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Accelerando

by Charles Stross (Goodreads Author)

3.86 of 5 stars 3.86 · rating details · 7,290 ratings · 505 reviews

The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.

Struggling to survive and thrive in this a...more

Paperback, 432 pages

Published June 27th 2006 by Ace (first published 2005)

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May 04, 2013 Clouds - (¿head-in-the?) rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: science-fiction-stand-alone, locus-sci-fi, science-fiction, reviewed

Christmas 2010: I realised that I had got stuck in a rut. I was re-reading old favourites again and again, waiting for a few trusted authors to release new works. Something had to be done.

On the spur of the moment I set myself a challenge, to read every book to have won the Locus Sci-Fi award. That’s 35 books, 6 of which I’d previously read, leaving 29 titles by 14 authors who were new to me.

While working through this reading list I got married, went on my honeymoon, switched career and became...more

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Jan 10, 2013 Apatt rated it 3 of 5 stars

I finally understand why Charles Stross is so popular even though I often find his fiction borderline unreadable. I think he writes for a tech savvy readership and they love him for it. It's great when an author gives you credit for intelligence and understanding and never talk down to you. However, while I know my way around Windows and Android phones I don't consider myself tech savvy, certainly my understanding of programming is minimal. A lot of what Stross puts in his fiction goes right ove...more I finally understand why Charles Stross is so popular even though I often find his fiction borderline unreadable. I think he writes for a tech savvy readership and they love him for it. It's great when an author gives you credit for intelligence and understanding and never talk down to you. However, while I know my way around Windows and Android phones I don't consider myself tech savvy, certainly my understanding of programming is minimal. A lot of what Stross puts in his fiction goes right over my head.

This is my third Stross book, originally it was going to be the first as it is available as a free e-book under Creative Commons licence, Unfortunately on that first attempt I could not read more than 50 pages and had to give it up. I had better luck with his Singularity Sky which I quite enjoyed, not long after that I read The Atrocity Archives which I partially enjoyed, very much like my second attempt at Accelerando. I wanted to give Accelerando another try because it is a highly rated book among my friends at PrintSF online discussion group. While I don't rate the book quite so highly myself I kind of understand my peers' enthusiasm for it, there is a lot to admire in Accelerando even if the end result does not quite work for me.

Charles Stross has an immense imagination, he knows his science, and he has a sense of humour. In addition to all that his blogs and other online posts give the impression that he is a great guy, kind, friendly, modest, and enthusiastic about science and science fiction. The only snag is I find his prose style difficult to read. He employs a ton of technical jargon and neologism, most of which is never clarified I understand that he has numerous fans who do not have any problem comprehending his work, more power to them, I can only speak for myself.

Accelerando is a fix-up novel comprised of nine short stories about events shortly before the advent of the singularity, through the singularity and events post-singularity.There lies the weakness of the book as a novel for me, the nine stories do bind together into one cohesive tale. The fix-up nature of the novel plays hell with the narrative rhythm, I find myself veering crazily back and forth between enjoying the book to feeling a bit bored and frustrated with it. The end result is on the positive side but not by a large margin. Practically every page is brimming with new ideas and concepts, sf readers who in this genre for the technological speculation is likely to have a field day. This is under the proviso that they are able to follow the author's technical expositions. I have to confess about 25% of these ideas flew right over my head, may be I just don't have enough bandwidth or storage space to cope with them. Be that as it may, the reading experience can be frustrating from time to time. Another complaint I have is with the characterization, most of the characters (except that weird cyber-cat) are of not worth caring about as Stross does not spend much time developing them, they just exist to drive the plot forward. I really do like the ideas that I was able to absorb though, especially those concerning posthumanism and Stross' speculation of what our race may eventually evolve or transcend into.

After being disappointed with The Atrocity Archives I kept telling myself that Charles Stross' sf books are just not for me, yet somehow his ideas always manage to entice me to pick up another one. I like Accelerando over all but I am also disappointed in it. The trouble is I am almost certain to read another one of his book in the near future and I probably won't enjoy it!

(less)

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Sep 16, 2008 Adam rated it 5 of 5 stars

Acclerando is Stross’s most frustrating, annoying, idea-packed, difficult, dense, and arguably best novel. Can feel like taking a crash course in astro-physics, computer science, economics, sociology, while reading a dozen blogs, Bruce Sterling’s “Deep Eddy Stories” and Shismatrix , and cliff notes of science fiction’s back pages. But once you get over the buzz of the overload it is a hauntingly odd story of a dysfunctional family in a world of increasingly weird technology and its implications....more

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Feb 25, 2009 Rob rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: accelerationistas!

