek audience. If you don't already have some idea of what computronium is before reading the book, you are likely to end up lost and overwhelmed with all the concepts being thrown around. It is very much a book of concepts without much character development and a plot that still strongly shows its origins as individual stories. If you have some background in technology and recent hard SF concepts this is a must-read book.

I had read Singularity Sky a while back. Not bad, but not great either, IMHO, so I ignored Stross for a few years.

On a whim, because I had heard so much about it, I paged through the start of Accelerando at the library. And ended up checking it out right away. Part 1 reads like a punky, sassy Bruce Sterling, updated to reflect 2005 tech culture and memes. With memorable characters like the despicable IRS dominatrix and the AI cat. Gotta also love a book that openly criticizes the likely impact of us boomers' entitlement programs on near-future economies.

Once the Singularity gets truly and well underway, in parts 2 and 3, Accelerando becomes a bit less gripping. Partly because the big-picture techiness is explained more directly and repetitively, rather than inferred from the story. Partly because some things aren't developed very well. For example, what they find in the big cosmic router in the sky was confusing and somewhat of a letdown after all the buildup. I loved Field Circus' imaginative take on interstellar travel though.

Nevertheless, the book remains highly readable, has a nice conclusion and some truly interesting ideas. Like, postulating that super-high-tech civilizations will descend into parochial isolationism rather than explore their surroundings. Not sure I buy all of that, but it is logical and well explained. And I appreciate Accelerando's relentless optimism about the future, which is in refreshing contrast to all the copycat dystopian SF out there.

Yes, Miyazaki is mentioned. So is Dilbert and the lobster nerds reminded me of Dr. Zoidberg from Futurama.

Accelerando is a romp through the 21st century and beyond. It is a rollercoaster ride through the Singularity and beyond into the world of post-humans.

The story covers three generations from a very dysfunctional family (and friends) - an anarchist genius & cross dresser, his repellent and rapacious dominatrix/ex-wife, his kinky opera-rave-drugs-alcohol loving French girlfriend (perhaps the most "normal" person in the story!), the kindly and avuncular wealthy Italian communist politician, the wayward daughter who sells herself into slavery in a company set up by her dad and runs away to Jupiter to become a queen, her Islamic nerd boyfriend, her French boyfriend, her nerdy and prudish historian son and, of course, the arrogant, manipulative, swearing cat, Aineko (the real star of the novel). I forgot to mention the star ship the size and shape of a coke can!

At the start of the book we meet Manfred Macx, an anarchist entrepreneur who makes strangers he meets on the street rich with business plans he dreams up and then gives away on the spot. He does this with great skill, much to the annoyance of both the conservative capitalists in America and the communists and socialists in Europe....

Accelerando is a very full novel, it is almost overflowing with ideas and speculations. It does have some flaws, but none that interrupted my great pleasure in reading this book.

The story also poses an interesting question: What if we do meet aliens in the stars and they turn out to be jerks? (Instead of our equals or superiors)

Aineko, the wise-guy swearing robot cat, has simply gotta be in another novel!

I gave Stross five stars despite a host of problems: The eerie resemblance to Wil McCarthy's CONTINUUM, the ungainly structure, the unconnectedness of the parts, the almost mind-numbing avalanche of new words and phrases and the unrealized ending. The last part of the book comes in for major criticism as the action bogs down and seems repetitive. Despite all of these potential literary land mines it is an incredible work of science fiction / projection.

The Singularity has acquired the status of a new buzzword, in particular after the book by that name by Kurzweil. Most novels start post-Singularity where all the problems have been worked out. Stross starts at the near future, when the first signs of the long exponential growth in intelligence and computation begins to affect the way we feel about ourselves. The novel is essentially a generational saga (with the first, the story of Manfred, easily the best). The second part covers his daughter and the third, her son. A Shia emir in orbit beyond Mars is teh least realized character - phony and totally unreal. Strange concepts like smart matter, phase studies, resurrection, virtual reality universes - all are credibly depicted. Interspersed throughout the book are historical outtakes describing the incredible changes decade by decade.

The search for alien life ends with the discovery that, yes, intelligent life exists but it is no longer biological. For reaons of energy and computation, the civilization cannot leave its home star. This ia a unique solution to Fermi's Paradox. The author believes (and I agree) that if we do encounter aliens it will be the mechanical (not the flesh) kind. The future as depicted here is exciting, strange and very bleak - at least from the perspective of this pre-transcendent human. The efforts to return mankind to a pre-Singularity world is all the more telling, as if only the familiar can satisfy us. Great read -

Almost every book I read has a "working title" which describes how I feel about it. Gaslight Dogs for instance, is forever known to me as "That problematic colonialism book". Accelerando came free on my Kobo reader, and apparently it is filed in my head as "I like the lobsters best".

