Name: Accelerando
ISBN: 9781841493893

Charles Stross

His most ambitious novel to date, ACCELERANDO is a multi-generational saga following a brilliant clan of 21st-century posthumans. The year is some time between 2010 and 2015. The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake. He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much. And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world - and the world of his descendants - is turned on its head.

Accelerando

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 accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan; Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity. For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form...

Pierre

Fantastic book all in all but the ending was a bit short and abrupt.

Gavin

A scary family-dynasty epic told at that point in history where generational gaps grow unbridgeably vast on the spume of telescoping technological progression. First book is a wonderful freewheel through the near-future, with his technolibertarian booster protagonist – Sam Altman meets Richard Stallman meets Ventakesh Rao – running around as midwife to the future. Includes a nepotistic jaunt through Edinburgh because why not (it's a tech town after all). It is funny and prescient about our dependence on feeds and open-source expansion. 

  Welcome to the early twenty-first century, human.
It’s night in Milton Keynes, sunrise in Hong Kong. Moore’s Law rolls inexorably on, dragging humanity toward the uncertain future. The planets of the solar system have a combined mass of approximately 2 x 1027 kilograms. Around the world, laboring women produce forty-five thousand babies a day, representing 1023 MIPS of processing power. Also around the world, fab lines casually churn out thirty million microprocessors a day, representing 1023 MIPS. In another ten months, most of the MIPS being added to the solar system will be machine-hosted for the first time.


The confusing part is that the first third of it is among my favourite books and I recommend it often. But the later books work less well; they become less and less convincing as we reach the singularity (his grasp of the physics and the economics of computers and space is characteristically excellent, and it's all hard enough) - more and more of that omniscient voiceover guy is needed. 
Not everyone is concerned with the deep future. But it’s important! If we live or die, that doesn’t matter—that’s not the big picture. The big question is whether information originating in our light cone is preserved, or whether we’re stuck in a lossy medium where our very existence counts for nothing. It’s downright embarrassing to be a member of a species with such a profound lack of curiosity about its own future, especially when it affects us all personally!

I agree with Kahneman, though, that it's wrong to put as much weight on a weak ending as people tend to; the experiencing self, who was deeply impressed most of the time, should not be relegated so.

  In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and brittle.


As always, many incredible thoughts embodied in very vivid scenes – it deserves the technical glossary supplied by fans here - and you've no regrets about spending time with him. But again I've the patronising sense that he fluffed it.


Book I 5/5, Book II 3/5, Book III 2/5. 

[Free! here.]

Jiahao Chen

Too much technology mumbo-jumbo. It's hard to figure out the plot in the soup of hot-sounding buzzwords. But maybe it's also because I've always thought that the Singularity concept was silly.

Taylor

Life is too short to finish long novels that are basically just mad libs versions of run on sentences where all the blanks prompt [arcane almost-technology], [the future is scary!!!], or [quantum whatever-the-fuck]. 

Once I got used to the writing style, the first half went by in a breeze. But eventually the plot thins out to “future cat! aliens! crypto-fasco-anarcho-hierarchical bureaucracies! 10,000 clones of this *one guy*!” and it just turned into a slog.

Cindy Lieberman

This sci-fi novel is far out....Really far out into the future, describing a post-singularity where our uploaded selves take on different forms, remake the solar system and, well, much of it is beyond my ken. I still found it a fascinating mind trip, and Stross’ humor makes it an enjoyable ride.

Jan Jackson

Yep. Not bad. Very dense, very stop/go. A bit like Dune for Byte babies. Dynastically disparate ( I can't keep track of one personality, so I'd have no chance with all my spawned ghosts). I liked the fact that to be human was not necessarily to be contained. And there's no doubt that CS has ideas to spare, but at times I thought I was on a fast Tiki tour of ideas, with never enough time to let them develop. I disliked the ending. My bag.

Nat Welch

Bit of a trip. I really liked the first arc (very near-future cyberpunk), but the second and third got a little too sci-fi for me. Worth a read if you like thinking about philosophy, individuality and Artificial Intelligence.

dead line

I had high hopes, but it just wasn't for me.

Parts of it were good, but it mostly felt muddled and unclear.

I feel like the author lacked restraint in posing his ideas. I could see this being a positive for some people, but for me it was exhausting. He was onto the next half formed futuristic jargon-filled element, before I had time to parse the previous one.

There was no structure to it, things happen with abruptness.

2.5/5

Carlo Zottmann

Wow, what a book. Contains A LOT of interesting concepts and ideas (smart matter, matrioshka brains etc.). It's not an easy book to grasp (at least not for me), especially the latter half contained a few things which took a while to wrap my head around.