Shelves: singularity, science-fiction, 2007

I tried reading the PDF (found at [http://www.accelerando.org/]) of this last year and didn't get very far. However, once I held the book in my hands, I seemed to fly through it. At first.

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. A...more

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Oct 25, 2011 Morgan rated it 1 of 5 stars

Many people recommended this highly to me. I found that the plot and ideas, as summarized on Wikipedia, were brilliant and mind-expanding.

The writing of the book was intolerable. I couldn't get past page 20. It was like reading Wired Magazine--Stross drops every current technology name and buzzword, apparently without a deep enough understanding to know which might have staying power 15 minutes into the future. When "slashdot", "open source", "bluetooth", "wimax", "state vector" and more terms...more

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Jul 23, 2010 Scott rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

OK, let's start with the fact that the book jacket compared Charles Stross's writing with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson at their best.

As a reader who has a serious crush on Stephenson's writing, I instantly had an expectation was set up in my mind, as you can imagine.

However, this novel was thoroughly disappointing. I like hard SF and cyberpunk that explores social mores and the impacts of technology and science upon society. And can do so with humor (or irony). The science was so outlandis...more OK, let's start with the fact that the book jacket compared Charles Stross's writing with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson at their best.

As a reader who has a serious crush on Stephenson's writing, I instantly had an expectation was set up in my mind, as you can imagine.

However, this novel was thoroughly disappointing. I like hard SF and cyberpunk that explores social mores and the impacts of technology and science upon society. And can do so with humor (or irony). The science was so outlandishly bad (e.g. generating sufficient power to run manufacturing plants on a satellite of Jupiter by wrapping conductors around the satellite, across the poles, to create a conducting loop to move through Jupiter's magnetic field), and the belief in the Singularity so without skepticism, that I stopped drinking the Kool-Aid at about page 220, and had to gut out the last half of the book without the necessary suspension of disbelief that is why I read science fiction in the first place. As the book proceeds use of science or IT concepts becomes increasingly absurd as the main characters (who are nearly impossible to feel any sympathy for) are rescued, Deus ex Machina style, from ridiculous crises with unexplored implications that abuse the reader's time and effort placed in attempting to understand what has been written.

The ability to dash out clever metaphors and create a story around a compelling idea (like the Singularity) does not guarantee that the story will be good. Stross has moments of true humor and irony, but the characters are leaden and locked in epoch-long neuroses that persist whether the character is in "meatspace" or has re-instantiated itself as an orangutan or a flock of passenger pigeons (I'm not making this up). There is also a level of omniscience and confidence in the main characters that suggests they know everything that has happened and will happen. While this may be a device to make the post-humans off-putting to us as human beings, part of the reason to write a book is to get humans to read it, and most real humans won't soldier through a book with know-it-all characters they cannot care about, who already have figured out everything that will happen to them, and seem unbelievably bored by anything except for their family squabbles.

The middle third (from around page 200 through 300) really lacks coherence and cannot be readily followed by any but the most careful reading. And, upon careful reading, you are not rewarded. This is not Pynchon or Faulkner; this is geek speak that does not connect with ideas that matter. At the point where the travellers encounter alien intelligences, the entire story completely falls apart and has to be rescued, again, from its own excesses.

I have spent too much time writing about this. If you read this review, you have been warned about what to expect in reading this book. I will not be picking up another Stross novel any time soon.(less)

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May 25, 2013 Hugh Foster rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well, ahem, of course the first thing to be destroyed is Unity of Time, Place, and Action. After that, pretty much the entire Solar System gets thrown out the window too. Either destroyed, or more likely, converted slowly into Computronium...dead matter made smart, a Singularity slowly metamorphosing planet by planet, the large array of Characters forced to exist in a Posthuman cosmos.

It's Big.

And speaking of Character--besides Unity of Time, Space & Action getting skewered, completely, we a...more

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Apr 12, 2012 Tim rated it 2 of 5 stars

In the future, all of Europe will speak English as if they were plucked straight from an episode of 'Allo 'Allo. The French are addicted to "mais oui". The Germans can't without basic errors of grammar related to their own language structure talk. And Russian cannot use definite or indefinite article or plural. Even AI. Hallo. My name Boris. It's like Stross had never met a real foreigner before writing Accelerando.

