Accelerando

by Charles Stross

book data

831 ratings, 3.82 average rating, 132 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		27%
4		38%
3		23%
2		6%
1		2%

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published

June 27th 2006 (first published 2005) by Ace

binding

Paperback, 432 pages

literary awards

2006 Locus Awards Winner (SF); British Science Fiction Association Best Novel nominee (2005); Arthur C. Clarke Award Best Novel nominee (2006); Hugo Best Novel nominee (2006)

isbn

0441014151 (isbn13: 9780441014156)

description

The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have r...more

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09/06/08

Adam rated it:

bookshelves: wtf-idea-gatling-gun-my-head-hurts

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 imp...more

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06/27/07

Rob rated it:

(review of isbn 0441012841)

bookshelves: science-fiction, singularity

Read in September, 2007

recommends it for: accelerationistas!

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 cr...more

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

2 comments

09/26/08

Gar rated it:

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...more

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06/08/09

Catherine rated it:

bookshelves: cyberpunk, science-fiction

Read in June, 2008

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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09/06/07

Tama added it (review of isbn 1841493902)

bookshelves: books-i-never-finished

Read in September, 2007

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....more

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03/19/09

Paul rated it:

(review of isbn 0441012841)

bookshelves: 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...more

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06/16/09

Stantontas rated it:

Read in June, 2009

recommends it for: wired magazine readers, twitterers, SF fans

I'm ambivalent about this. Considered as SF, it's very good. Lots of ideas, pageturner, humour.

But I think I just don't care about hard SF any more. Even the best of it (which I'd class this as) feels like riffs on ideas that are floating around the internet and lacks emotional depth. Post-humans don't interest me, especially if they only vaguely interested me as humans. I find PKD's suburban ennui more convincing and engaging than Wired-magazine handwaving about future shock and all...more

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09/02/07

Raja rated it:

bookshelves: sci-fi

Read in September, 2007

I liked it, but I didn't love it. Some interesting ideas but overall it felt a little too random -- there were so many characters with which we spent so little time that it made it difficult to empathize with most of them.

The ending was brief even compared to the likes of Neal Stephenson, and while it did cover its explanatory bases well it didn't really offer too much in the way of closure.

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11/22/08

Susan rated it:

bookshelves: genre-sff

Read in December, 2008

If I were to outline the plot of this novel, it would look like the most brilliant epic on the the Singularity that has ever been written. And, damn it, that's exactly what it should have been. This is my second book by Charles Stross, and I am concluding that his strong points are quippy prose and great ideas, and his weakness is story.

He may have shot himself down by his raw audacity. This is supposed to be a novel about the Singularity as it is happening. For those of you less...more If I were to outline the plot of this novel, it would look like the most brilliant epic on the the Singularity that has ever been written. And, damn it, that's exactly what it should have been. This is my second book by Charles Stross, and I am concluding that his strong points are quippy prose and great ideas, and his weakness is story.

He may have shot himself down by his raw audacity. This is supposed to be a novel about the Singularity as it is happening. For those of you less into science fiction lore, the Singularity is sf's attempt to reconcile the path of accelerating change (cultural and technological) that the human race has found itself on for at least the last century. Exponentially accelerating change isn't sustainable. Either something is going to cause us to slow down, or eventually we become... something else. Something that couldn't possibly be understood or predicted by the us that exists now. Usually the Singularity is a handwave in some far-future history that doesn't look anything like what we look like now. Charting mankind's path THROUGH the Singularity is definitely the subject of a science fiction epic. And without a doubt, this book has the ideas to pull it off. It just doesn't have the storytelling.

So, this book charts the course of the Singularity through the lives of 3.5 generations of a family in essentially three acts and an epilogue. 50 pages into Act 1, I was riveted and couldn't put it down. Somewhere in Act 2, he lost me.

As an example of what I mean about Stross not having the chops to tell this story, let's talk about economics. This book is FULL of economic terms. Stross clearly is building a world where the effect of technology on economics is crucial to our transformation into a post-Singularity people. This makes a lot of sense, and at first I loved the hard economics SF as a contrast to hard technological SF. So, in Act 1, our hero sits down with another character and discusses the abolition of scarcity. And I thought, "Yeah! Go there! What kind of world will you build with no scarcity?"