This is a series of linked short stories exploring more and more distant futures of the singularity, when it becomes possible to upload oneself into a computer. Well, there's some debate about what singularity means, but this is a prospect of our cybernetic future.

I really enjoyed the first third of the book, and my affection for it decreased with the technological sophistication the culture was dealing with. By the time the grandchild of our original protagonist is raising a clone of said protaganist as a child, I am a little detatched. In fact, I liked the uploaded Lobsters in Space a little better, probably because they are less prone to human frailty.

I am an unabashedly character-based reader, and this book was not so much character-driven as technology-driven. It was an extended musing on the extrapolation of our current cultural obsessions and abilities, and what those might look like decades down the line. I was amused by the idea of rogue AI lawyer-companies all suing humanity back to the stone age.

Read if: you like thinking about the future-that-may-be, you wonder what the nature of humanity is if we don't have bodies anymore.

Skip if: you are going to feel awkward liking unembodied crustaceans better than humankind's continual messing up.

I think I would have been better prepared to enjoy this book if I had known that it was originally published in serial form. In retrospect, it makes sense. Each section stands alone fairly well, but the sections only partially mesh as a whole. My favorite fiction has strong characters. In this format in particular, character development suffers.

In Accelerando, humanity speeds to and through the Singularity (the post-human era often called "the rapture for nerds"). The story follows three different generations of the Manx family through the centuries as serial protagonists. As a result, I had difficulty forming real attachment to any single character. Despite it's depiction of the vast sweep of human future, this book is not likely to move you emotionally. It's telling that the most memorable character in the book is the family's AI cat.

Really, though, the characters are secondary to the ideas. The ideas are so fantastic, and they come so frequently (about 1 new concept per paragraph through stretches of the book), that the end result, while not compelling, is still plenty dazzling. So, if you read your SF for the ideas, I think you'll enjoy this. If you prefer your SF as a vehicle to drive human character development, you should probably keep looking.

This book is all about future shock and the accelerating pace of technology which reaches the point that humans are no longer equipped to deal with it. The book itself is so loaded with rapid fire ideas and technological spin-offs that it is in itself an example of its own subject matter. I have a technological background, but there was much here that I had to re-read several times to get the references, and still didn't get it all, I'm sure. This is Science-Fiction which is about as close to the limit of how "high bit rate" it can become without becoming inaccesable to an audience at all.

Like Finnegan's Wake for techno-nerds, it almost needs annotations for the average reader to keep up with all the ideas it spins off- i.e. using sentient beings as currency, reducing the entire mass of the solar system to computronium, self-replicating 3-D printers, star travel as data downloads, and on and on, laced with lots of casual techno-speak, some of it newly minted here. Stross even manages an explanation for Fermi's paradox (If there are advanced civilizations on other worlds, why haven't they come visiting?).

People have complained that the characters are flat, and that is true, but this somehow fits with the subject matter. Human beings, such as ourselves, faced with such a constant barrage of future shock are likely to end up stunned and unable to keep up with the characters' intellectual motivations. These people's motivations are very complex as they react to their environment, and often their actions are related to technical issues we may not even understand. Thus it is natural that we don't relate well emotionally to the characters. In this way, the book and its effect on the reader mirrors its subject matter, whether intentionally or otherwise.

This book is an amazing achievement but also disturbing in its treatment of Vingean singularity. It makes you wonder if it is inevitable that humans become obsolete.

Accelerando is an entertaining collection of loosely related anecdotes spanning a time that covers both the near future and the post-singularity world. Stross seems to be more interested in showing off how many geeky pieces of knowledge he has and how many witty one-liners he can produce than he is in producing a great plot or a big new vision. I expect that people who aren't hackers or extropians will sometimes be confused by some of his more obscure references (e.g. when he assumes you know how a third-party compiler defeats the Thompson hack).

He sometimes tries too hard to show off his knowledge, such as when he says "solving the calculation problem" causes "screams from the Chicago School" - this seems to show he confuses the Chicago School with the Austrian School. He says that in the farther parts of the solar system

Most people huddle close to the hub, for comfort and warmth and low latency: posthumans are gregarious.

But most of what I know about the physics of computation suggests that warmth is a problem they will be trying to minimize.

The early parts of the book try to impress the reader with future shock, but toward the end the effects of technological change seem to have less and less effect on how the characters lives. That is hard to reconcile with the kind of exponential change that Stross seems to believe in.

He has many tidbits about innovative economic and legal institutions. But it's often hard to understand how realistic they are, because I got some inconsistent impressions about basic things such as whether Manfred used money.