But aside from the grating dialog Stross paints a wonderful picture of a world st...more

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May 30, 2010 Richard rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Singularitarians and geek-positive futuristas

Recommended to Richard by: Scott Jackisch

Shelves: scifi, singularity, scifi-apocalyptic, scifi-cognition, scifi-hardscience

A 3 1/2 star book, downgraded to three because Stross ultimately doesn't deliver much more than a caffeinated theme park ride of the singularity.

I doubt that Accelerando will ever be seen in quite the same way as the early cyberpunk books, but it is certainly similar in its hyperkinetic and chaotic creativity. Stross tosses in a billion and one tasty tidbits of near-future circum-singularity and presses the "Will it Blend?" button.

And, as one would predict, the result is a very intriguing if chu...more

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Sep 26, 2008 Gar rated it 3 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Accelerando, or That Darn Cat!

The basic template for every chapter is: character wanders around and uses increasingly-elaborate gadgetry--wearable computers and VR glasses give way to neurally-interfaced implants give way to reality-editing "ackles" authorizations to edit the criteria of the virtual simulation space that their minds have been uploaded into--in between chunks of exposition. When this starts getting unwieldy, it switches to pure expository essays about just how much further techno...more

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Jan 25, 2011 Brian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: all SF fans

Shelves: ebook

The first third of this book is a five star white knuckle fall off the cliff ever accerating drop into the singularity. It's fascinating, breathtaking, horrifying, belivable and plausible. You're never quite sure what's coming, and you never catch your breath, but you're never completely lost either.

I distinctly remember thinking 'I have no idea how the heck he can keep this up for the whole book', and the answer unfortunately is that he doesn't.

Once you hit the second generation (loosely speaki...more

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May 17, 2009 John rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009, sf-fantasy, scottish

This book will short circuit your geek meter: a kind of epic chronicling three generations of a pretty messed up family through humanity's advance from a near future not too much unlike our own to a totally post-human universe. Although I found the story and characters to be a little wanting at times, these elements often felt like mannequins anyway, putting human form on the tsunami of ideas Stross lays out. If that doesn't sound fascinating to you, this ain't the book for you - I think I added...more

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Jun 17, 2009 Cathy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction, cyberpunk

Read it last year and just remembered it because I picked up another book by the author. I remember clearly that I didn't love it and had expected to. It's in the vein of singularity books that I usually enjoy. But there were some weird character choices and I just didn't get the end. I liked the cat though.

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Sep 13, 2007 Tama Wise added it · review of another edition

Shelves: books-i-never-finished

Not a good sign of things really. I was doing so well at sticking to books when I didn't work in a library. Now that I do, I see so many other interesting books.

Finishing this book was hampered in a great part by the language of this book. I'd consider this a 'modern cyberpunk', in that it takes into account things like wireless network and the like. However, the story and characters were so buried in technobable and politico-socio speak that for the most part I was lost in skimming.

The same sor...more

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Mar 19, 2009 Paul rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: sciencefictionfantasy

Set in the near future, these related stories are 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 repla...more

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Jun 14, 2013 Ben Bates rated it 4 of 5 stars

I enjoy Charles Stross and this, in some ways, is his magnum opus (so far). The ideas contained within are nothing short of stunning. The logical path he takes the reader through in terms of the progress of uploaded personality is intriguing through all of it's twists and turns. Throughout this and the other ideas that are central to the core of this book he manages to maintain interesting and well drawn characters. I won't divulge what the ideas are as the strength of them (for me) is the centr...more

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Mar 09, 2013 Smcleish rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: owned

Originally published on my blog here in April 2009.

I first read Accelerando soon after it came out, but, although I found it fascinating, I wasn't able to put together a review. It's an incredibly ambitious novel, describing one potential fate of the human race: it aims to be as iconic a part of the science fiction genre as Neuromancer or Snow Crash. The novel is very much in their tradition of speculation about the interaction between computers, human minds, and the universe.

Accelerando follows...more Originally published on my blog here in April 2009.

I first read Accelerando soon after it came out, but, although I found it fascinating, I wasn't able to put together a review. It's an incredibly ambitious novel, describing one potential fate of the human race: it aims to be as iconic a part of the science fiction genre as Neuromancer or Snow Crash. The novel is very much in their tradition of speculation about the interaction between computers, human minds, and the universe.

