Accelerando (Singularity)

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.

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.

Charles Stross has written expansively on the concept of the Vingean Singularity, where the rate of technological advance increases so rapidly that the future cannot be foreseen. In Accelerando he charts the course of three generations of the Macx family before during and after the singularity. The novel was originally a series of self contained short stories and is very episodic. As such, there is a series of events that are all resolved within the same chapter only to come unravelled at the start of the next. However, all the smaller story elements fit into a greater arc chronicling humanity's rapid rise, obsolescence and recovery. Stross's writing is excellent, although computer literacy is a must. Indeed, this isn't an easy read but it is quite a ride and well recommended.

I've been discovering Stross' novels in highly non-chronological order. "Singularity sky" impressed the *beep* out of me with its combination of imagination and humor, and some of his other novels have also been very enjoyable. But THIS one...this one goes a little beyond mere enjoyment. SF writers are actually notoriously bad at accurately predicting the future. The danger is in extrapolating trends - "extrapolating" is roughly the same as "getting it wrong". So, no Soylent Green ("Make room, make room"), no eco-catastrophe (lots of novels from the 60s), etc. Knowing that, an author has to work pretty hard to make us suspend our disbelief. Suspension of disbelief is not the same as hanging it by the neck until it's dead! Stross manages this so well in "Accelerando" it's frightening. He makes the impact on technology on human society, identity and consciousness totally believable. Of COURSE our consciousness is going to be decentralized, split between bits still running in the old wetware and bits running as external agents on other platforms. Of COURSE there's going to be a Singularity (and this is the most believable one I've read about yet). And of COURSE there's a perfectly societal response to all that. The characters are still recognizably human, but sometimes just barely. One particularly well-written passage has one of the main characters lose his external computer support (disguised as a pair of specs) through which he was running many of his supplementary agents and programs. He is like a man with brain damage after that. He can still function, but his thought processes are..alien to us. Stross is also very fond of casually tossing HUGE concepts into half a sentence during a conversation. I kept cracking up at his mention of what were essentially self-aware financial instruments - your options are coming to GET you! This is a wonderful book. Dazzling, captivating, occasionally very funny and just a damn good read. Highly recommended. Hugo Award next year.

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.