His answer to the Fermi paradox is unconvincing. It is easy to imagine that the smartest beings will want to stick close to the most popular locations. But that leaves plenty of other moderately intelligent beings (the lobsters?) with little attachment to this solar system, whose failure to colonize the galaxy he doesn't explain.

[This review was first written on my web site. the store does not allow URLs to be embedded, but if you google on gordon's notes you can probably find the online version -- that one has lots of fun links to explore.]

Charles Stross is a former pharmacist, former programmer and journalist, certified geek, and current full time writer. Most people would tag him as 'science fiction' writer. From what I've read of his journals, and especially his books, he's terribly bright and very imaginative.

Accelerando is one of his commercially successful books (scan it for free before you buy at accelerando.org). The amateur the store reviews are well done (one of the two 'professional' reviews is by someone who didn't read the book); I can't add much to them. The book does not fully succeed as a novel -- it was published as a series of short stories and it doesn't hang together all that well. There are some annoying plot holes (no security on the goggles? Did one of the lead characters flee to alpha centauri or commit suicide? Why is Pierre asking what happened - he was there?!), some dangling and overly fluid characters, and too many annoying synopses of 'what went before'. The writing itself is professional, and that's no mean trick, but the work would have needed a harsher editor and a complete rewrite to fly as a novel.

That's ok, because it's really a series of speculative essays disguised as a novel -- and the thinking is deep and creative. I thought I was being a bit whacky when I blogged about the spanish inquisition as a corporation, and the emergent sentience of corporations in the ecosystem of economic interactions, but Stross goes much, much further. He plays with the idea that at some point the relationship between finance wizard and financial instrument might be inverted, so that souls would be traded by sentient financial instruments. That's not bad; I can just about see how it might happen ...

The embedded essay I most enjoyed reading, however, is on one of my all-time favorite topics -- the Fermi Paradox. This is one of those conumdrums that bothers a very few people a great deal and is irrelevant to most of humanity.

In short, we ought by all rights, to be overrun by little green beings. The puzzle is that we appear to have much of the galaxy to ourselves. To the Fermi fan-boys this is the biggest question around, to which matters of theology or epistemology are merely academic.

The answer to the Fermi Paradox is most often expressed in the terms of the Drake Equation. The best bet is that something utterly inevitable ends all technological civilizations like our own in well under a thousand years. The most popular candidate for an "inevitable fate" over the past 23 years has been the Singularity (Greg Bear's 1982 short story 'Blood Music' is the earliest version of the Singularity theory I know of, Vernor Vinge developed the ideas extensively in the early 1990s.) Stross takes these ideas and pushes the boundaries. Why might a post-singular entity find travel unappealing? Why would it be hard for entities like us to live near such a beast -- even if it didn't spend any time thinking about us?

Reading Stross is like having an extremely bright and free thinking fellow over for a beer (or something, these UK writers seem fond of a range of substances). He tracks all over the place, the narrative doesn't always hang together, but it's a heck of a lot of fun -- and where else can a geek get his Fermi fix?

Accelerando begins in the not-too-distant future, and spins the tale of a family living during the techno-pseudo-rapture of humanity from physical form to digitized representations living in a Matrioshka brain. The conflict that develops between "meat" humans and "post" humans forms the basis for most of the story. What makes this unpalatable situation so frightening is that the steps leading to it each seem relatively benign and harmlessly logical.

One striking aspect of this work is that it was the first bit of science fiction I've read that actually left me feeling as though people living today could see the events described in the book unfold. While the malleable world available to silicon "uploads" certain sounds fun, there is also a dehumanizing element -- how can creatures "born" in a world where death is virtually impossible understand why it's bad to harm physical entities? What worth does a person have if any necessary physical posessions can be congealed out of smart goo/nanomachines at virtually no cost? What value does one have in an information economy when your brain has a fraction of the computing power of your bedroom wall?

My only minor gripe with the book is the ending is a bit abrupt, and didn't quite ring true to me. Still, the fascinating glimpse of a possible future and the enjoyable trip through the first few gigaseconds of post-singularity human history are enough to leave me very satisfied.

ACCELERANDO(2001-2004) is actually a series of recently-published short stories, combined into a novel.

It took me a few pages to come up to speed with the author's writing style, which reminds me a lot of Harlan Ellison's writing style. Once I got the hang of it, I started blasting through the pages quickly, it was easier to spot the numerous humorous passages, and was easier to keep track of the rapidly-changing technology (the main character from the first chapters uses the Internet to issue new patent applications and front companies at an expanding exponential rate, before his wife's divorce lawyer starts suing his companies using a similar online ruse).