Then, not only does he never go anywhere with that, but in Act 2 we race across the galaxy to find an alien civilization with... SCARCITY-BASED ECONOMICS! Sure, you could have saved the story by having the characters think about this, by perhaps postulating that scarcity itself can't be eliminated, only redefined. There are a lot of places you could go with this, and Stross not only fails to go there, he never even seems to notice that he's talking in circles. After a while, every time he brings up economics, it sounds like, "Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! No, not the rabbit I just pulled out of my hat. This is a different rabbit."

He talks constantly about Economics 2.0, but it sounds exactly like Economics 1.0 with more processing power and more complicated AI-driven computer models. Well, I can predict that from here. I don't need a Singularity. Why can't he come up with a new set of economic laws that human beings right now would never think of?

Aye, there's the rub.

And that's not even going into his bizarre fetish for nonsensical lawsuits in a legal system with remarkably consistent behavior over time. Or the nonsequitur use of 20th century media references and slang. He seems to go back to these things like old friends, making the world he's building seem a whole lot less changed than he wants you to believe.

The thing is, Stross talking himself into a corner on economics and law is a side show to the big show. You could have used a lot less detail, sounded like you knew what you were talking about, and moved the plot forward just fine. I almost wish a different storyteller could take his plot outline and write a different story. Or maybe what he needed was a better editor -- did nobody read through and notice? The ideas were so good. The arc was so good. As it is, I'm glad I finished it, but I don't think I'm recommending it.
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05/13/09

Tim rated it:

(review of isbn 0441012841)

bookshelves: sf

Accelerando will make your brain hurt -- but in a good sort of way.[return][return]Actually a unified collection of nine previously published novelettes, Charles Stross may very well have written a seminal work in science fiction. Seminal not only in exploring where humanity may be going in the next several decades but in making a reader think about the societal implications of the growing connection between human life and technology. If you have any doubt about that connection and its importanc...more

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09/11/08

Sam rated it:

Consumed this book like techno-cyber-post-Singularity pringles. Couldn't put it down. The mind shapes this book created have left a longstanding impression. Right now, I am thinking about the future much more than the past.

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05/19/09

Hideoijj added it

Read in June, 2009

It's taking me awhile to get through this one, partly because it's my lunchtime/beach book (actual paper), partly because I find it difficult to care about the characters very much. He's got some very cool ideas though: technology allows us to completely upload ourselves while simultaneously turning all matter in the solar system into nano processors which are made into dyson spheres around the sun. Feral alien self-aware corporate instruments inhabiting a Matrioshka brain 16 light-years from ...more

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01/02/09

Duncan rated it:

bookshelves: science-fiction

when i first started this book i was annoyed, stross was dropping nerd-cred terms and references so often it felt like he was pandering. it took me a good 50 pages before it became clear that stross wasn't just applying a geek patina to his story, but was instead a genuine tech-head.

if i have one criticism - the danger of projecting current technology in to the near future is you have a very real probability of dating your work. it's strange re-reading a novel that's less than 4 yea...more

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12/15/08

Angela rated it:

bookshelves: sf

Read in February, 2009

My reaction to Accelerando can be summed up thus: What the hell did I just read?

This is not to say that I think this is a bad book. On the contrary, there's a lot of hard SF goodness to be found it these pages, from space elevators to computronium, wormhole traversals to Matrioshka brains. All of these things are set off against three generations of a brilliant family at the forefront of the rapid evolution of humanity from the species we know to a godlike collection of intelligences...more

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12/09/08

Noah M. rated it:

(review of isbn 0441012841)

Read in December, 2008

This was a massively scoped look at a possible post-singularity scenario for mankind. It addresses some of the problems with the idea of a technological singularity, and speculates on possible end games for tool using civilizations. I must say that the timeline in this book stretches the ole belief muscles a bit. I just can't imagine us making quite as much progress as he envisions in the next ten years. Oddly, I am quite neatly part of the generation he's writing about. I'm right in the sa...more This was a massively scoped look at a possible post-singularity scenario for mankind. It addresses some of the problems with the idea of a technological singularity, and speculates on possible end games for tool using civilizations. I must say that the timeline in this book stretches the ole belief muscles a bit. I just can't imagine us making quite as much progress as he envisions in the next ten years. Oddly, I am quite neatly part of the generation he's writing about. I'm right in the same age range as the main character, so the changing world he lives through could very well be my generation's fate.