Accelerando follows three main characters, Manfred Macx and his daughter Amber, then her child Sirhan (not forgetting their cat, the most intelligent of all of them) as they explore the developments in computing which Stross suggests will occur during the twenty-first century and beyond. These begin with spectacles which provide a virtual reality overlay on the real world, to implanted computers and networked enhancements to memory and cognition, to the conversion of the solar system itself into a giant molecular computer, in which uploaded post-humans live in simulations. Manfred is pretty recognisable, just beyond the edge of the way that many people live now, with some interesting technological toys and a radical lifestyle (spent registering patents that he makes available for free use and living off favours from those who benefit from them). Amber is stranger, as most of her story takes place as a simulation on a tiny space ship/computer where she is empress over a virtual court based on fifteenth century France. Sirhan is an adolescent who experienced multiple simulated lifetimes as his education yet has not so far decided which gender to be.

While the themes are similar to those explored by Gibson and Stephenson, being a future based on the technology available at the time of writing, I suspect that Accelerando will not prove as influential. Both Neuromancer and Snow Crash proved self-fulfilling prophecies, Neuromancer inspiring developers of the Web amd Snow Crash developers of virtual reality environments such as Second Life, the accuracy of their predictions coming as much from this as from authorial prescience. Both novels take place over a fairly short internal timescale, a few weeks during which the IT environment remains effectively static, and this means that they can really serve as models for developers to emulate. Accelerando, as its title indicates, is about the process of change, and this means that the worlds described in it are a moving target, and there is far less space for Stross to go into evocative details.

Apart from the IT, all three books have other things in common. Most obvious is that they all portray the current political realities based around nation states as effectively obsolete. This seemed very far fetched in the mid-eighties, when I first read Neuromancer's suggestion that corporate entities would be the main powers in the world (rather than running things from behind the scene, as has been suggested happened in Bush's America). Stross's post-capitalist world seems more likely now than it did when I first read Accelerando, before the credit crunch. The short sightedness of financial institutions and the consequent loss of trust by their customers, combined with a fairly clear and longstanding inability of governments to understand, legislate and innovate for the Internet seems to me to make the sort of changes that are the background to this novel not just possible but likely. Snow Crash, where the Mafia deliver pizza and Federal organisations are just an embarrassment is obviously satirical and not very likely in the real world; Stross's idea that the Russian Mafia enforce music copyright is less extreme while still satirical.

Any novel which covers three generations is ambitious, and Accelerando also describes a possible ultimate fate of the human race. From a futurological point of view, some aspects are questionable. The timetable, for example, depends on Moore's Law continuing to hold well into the future: it is not a natural law, just an observation, and depends on increasingly fast technological innovation which seems unlikely (at least in the current economic climate). The scenarios which are described in the novel are mostly well known speculation (in particular by Frank Tipler, who is indirectly mentioned through the "Tiplerite" religion, dedicated to bringing about his vision). Stross may well be the first science fiction author to produce a novel which centres around these ideas to this extent: novels dealing with the final destiny of humanity are surprisingly rare in science fiction, except when treated as satire. Accelerando does suffer from one of the major problems of science fiction which deals with big themes: when you have beings who are vastly more intelligent than any human (including the author and his readers), how is it possible to make their actions comprehensible? Stross does this mainly by keeping his narrative centred on those who remain close to baseline human, who stay recognisable to us, even if strange. (I'm not sure the people depicted at the end are quite strange enough, given how different they are tto us; they should be more difficult for us to understand than our culture would be to someone from the nineteenth century, and I don't think that they are.)

Accelerando is fairly effective, and manages to remain sufficiently straightforward to be readable right to the end, despite the proliferation of virtual copies, clones and a wide variety of types of post-human with far greater intelligence than those who choose to remain principally flesh and blood, no matter how augmented. There are some lapses of judgment, such as the sudden adoption of an arch tone at the start of the final section. There is perhaps too much explanatory material. Each chapter has a section summarising the present situation, basically a summary of IT developments during a decade of the twenty first century. There is a lengthy, but amusing, FAQ for newly resurrected individuals given in full and taking several pages. And I always find a novel written in the present tense to be constantly mildly irritating. But, considering its ambition, Accelerando is very successful.(less)

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Feb 03, 2013 Laura rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: being-human, bees, coming-of-age, cthulhu, fanfiction, economics, evolution, graphic-novel, metatexts, singularity

This is a book about the Singularity. Except when I am actively listening to Ray Kurzweil, I am not that interested in the singularity and its discontents. Both paranoia and utopia bore me, even if they do happen after we technologically immanentize the eschaton. But Cory Doctorow seduced me into reading The Rapture of the Nerds by describing the POV character as “a bit of a Rincewind,” and that book was delightful.