I've got to give the author credit for attempting all these short-range predictions... while most may come out looking silly in 15 years, it sure is fun to consider that even some of these technologies might be possible within the next few decades.

Stross' main character Manfred Mancx has "6 ideas before breakfast" and much the same could be said of the author, who throws and amazing variety of future-human and post-human ideas into the mix on this novelization of his short stories. The story is alternately a family drama, an adventure story and a space opera. The narrative does tend to fragment a bit at times, with abrupt juxtapositions between the former short stories and the futuristic geek-speak can be a little daunting, but when you've got a robotic cat that has willed himself to obtain sentient consciousness, space-faring lobsters and the dismantling of the solar system, you have one heck of a yarn. Science Fiction fans unite, you have nothing to lose but your meat-bodies!

This book consists of episodes during three generations of the Macx family. During those three generations, the human race is superceded by artificial intelligences, (referred to collectively by humanity as 'The Vile Offspring').

Surviving humanity leaves the Solar System to the AI's by the end of the book and lives a nanotech derived existence near a brown dwarf star elsewhere.

Uploads to cyberspace and back to realspace are commonplace, death is temporary when backups are taken into account.

Stross paints a dystopic picture of a universe where humanity comes to exist on the fringes outside of a greater uncaring civilisation of AI's that exists in what used to be the Solar System. Identity is something of a variable. People can split off copies of themselves and reintegrate them later by the end of the book.

People are still recognisable as people except that they can operate in a greater variety of modes. They know more but aren't any smarter than they are now.

Whatever faults the book has, it does give the reader a lot to think about and I'll be reading the sequel some time in the future, although I doubt that the human race will take the course mapped out by this book, if only because the aliens aren't likely to be there.

Not the third book of a trilogy starting with Singularity Sky. This is actually a loosely collected novel/sequence of short stories about an entirely different singularity concept. Many interesting ideas about the singularity, post-singularity life, the fate of A.I. once it's beyond human ken, but although Stross provides his usual excellent set of ideas to chew on, the characters and plot are a little fitful and poorly defined. Not his best work, although he's still one of the great thinkers of science fiction.

I have a hard time disliking Charles Stross. I really do. He writes like someone who's in love with their subject and in a good way. The first book of his that I read, "The Atrocity Archives", sold me at the first Cthulhu reference. "Iron Sunrise" was quite enjoyable also.

But "Accelrando"? Oh god. Where to begin?

One of the noted qualities of good literature is that it ages well. In other words, a reader can pick up the book fifty years after it was written and find it enjoyable. Some even hit the hundred or multiple hundred year mark (Dante, Shakespeare, etc) and have survived so long because they aged well.

If your central character is talking about updating his blog with travel photos and suffering from being Slashdotted in a bar in the very first chapter, you've already dated yourself horribly at this point. Fifty years down the road, people will read this and have a hard time empathizing with it. Hell, three years down the line it's almost making me laugh.

The barrage of pop-culture memes and references aren't helping much either.

When all of these things are dated, irrelevant, or just plain wrong a few years down the line, the book suffers for it. And it's painful to see a good writer suffer for it too.

Started out somewhat OK. Sometimes the "humor" reached Neal Stephenson lows, but it wasn't nearly as annoying. Then the Singularity happened, and things just went downhill.

I don't think I'm the right target for these "idea" novels. Some of the ideas can be interesting, but I'd rather read them in non-fiction, rather than have to endure bad, "witty", "hip" writing from people who don't seem to care about writing as an actual craft.

For all the flack that nerds give William Gibson, at least the man can put a sentence together artfully and evocatively; something that these authors that get compared to him in the sales blurbs can't seem to do.

This novel covers three generations of the Macx family, and how they cope with technological progress from the years just prior to the Singularity (for those who are unfamiliar with the term Singularity, it just refers to a time of extremely rapid technological development, actually feeding upon itself) to many decades post Singularity. This is really an amazing story that veteran writer Charles Stoss weaves here, mixing the human element in with a future that becomes more difficult to comprehend to mere humans, even ones augmented with mind enhancing devices. Along the way immortally becomes the norm, and transcending ones body is easily done. Non-human artificial intelligences far surpass human abilities, and non-terrestrial intelligences prove to be problematic.

Overall, I found this book very well writen, and the ideas and issues presented by Stross will make a thinking person think more. However, I found this novel to be a bit too long and drawn out, and the parts about the computronium converting much of the solar system to more computronium a wee bit far-fetched...as a limited amount of data input will require only a limited amount of processing power to analyze all possible aspects of the data. This is all minor criticisms of a great novel, do yourself a favor and read it.