Anyway...

It was good, fast, written like Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash in its crazy, freewheeling approach to the future. I think it was a series of novellas stitched together as a novel, because there was some very unnecessary recaps of earlier events here and there.

Also, this book as AI characters who are uploaded Spiny Lobsters. So that's amazing. I love sea creatures in cyberspace!

I liked it a lot, and it's available for free under the Creative Commons license at Charles Stross's website.

Also, since I've read a bunch of Greg Egan recently (and Egan deals quite a bit in the post-singularity humanity trade), I must say that this book takes an almost literal opposite stance on post-singularity life compared to Egan's future. Stross imagines a brief boom of technology and hope, and then a swift downward spiral as AI begin to become the dominant lifeforms on the planet. Egan never really addresses this. Humans just become software, and that's sort of that for him. AI beings from outside the human experience don't really enter in to the equation. I think I find Stross's vision to be a bit more likely, the lifetime of a tool using species being surprisingly short because of the eventual algal bloom of AI.

So, yeah, read it. There's a good question in there about whether it's okay for Muslims to eat bacon that's been assembled by nanomachines rather than cut from a pig. What do you think on this important issue of the future???

EDIT: I've decided to change my rating to five stars. I've acknowledge that this book is far from perfect. It's pieced together. It stumbles pretty often. But I think about parts of the book on a near daily basis. I'm considering reading it again, which I literally NEVER do...especially not so soon after my initial reading. So, this book has really gotten to me on some level. Five stars seems appropriate for something that's sticking with me like this. I've given five stars for far, far less.(less)

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08/19/08

Tal rated it:

(review of isbn 1841493899)

bookshelves: library-book, sf-fantasy

Read in August, 2008

The year is some time between 2010 - 2015. The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake. Although he lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, even Manfred can take on too much. And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his wo...more

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08/11/08

Michael rated it:

Actually more like 3.5 stars.

Super hard post-cyberpunk for the Cory Doctorow crowd. It showers you with sometimes radically new little ideas constantly (the best are Heinlein style, as asides), but it's at the same time very insular, absolutely written for people who already are into the Singularity, IP issues, and read lots of Boingboing.

As for me, I speak the language but don't buy all the assumptions--that suddenly AI is going to be building itself and outdo our tech...more

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07/20/08

Rowland rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in January, 2009

Accelerando covers a possible future where Artificial Intelligence, nanotechnology, game theory, memes, technological singularities, new economics, trans-humanism, quantum theory and alien technology all play a part. But at its very heart is the story of a family. Surprising, a very traditional family with the same power struggles, resentments and loyalties that go along with that. At times I did find the use of technological babble a bit tiresome, as if to fit every popular reference available ...more

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06/04/08

Nikki rated it:

(review of isbn 1841493899)

bookshelves: speculative-fiction

Read in April, 2008

It's a sci-fi book, and tosses around words like singularity and wetware and all kinds of words that seem to be required knowledge for reading sci-fi (since I recognise them from Ken MacLeod's books). To be honest, I'm rapidly discovering I'm out of my depth with a lot of sci-fi. I'm alright with Le Guin, Alastair Reynolds, Tad Williams and Asimov, but a lot of the rest is beyond me.

Most of the book basically flew right over my head. The characters weren't that special, either. About...more

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05/21/08

Aaron rated it:

Read in March, 2009

recommended to Aaron by: Andrew

So far it seems like ideas I've seen before refurbished for people more comfortable with Linux kernels than other people. Remaining cautiously pessimistic.

Update:
The book was a quick read, if nothing else. Stross has an affinity for stringing together a lot of posthuman ideas into an integrated read. The middle of the book plays to this strength; the characters are far enough into their evolution into post-humanity that Stross can avoid some of his weaknesses as a writer -- mai...more

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