Accelerando plays with a lot of the same themes, but in a multi (and semi-recurs...more

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Dec 21, 2012 Nikia is currently reading it

I wonder if maybe I'm just not intelligent enough for this book. I read 2 other books by the author () but this one was a much more difficult read. I wonder if I was just distracted (I began reading the book shortly after giving birth to my first child ) or if I'm simply am idiot about singularity.
my first problem was that the first quarter of the book was spent setting the scenery and really had nothing to do with the rest of the book. (I secretly wonder if the author has dreams of a trilogy m...more

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Oct 20, 2012 Dave rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Singularity fiction" full of some familiar sci-fi tropes but with fun twists. For example, brain uploading (but also exploring the implications of detailed personality control, task-specific self-duplication and reintegration, and participatory government), virtual environments (humanity explores space in a ship the size of a Coke can as our digital selves, and exercises control over the rate of time, physical properties, and avatar characteristics), real-world environmental control (including...more "Singularity fiction" full of some familiar sci-fi tropes but with fun twists. For example, brain uploading (but also exploring the implications of detailed personality control, task-specific self-duplication and reintegration, and participatory government), virtual environments (humanity explores space in a ship the size of a Coke can as our digital selves, and exercises control over the rate of time, physical properties, and avatar characteristics), real-world environmental control (including aerogels and 'utility fog' of conformational particles), or Dyson Spheres (updated to the more computation-centric Matrioshka Brains of iterative shells feeding on the interior neighbor's waste energy).

It's like Stross read Kurzweil and decided to tell us some of the same projections without putting us to sleep. For me, it was a very new kind of sci-fi that I hadn't really read before. Virtual selves and intelligent matter had only gone so far in my prior reading.

I missed the romance of ship-show style space explorations with humans as we are now bringing our environments with us and learning abroad. But the stark contrast of living in hybrids with our digital selves and converting all available dumb matter into computronium was interesting and new as a result. Like Kurzweil predicted, we ultimately find evidence that the matter of entire galaxies has been converted into unified intelligences, thinking thoughts we can only speculate about.

Narratively, it follows three generations of the Macx family to and through the technological singularity that changes what it means to be human, then puts survival at risk by our "Vile Offspring" of sentient corporations and legal instruments that come to dominate the power and bandwidth-rich inner solar system. In each generation, the family is somehow at the center of the ever-faster shifts occurring in our "light cone" of the universe. Each decade is called out and introduced with its major struggles and developments and each has specifically predicted obstacles that humans must overcome or risk either extinction or becoming something that could no longer be called human. In Stross' narrative, we somehow thread the needle by the end, on both counts.

One of my favorite details is that the orchestrating force behind the family's environment turns out to be (view spoiler).

Another is that, when we finally do get a signal and make contact with an alien civilization, we are duped. (view spoiler)(less)

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Aug 30, 2012 Stephen rated it 3 of 5 stars

I don't remember whether I ever stated it, but I place a lot of value on new ideas. In this sense of the word, Accelerando did fairly well. However, there were problems that I don't feel comfortable going into unless you have already read it. I don't like to ruin books for people, so I will just say read it with the knowledge that every section is probably around 90% as interesting as the section preceding it, but that it is worthwhile book if you enjoy being presented with new ideas.

***** SLIGH...more

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Jun 29, 2012 J.L. Dobias rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-shelf-10

Accelerando by Charles Stross

The last thing this book needs is another review. It seems to run the whole gamut of stars in the system. It's that type of book that has a love hate relationship. There seem to be a lot of complaints about the overflow of cyber geek talk which doesn't surprise me. What did surprise me is that I went right through this book with only a couple pauses to look up words. It seems I cut right through the geek talk without flinching. Maybe I should say blissfully through....more Accelerando by Charles Stross

The last thing this book needs is another review. It seems to run the whole gamut of stars in the system. It's that type of book that has a love hate relationship. There seem to be a lot of complaints about the overflow of cyber geek talk which doesn't surprise me. What did surprise me is that I went right through this book with only a couple pauses to look up words. It seems I cut right through the geek talk without flinching. Maybe I should say blissfully through. Since it might be argued that I was bliss-ed just enough to remain unaffected.