When I first started reading the book, I was more than a bit put off by the over use of early 21st century in the first chapter, but I stuck with it...and the rewards were worth it. Since reading Vinge, Bear, and Gibson, I have been very interested in the idea of uploading a personality and space exploration using uploaded avatars. Stross does a great job of exploring those notions. Even better was his conceptualization of post-human intelligences as limited liability corporations. This was a subtle but compelling idea in the story...that our corporations would take over is a new idea...

The book is a lot of fun with interesting ideas, and I highly recommend it it you like "cyberpunk" types of science fiction. The ending didn't do much for me, but the middle was worth the trip.

On the dawn of the new millennium, technology has outpaced humanity's ability to keep up with it. Implants plug humans into the internet at all times. Artificial Intelligences have become smarter than its creators and people upload themselves into the neural net leaving their bodies behind. People can replicate themselves and live on two different time tracks and the ability to contact alien species is just a heartbeat away.

The three generations of the Macx clan have done their best to adjust to a brave new world. Manfred is working tirelessly to get the franchise for uploaded minds while his daughter Amber has sold herself into indentured servitude to get away from her mother who wants her to follow in her footsteps as an unaugmented human. Sirhan, the product of another Amber who didn't go through the wormhole has brought the family together from various incarnations to help them make the history museum on Saturn a reflection of the history of the humans. The Macx family also must find away to pull away from whatever is dismantling the solar system to create a Matrioshke brain that is clearly more brilliant than humans in all their various forms.

This novel has appeared as short stories in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 2001-2005. Each story has been extended with its own chapter in a seamless plot. The individual members of the Macx family and those who came into their orbit show three generations of technological change and how it affects society. All three Macx characters are fully developed and have their own distinct personalities but when they come together they are a force to be reckoned with. Charles Stross has written the singular most explosive work of his career.

Harriet Klausner

Accelerando (2005) is a standalone SF novel. It is set in the near future during the meltdown of nation states and capitalism. The EU has self-disorganized into the European Confederacy and the United States is almost bankrupt. And the underground economy is taking over the world.

In this novel, Manfred Macx is a genius who is patenting lots of primal ideas and assigning the rights to several Free Foundations and variously selected beneficiaries. He gets free passes and other nonmonetary compensation from these astounded recipients, thus has little need for cash. Manfred has an ongoing sexual affair with Pamela, an IRS entrepreneur who constantly reminds him of his estimated tax arrears.

Pamela traps him into getting her pregnant and then forces him to marry her. Manfred is reasonably satisfied with the arrangement except for the arguments about their frozen female embryo. Three years after their marriage, Mandred is on the run while his divorce is being processed.

Manfred is harassed by Alan Glashwiecz, who has been retained to pursue Pamela's interests in the divorce. However, he also encounters Annette -- a representative of Arianespace -- whom he had previously met three year before. Annette breaks his preoccupation with Pamela by seducing him in her apartment.

In this story, Amber is his daughter, who eventually gets thawed and birthed. She gets her first neural implants at the age of three and finds herself able to function in the adult world. Yet Pam doesn't consider Amber worth consulting on her life and raises her to be independent of her neural auxiliaries. So Pam runs away at the age of twelve.

Sirhan is the son of Amber -- the one in Jupiter orbit -- who grows up to be a historian. He legally seizes his mothers assets and drives her into bankruptcy. Then the other Amber -- the one on the interstellar voyage -- returns to find that she has become a party to the lawsuit.

This story reads like William Gibson on Angel Dust. The story starts out strange and gets even wilder. Of course, the Singularity has something to do with it.

This story took the author five years to write. One suspects that he had to take time out to let his brain cool. Enjoy!

Recommended for Stross fans and for anyone else who enjoys tales of the coming Singularity, expansion into space, and interstellar aliens.

-Arthur W. Jordin

I recommend this book. It's accessible, but Stross respects his readers enough that he doesn't write to the lowest common denominator. I found the first half of the book absolutely fascinating - I couldn't put it down and I was glad for the five hours on the plane to grant me uninterrupted reading. Many challenging conceptual extensions of today's bleeding edge - a real pleasure. The next 30% of the book was a long setup for the last few pages, and I didn't enjoy the same sense of discovery as in the first half. Frankly, the last 10% was a real challenge to finish, but the payoff is worth it.

If Stross speaks the language he writes, he might be your geekiest best friend. Nearly every sentence is packed with hard tech blather. Many of the terms are invented or spliced together in pseudo-meaning. There are very few clear explanations of the geeky phrasings; you are supposed to infer meaning from context. So, are "transhumans" and "orthohumans," a couple of paragraphs apart, different constructs? Alas, the surrounding context itself is loaded with geekspeak, so readers have unpleasant options--put up with it; invent your own meanings; or put the book down.

