Accelerando
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Accelerando

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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

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Clouds  - (¿head-in-the?)

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
Apatt
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
Adam
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
Rob
Feb 25, 2009 Rob rated it 3 of 5 stars  ·  review of another edition 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 critical core. A...more
Morgan
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
Scott
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
Hugh Foster
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
Tim
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
Richard
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
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
Gar
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
Brian
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
John
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
Cathy
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.
Tama Wise
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
Paul
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
Ben Bates
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
Smcleish
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
Laura
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
Nikia
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
Dave
"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
Stephen
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
J.L. Dobias
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
Kyle Weems
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
Gabe
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
John
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
David
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
Andrew
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
Ryal
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
Daniel Roy
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
Nick
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.
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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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More about Charles Stross...
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