What some of the longest -geek-speak passages reminded me of was some stuff I'd recently tried to digest at the Depau science fiction studies site.:: http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/... ::this one in particular was what kept coming to mind every time we took a trip down through all the buzzwords and slang from every notion of cyber punk and the socioeconomic of the net. There were complaints that this is not how they will be talking in the distant future. Get real people if you can pick out the slang I will give you that but buzzwords are forever they just shift around in meaning through the years.

I suppose if you can read the articles for the science fiction studies without much pause then Accelerando shouldn't affect you. There is something to say about the characters being a bit distanced and dysfunctional enough that you don't seem to feel for them. I have a feeling that Charles Stross may have been going for that.

Another thing that Charles did was he put together a tough combination of things that would drive any writers forum crazy. Much of this book is written in first person and present tense. Other part seem to be third person- close- and present tense. These alone are not easy tasks to pull off. Then there are those long and greatly punctuated sentences that would grind on the nerves of the OCD driven punctuation people at a certain forum I will leave unnamed here.

Charles pulls this all off well. I would almost guess he might be thumbing his nose at these forums that are trying to spit out cookie cutter writers. All of them clones of the churlish administrator who is still learning to write. And this is where I can see that a few people might not like this book. Not because it is not written well or that it is full of geek-speak but because it doesn't conform to what the majority of books are that are spit out by the presses of the large publishing houses.

Sure there might be some Science in this story that is suspect. It is after all science fiction and the best of them that have started from the most solid what-if have all digressed a bit and wandered off the path. I again think that Charles has done well.

Of course there is the notion that these separate stories do not quite congeal together well even though they are about the members of the same dysfunctional family. To that I say we missed a larger point. These are not just the story of Manfred Macx and his wives and children and grandchildren. This is the story of the birth of an AI (catlike) and its growth into something that transcends its creator.

*Possible spoiler-------------------------------------------------
This is Aineko's story- Aineko is there all the way through the whole story. Right to the end. And I'll admit that its hard to empathize with Aineko but that might be because it's not really human.(less)

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Jun 18, 2012 Kyle Weems rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sci-fi

Split into nine short stories, Accelerando follows three (more or less) generations of a family in the period before, during and after the emergence of a tech singularity in the Solar System, and the consequences it has for humanity (and transhumanity, posthumanity, etc).

Although it comes across as a prophetic and cautionary tale about the risks humans will face when we (intentionally or otherwise) generate our own successors in the form of posthuman intelligences that far outstrip our own menta...more

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May 24, 2012 Gabe rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

It is clear that Charlie has some very interesting ideas. Unfortunately, in this book he completely fails to sell any of them.

Over-use of technobabble and technocratic desriptions make the book tedious to read: "Economics 2.0", the post-singularity situation, is central to the book, as is the implication that human minds are too puny to grasp it. Charlie quite consistently refuses to provide the reader with any indication of what might be involved, which is consistent with the assertion and impl...more

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Jan 18, 2012 John rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: cyberpunk-post-cyberpunk-fiction, science-fiction

Accelerando" will surely please many fans of William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling despite its flaws of which some are quite noteworthy. Stross' novel works best as a novel of ideas, depicting the ascent of humanity into a "posthuman" late 21st Century future as seen through the eyes of Manfred Macx and two generations of his descendants. His is an apocalyptic vision of artificial intelligence progressing so rapidly that sentient hive minds reconfigure the inner Solar System to suit...more

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Dec 27, 2011 David rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: science-fiction

Manfred Macx is a "venture altruist," someone who conceives of new technologies and patentable ideas who gives them away for free. He's a successful man because he makes others wealthy, who, in turn, cover all of his expenses. He's trying to be post money, but the IRS, still struggling to pay off America's massive debt, is after him. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem for a man like Macx, but the agent in charge of the investigation is his estranged, dominatrix wife. While on the lam in Amster...more Manfred Macx is a "venture altruist," someone who conceives of new technologies and patentable ideas who gives them away for free. He's a successful man because he makes others wealthy, who, in turn, cover all of his expenses. He's trying to be post money, but the IRS, still struggling to pay off America's massive debt, is after him. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem for a man like Macx, but the agent in charge of the investigation is his estranged, dominatrix wife. While on the lam in Amsterdam, he gets a call from a net-based AI built from the uploaded brain scans of lobsters that works for KGB.ru. It seems that the lobsters want to defect and escape the domineering influence of humanity and they need Macx's help.