Stross offers some interesting plots and subplots here, but the vocabulary noise is so high that I found it a dull burden to slog through to the end.

This book is a little preachy and the constant anti-capitalism propaganda is frankly irritating. The book has an agenda where all information should be shared freely. The characters waltz around with constant free bandwidth, limitless computation, and free access to the net. This all misses the very important fact that energy is not free.

Energy is not free. Energy to fuel our bodies. Energy to create bandwidth. Energy to put satellites in the sky. Energy is at the core of this book, yet he never once acknowledges it.

It takes energy for an artist to write a song - they should be compensated for their time and effort. It takes energy to come up with an idea - the person who does so should be rewarded for it. Life takes time and energy. Yet, the easy with which our protagonist comes up with his ideas flies in the face of that and the statements made about all of our energy being open source... that's just bullcrap.

Add in that this book is often too absurd to accept and you don't get good scifi.

At least, 160. Perhaps verging on 170 or 180. And this is evident in every sentence. I have never ever read anybody who tries so hard to show his intellect in every sentence, in every word. If Stross could show how intelligent he is in spaces between words, he would do it. Reading Accelerando demands a portable wikipedia (I think I even spotted an all your base are belong to us reference) a great deal of Egan (who he shamelessly rips, even though he credits Vinge)and a lot of time. Read it at a pace of ten or fifteen pages per day and it will start making sense. Nice way out for the Fermi paradox, would like to see the Matrioshka brains fleshed out some more. Overall, nice Singularity effort.

By the time I finished ACCELERANDO, I was again reminded how it's just as well that we are, each of us, only so long for this world. With the increasing pace of technological change being what it is, this world is starting to get a little too weird for me already, and I'm not even 50! Imagine living in the mid-21st century timeframe Charles Stross sets his novel against: A time in which the interface between the human mind and the digital realm allows for a genuine expansion of consciousness and the evolution of our species into something new and just a little frightening.

ACCELERANDO deals with three generations of the Macx family, beginning in Manfred, who could have been born in the 1980s and now, as a thirty-something adult, has vast amounts of computer processing power sewn into his clothing and experiences so much of his reality via the web that without his hardware he's all but deaf, dumb, and blind. In Manfred's world we are learning to literally "upload" the brains of living creatures, neuron by neuron, into cyberspace. Later, in the world of Manfred's daughter, Amber, humans can use digital technology to spin off "ghosts," rudimentary copies of their consciences that can worry about rudimentary tasks. By the time Amber's son, Sirhan, starts coming into his own, most of the human beings in the inner solar system have uploaded into cyberspace, the inner planets are being systematically pulverized and turned into raw material for increasing computer bandwidth, and our own sun is little more than an energy source for a growing, almost God-like digital mind. Stranger still is the suggestion that intelligent lifeforms elsewhere in the universe often share similar fates.

Needless to say, ACCELERANDO is highly speculative and ideological, even veering toward satire at times. The novel raises all kinds of provocative questions about the nature of consciousness, identity, and even what we commonly call the soul. In the process Stross throws at the reader all kinds of techno-jargon that we can barely make heads or tails of, though computer geeks will probably have a easier time of it. For me, this made the novel rather difficult to absorb at times, and the parts that take place in purely virtual reality got a bit annoying.

And yet I couldn't shake the suspicion that maybe Charles Stross is really on to something here. 200 years ago a 70 year old and a 17 year old could carry on a conversation in mutually understandable terms. Today that's just not possible, and the pace of technological change is accelerating ever more. Technology, specifically digital computer technology, is shaping who we are as humans and what our society is becoming. Resistance is futile.

Stross seems to share some of the literary memenome as Stephenson and Doctorow. The prose style (especially early on in the text) felt a bit like Snow Crash; those vivid bits of lurid ephemera, that nearly comic book pacing, every tawdry details competing for your attention right alongside the critical core. And like Cory Doctorow on crystal meth, every ten pages bombards you with some prosaically twisted huge new idea (i.e., what would Islamic scholars have to say about bacon built molecule-by-molecule by nanobots instead of cut from a pig?)

Accelerando takes us on a wild ride through a technologically force-fed, self-propelled post-evolutionary end-stage of humanity. And Stross isn't afraid to "go there" with any its implications. Overall, not the "wow!" novel I'd heard it would be but still an enjoyable piece of speculative fiction with some razor sharp wit.

Charles Stross has two different types of science fiction that he writes. One is heavy on the science and invokes a lot of deep thought and contemplation. The other is heavy on the fiction and uses science to support a compelling story. This book is in the former mode while I prefer the latter. If you enjoy books that discuss important issues and make you think then this is the book for you. If you are more like me and read SF for easy reading to relax then give some of Stross' other books a try and they will probably be more to your liking.

This is a well written book by a great author but it is not my cup of tea.

Charles Stross has managed to generate an excellent reputation in science fiction in a very short amount of time (note his *three* Hugo nominations in a single year, which is a nice trick for anyone to pull off). And while Stross' work to this point has justified the growing reputation, Accelerando is the clincher -- a three-generation-spanning explosion of ideas about future of humanity that's just mindblowingly fun. Stross starts the reader in the very near future -- the shallow end of the pool, as it were. But things get deep fast as Stross extropolates technology accelerating at blinding speed and humanity (and, well, others) doing its damnedest to keep pace.

What's nice about Stross' writing is that even as the ideas get wild, the writing stays grounded; it doesn't hurt to be a hard-core futurist when reading this book, but it's not absolutely required. What *is* required is a willingness to let the top of your head get screwed off while Stross pours in several gallons of wild speculation. If you can handle that, you're going to be in for a treat. Acclerando is one of the books the rest of the genre will calibrate from.

Will this book deliver yet another Hugo nomination for Stross? It'd be a shame if it didn't.

Stross's novel opens well enough, promising to sketch where we might be going with our increasing reliance on virtual realities and the increasing melding of human consciousness and artificial intelligence. Unfortunately, that opening promise remains completely unfulfilled. The entire solar system is converted into "computronium" and comes to function as a single mind entity, but the reader has no idea who is directing this process, how, or even why. The characters are flat and uninteresting, and it's frequently unclear whether any given character is "real people" (or as Stross terms it, "meatbody") or an "upload" as a virtual entity (completely undefined how it got to be so) circling Jupiter or Saturn or somewhere. The solar system becomes an increasingly complex mix of "meatbodies" and AI agents and nano-thinking-machines but there is no sense whatever of the sort of emergent ecology that would imply. Frequent digressions on evolving economic systems make no sense whatever and help render the thrashing about of the characters meaningless. Stross is fond of spinning off whole paragraphs of geeky terms which, since they remain undefined, amount to nothing more than tedious techno-babble. Long before the end, the resulting stew is insufferable. I regret the hours I put into this rambling, pretentious mess. Do yourself a favor and give it a pass.

A fun and interesting romp through the near and far future of humanity. Augmented Human, Meta Human, Post Human worlds collide in this futuristic meme stew.
It's entertaining and filled with the potpourri of hip, cutting edge concepts but still feel's like it's missing something of depth.
It might not be profound but it is memorable.

Eon by Greg Bear handles some of these ideas in a more interesting and better paced fashion.
Eon

Charlie Stross delivers a roiling book that feverishly explores a possible history for 21st century, and what it means to be human throughout those events. The book is actually a collection of nine short stories, loosely assembled around three generations of the Maxx family. While it's definitely not for everyone (significant technical background is a real help here), I found it to be brilliant and hilarious.

I have an ongoing debate with my friends about at what point the book becomes patently absurd. Everyone has their own answer, and they range from the first to the last chapter. Enjoy the ride!

While characterization and plot is somewhat lacking, it is no worse in those respects than many other hard SF books. Accelerando is THE most realistic novel of the human/transhuman/posthuman transition I have yet encountered. Its history as short stories brought together shows in the structure, but I think that is possibly the best way he could have shown such a difficult and complex issue.

Charles Stross combines cutting edge current tech with future technological speculation to illustrate how scientific progress will lead to the next human evolutionary step. Accelerando is a chillingly well-conceived view of a most probable future.
Mr Stross takes the crown of future tech noir and post cyber punk with this book. I envy anyone just about to dive into Accelerando, Singularity Sky and the excellent 'sequels'.

Accelerando is a mind-blowing, thought-provoking collection of novellas that are tied together into one giant novel that takes the reader from an evolutionary and almost recognizable future to a revolutionary and bizarre one. Stross shows a masterful ability to wield his impressive knowledge of computing technology and other intellectual disciplines without boring those readers who aren't technofreaks or social scientists. It is one of those rare novels that manages to be simultaneously educational and entertaining.

The prose can be intentionally in-your-face at times, but the contrast of this occasional brutality with the delicate intricacies of Stross's wide-ranging vision only makes Accelerando all the more intriguing.

Along with Neal Stephenson, Charles Stross is one of the finest and most exciting SF authors writing today.

While characterization and plot is somewhat lacking, it is no worse in those respects than many other hard SF books. Accelerando is THE most realistic novel of the human/transhuman/posthuman transition I have yet encountered. Its history as short stories brought together shows in the structure, but I think that is possibly the best way he could have shown such a difficult and complex issue.