If that sounds strange, it's only the beginning. We follow three generations of the Macx clan as they cope with the rapidly increasing pace of technological advancement, expansion of the human race into the solar system, and the decline of civilization as we know it.

Stross sets a heady pace here. He packs more ideas into a single chapter than most writers do in an entire novel. It's easy to get lost, but Stross provides omniscient narrator infodumps in each chapter that sound like newsreels from the first half of the 20th Century. But even with the help, there's nothing to help us stay connected with the characters. In fact, the reader must actively re-connect with them as the jumps in the narrative break the continuity. It was hardest to do with Amber, Manfred's daughter. She goes from rebellious pubescent girl on the run from her domineering mother to founding a kingdom/infohaven on one of Jupiter's moons without any sort of transition. But before we can adjust to this new setting, she's uploaded a copy of herself to an interstellar probe. Now I understand that the book is composed of a series of short stories, but for the collection which is Accelerando, I would've preferred new material that tied the individual stories together and delete the obvious repeated background which were necessary for the short stories to stand alone.

The accelerated pace of technological advancement reads like a Ray Kurzweil wet dream; something for the Singularity crowd to swoon over. Being that the time from when an author writes his manuscript to when it sees print takes some time, I thought Stross bought into Wired's fantasy puff piece: "The Long Boom," written pre-dotcom bubble burst, in which the dotcom boom was never going to end. Fortunately, Stross doesn't buy into that and he doesn't paint the Singularity as all shiny either. Instead, bad things happen as the offspring of post-humanity threaten us with extinction!

In case all of my grumbling has obscured matters, I'll reiterate that I loved reading Accelerando. Where else can self-aware corporations wielding lethal pyramid schemes do battle at an interstellar network router orbiting a neutron star with uploaded personalities fleeing an all-consuming Martioshka Brain? If your curiosity outweighs your confusion, then pick up a copy of this book. (less)

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Sep 01, 2011 Andrew rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

I have a soft spot for the classic SF “fix-up”—a book that began as short stories and was later Frankensteined into a novel. It’s a concept that is common to classic SF, due to the fact that the genre emerged from pulp magazine roots, which were the province of short stories and serials. (Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Sturgeon’s More Than Human are two of the most famous examples of successful fix-ups—and personal favourites of mine). I’m not sure why I enjoy the fix-up so much. Somethin...more

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May 19, 2011 Ryal rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Alright, first with the dealbreaker.

The first 50 pages are so confusing that, even after my second readthru, I can't tell you what Economy 2.0 is all about. I can grasp its theories, but don't ask me to explain it to you because, I can't. There is so much information to take in on those first 50 pages, it seems like you're being rushed through 250 pages. It seems that this was the author's purpose and I give him kudos for that. I just know that it seems if you are not into hard sci fi, you will...more Alright, first with the dealbreaker.

The first 50 pages are so confusing that, even after my second readthru, I can't tell you what Economy 2.0 is all about. I can grasp its theories, but don't ask me to explain it to you because, I can't. There is so much information to take in on those first 50 pages, it seems like you're being rushed through 250 pages. It seems that this was the author's purpose and I give him kudos for that. I just know that it seems if you are not into hard sci fi, you will not make it past those first 50.

If you do manage to complete that feat, you are now free to take a break and relax. The whole story revolves around what some scientists believe is called a Singularity. It is the point at which the total computing power in our solar system surpasses the total brain power of the human race. Another definition could also be the moment computers are smarter than us.

Keep in mind that this book's spacetime spans over several generations of the main protagonist's family. I say spacetime because, most of the family aren't even on earth for most of the book and the later generations are spread further apart due to longevity drugs being discovered early on. There are even prolonged periods of time where a version of a character(it gets complicated) is downloaded into a version of cyberspace(Yes, there are more than 1).