I believe Cory Doctorow said it best when he said something like 'makes hallucinogens obsolete' This book is brain meltingly lovely. Instead of being sci fi to inspire the dreams of yesterday (which seems to be so much of what's out there), Stross creates sci fi that is truly future speculative (not predictive, just mentally inflammatory in the best possible way). Don't get me wrong, this book has it's flaws, and there are bumps in the narrative. However, they're totally forgivable, as Accelerando takes you along for a ride that is both outlandish beyond belief, and all too believable.

I just finished reading the book for the 3rd time since it was released. I found the concept utterly fascinating and his world infinitely vast, intellectually and scientifically bright, stimulating and hip. Imagine taking Cory Doctorow, strapping him to a relativistic rocket and seeing what he looks like in a few hundred years of breakneck societal and technological change.

Although the book suffers from a little "Neal Stephenson ending" (where the book is so powerful it becomes impossible to conclude it gracefully) and the character development slows down after the first few chapters, the unbelievable journey it takes you and humanity is worth the price of admission.

It's still on the bookshelf of novels I will read again. As a previous reviewer stated, resistance is futile.

Apparently it really is possible to spend too much time with the GNU Manifesto. At least we can take comfort in the knowledge that the personal lubricant industry will do well as the technological singularity approaches.

Some observations:

- This book isn't bad, but for someone whose lexicon includes all the post-humanist buzzwords (of which a near complete survey is made herein), it's pretty obvious the underlying stories here are a bit weak. The shamelessly heavy obscurantism here doesn't work for anyone with a CompSci degree and who's read all of the transhumanism Wikipedia articles.

- Characters suffer from what I like to call "post-humanist candy store syndrome" where post-human characters in a scifi novel have complete control over their (either real or virtual) environment, and go nuts with overdone immaturity interacting with it (i.e. morphing into ridiculous monsters and living out other childish fantasies). Even modern humans would get bored of this pretty quick.

- Obviously written by an OOP fanboi. References to Python and Java are pretty laughable early on in the book. No attempt is made to continue the detail of following programming language development after a few chapters, probably as a result of the author being incapable of speculation in this area.

- Along those lines, the hard scifi level of detail gets continuously more sloppy as the book goes on.

- Anti-Objectivist/pro-communist propaganda is laced into the early plot in such a heavy-handed fashion as to just be awkward.

- Has several "well, that's just stupid" moments, like killing grey goo with fuel-air explosives bombing and most everything involving the extra-terrestrials encounter.

- Exhibits what I'll hereby christen "historical gravity well syndrome" where a scifi novel tries to fill in back-story in a way that over-emphasizes the history of the decade or so before it was written (i.e. talking about Richard Stallman, George Soros, Noam Chomsky, a thinly-veiled RIAA, etc., yet nearly completely ignoring the history from the present until the beginning of the book). Do humans today spend all their time talking about the 1960s while ignoring everything since then?

- Most importantly, the book's universe is basically the myopic worldview of the salivating Linux freetards. This makes for a lot of cringe-worthy scenes and dialog that read more like a Slashdot post than an actual novel.

- Despite all the above, it's still nice to see ideas like Matrioshka brains, lightsails, computronium, distributed intelligence, and exocortices come to life, but none of these ideas are original to this book. Hopefully someone less simple-minded will write a better book about them some day.

This book has received great acclaims for the many ideas and concepts presented in it — if you trust the raves on the cover. As I see it there are mainly two ideas: 1) convert all available matter to "computronium" and 2) upload yourself, your pets and your companies. What you get is basically an intersolar internet with "ghosts in the machine".

Now try to add a plot to this... Well here is where it fails. The plot is basically non-existing and reading about the same "great ideas" over and over again gets boring after a while.

This book was a disappointment after having read "Singularity Sky " and "Iron Sunrise" by the same author. Exciting books with both ideas and a plot.

A stunning collection of essays grouped together as a novel. Its origins show in the lack of character development but few books have me laughing out loud and blown away by the audacity of its ideas. Stross never disappoints!

One of my favorite Stross books. As plausible as it is implausible. A Möbius strip. Diabolical characters and a rich array of backstory and inspiring pseudoscience. I think I highlighted 25% of the book....

Writing style somewhat jerky. Tries to be too clever in places. No unity of time/place.... But this is a story about a jerky, accelerating future, and I find it overcomes those handicaps and fairly rattles along, spewing out thought provoking ideas all over the shop. Recommended for Iain M. Banks, Vernor Vinge, and Greg Egan fans - perhaps not recommended for those who prefer their SF to verge on the techno-thriller.