(view spoiler)

All in all, this book's ideas are all the way out there. The ending is imaginative. It is a great read.(less)

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May 03, 2011 Daniel Roy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: sf

The heart of Stross' Acceledando deals with a concept that is dear to present-day SF authors and futurists: that of the Vingean singularity, a theoretical point in our near-future where technological progress will move so quickly that all futurist prediction models are useless. Disregarding the fact that futurism has yet to come up with a single prediction model that works besides Moore's Law, the concept of a point in history where technology accelerates towards infinity is definitely worthy of...more The heart of Stross' Acceledando deals with a concept that is dear to present-day SF authors and futurists: that of the Vingean singularity, a theoretical point in our near-future where technological progress will move so quickly that all futurist prediction models are useless. Disregarding the fact that futurism has yet to come up with a single prediction model that works besides Moore's Law, the concept of a point in history where technology accelerates towards infinity is definitely worthy of a little SF exploration.

Although the Vingean singularity has been discussed in previous SF works (none the least by Vernor Vinge, after which the concept is named), Charles Stross proposes to actually walk the reader through the times leading up to it, then through it and its aftermath. This clearly places the novel in the realm of Big Ideas, and on that promise, it deliver. In spades.

Quite frankly, Accelerando dwarfs even Stephen Baxter's best works (such as Manifold: Time) in terms of mind-boggling concepts per square inch. Stross, with the carelessness of the truly gifted, tosses about big ideas faster than the reader can juggle them. This is a book for nerds, written by a proud one: it talks about galactic routers, AI taking over Humanity, sentient economics, and Matrioshka brains, all within the span of a single, coherent story.

It's a good thing these concepts are so strong and resounding, because plot-wise, Accelerando is a little thin. The main character, Manfred Macx, is some sort of copyright anarchist that's just too cool for the world he lives in, and frankly, there's not much to love about him. Things get a bit better with his daughter Amber, but not by much. The main problem is that Stross chose extraordinary individuals to present extraordinary times, thus missing an opportunity to make the strangeness of emerging posthumanism resound on a more intimate level with the reader.

In conjunction with this, there is the fact that not much happens in the personal lives of the protagonists. Events on a galactic scale unfold around them and, yes, change their lives, but the protagonists do little more than witness them, ponder them a little, and move on. This might be made worse by the fact that the novel is actually a collection of 9 short stories, published by Stross over a period of time; but there is little sense of progression and action, and a lot of contemplation. Luckily, it's not so bad considering how cool the changes happening around turn out to be, but it's frustrating to see uninteresting characters worry about their personal relationships while god-like AI are busy dismantling the solar system to build a super-computer.

Another annoyance I have with Accelerando is that, despite the alien world it tries to depict as the novel advances, the author's metaphors and points of reference remain deeply rooted in the present. It's especially annoying at the start of the novel, meant to take place 20 years from now, where multiple references are made to current-day netspeak, such as 'Slashdot effect' and 'blogging'. This plants the first chapters of the novel firmly in wha I call 'nerd porn' territory, a SF style that cares more about pandering to modern-day technophiles than establishing believeability. To think the term 'blog' will be cool in 2025 is as silly as those old 50's SF novels that used 'atomic' and 'laser' every 2 sentences. I already spoke about this problem with Stross' style in my review of Singularity Sky, and thankfully it's not as bad this time around.

Fortunately, the 'nerd porn' effect dissipates after the first 3 chapters (although a particular reference to 9/11 in the final chapter of the novel was especially cringe-worthy), and Stross picks weirder and weirder concepts to throw at the reader. Ultimately, the novel is a satisfying joyride for the brain, and well worth a look by any SF afficiando.

As a side-note, Stross spends a lot of time discussing DRM in the first chapters of Accelerando, and it's worth pointing out that he totally put his money where his mouth is: Accelerando is available for download for free, as Mr. Stross decided to make his published book available under a Creative Commons licence. If you're interested, you can download the ebook from the author's official website. And if, like me, you end up enjoying it, be sure to pick up a printed copy for your own book collection, or to give to a friend. This sort of initiative is just too good not to encourage.(less)

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Jan 01, 2011 Nick rated it 5 of 5 stars

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Confusing at times, but that's sorta to be expected when talking about the singularity. Lots (lots!) of little references, I was happy to recognize many of them (and made notes to look up others). Definitely a dense book. Totally worth it.

25: Two more ideas salvaged from the risk of tide-pool monopolization, set free to spawn like crazy in the sea of memes.

61: ... offering him a disquieting glimpse into the world of the terminally future-shocked. He is surprised to find that not understanding _i...more

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About Charles Stross

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

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“The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)” — 3 people liked it

“Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.” — 3 people liked it

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