Accelerando (Singularity)
Accelerando (Singularity) book cover

Accelerando (Singularity)

Hardcover – July 5, 2005

by
Price
$34.13
Format
Hardcover
Pages
400
Publisher
Ace Hardcover
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0441012848
Dimensions
6.36 x 1.36 x 9.24 inches
Weight
1.35 pounds

Description

From Publishers Weekly Stross ( Singularity Sky ) explores humanity's inability to cope with molecular nanotechnology run amok in this teeming near-future SF stand-alone. In part one, "Slow Takeoff," "free enterprise broker" Manfred Macx and his soon-to-be-estranged wife/dominatrix, Pamela, lay the foundation for the next decade's transhumans. In "Point of Inflection," Amber, their punky maladjusted teenage daughter, and Sadeq Khurasani, a Muslim judge, engineer and scholar, try to escape the social chaos that antiaging treatments have wreaked on Earth by riding a tin can–sized starship via nanocomputerization to a brown dwarf star called Hyundai. The Wunch, trade-delegation aliens evolved from uploaded lobster mentalities, and Macx's grandson, Sirhan, roister through "Singularity," in which people become cybernetic constructs. Stross's three-generation experiment in stream-of-artificial-consciousness impresses, but his flat characters and inchoate rapid-fire explosions of often muzzily related ideas, theories, opinions and nightmares too often resemble intellectual pyrotechnics—breathtakingly gaudy but too brief, leaving connections lost somewhere in outer/inner/cyber space. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From Booklist *Starred Review* During the last five years, Stross has garnered a reputation as one of the most imaginative practitioners of hard sf. Expanded from several stories originally published in Asimov's Science Fiction, Stross' latest novel follows several generations of the Macx family through the rapidly transforming, Internet-enabled global economy of the early twenty-first century to the human and transhuman populated worlds of the outer solar system a half century later. The saga begins with Macx patriarch Manfred, a freelance "venture altruist," giving away patentable high-tech ideas in exchange for endless handouts while looking forward to the day when nanotech-programmed smart matter surpasses humanity in intelligence and productivity. Fifteen years later, his adolescent daughter Amber is an indentured astronaut trolling the orbit of Jupiter, and by 2070, Sirhan is Amber's permanently space-bound offspring, paying witness to the fruits of his grandfather's early innovations as something ominous and nonhuman is systematically dismantling the planets from Pluto to Earth. Stross has his thumb squarely on the pulse of technology's leading edge and exults in extrapolating mere glimmers of ideas out to their mind-bending limits. His brilliant and panoramic vision of uncontrollably accelerating technology vaults him into the front rank of sf trailblazers, alongside Gibson and Stephenson, and promises to become a seminal work in the genre. Carl Hays Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved A new kind of future requires a new breed of guide-someone like Stross. -- Popular Science From the Inside Flap "A new kind of future requires a new breed of guide-someone like Stross."- Popular Science "Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow." -Gardner Dozois, Editor, Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine Charles Stross "can be compared to Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter, and Vernor Vinge for the depth of his speculations" (Paul Di Filippo , Science Fiction Weekly ) as proven in such innovative hard SF novels as Singularity Sky ("wonderfully inventive"*) and Iron Sunrise ("[a] hard SF masterpiece"**). Now, expanding upon his award-winning short story cycle from the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, Charles Stross presents a startling vision of humanity's inability to cope with rapid technological advancement. 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... An ideological tour-de-force, Accelerando is destined to stand beside Neuromancer and Snow Crash as one of the most seminal works in science fiction. * The Denver Post ** Library Journal "This new brand of science fiction, like all the best SF before it, is not just about predicting the future or pushing an agenda or even plain old entertaining techno-fun. It is all that, but it's also about expanding the boundaries of the possible, building far-out worlds and then populating them with characters who bring the big ideas down to Earth."- Popular Science Praise for Iron Sunrise "A Hollywood thriller with a cyberpunk heart."- Entertainment Weekly "Excellent use of language kept this novel in my saddlebags for immediate access...Worthy and sympathetic characters...taut plotting."- San Diego Tribune "[Stross] has the ability to superimpose an intriguing take on contemporary events over an imaginative story peopled by bizarre characters."- Kansas City Star "Compelling space opera and cutting-edge tech with a tasty dash of satire...Stross skillfully balances suspense and humor throughout, offering readers-especially fans of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod-a fascinating future that seems more than possible."- Publishers Weekly (starred review) "Tense, unpredictable, a mixture of action, slapstick, and histrionics of the kind Stross always choreographs so masterfully... Iron Sunrise is vintage Stross, boisterous and provocative, opinionated and hilarious, and is likely to enhance his standing still further."-Nick Gevers, Locus "Fans of hard SF spiced with political intrigue will relish this dish."- Booklist Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England in 1964. He holds degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance journalist. He is now a full-time writer. Read more

Features & Highlights

  • Desperately trying to cope with the unchecked technological innovations that have rendered humankind nearly obsolete, the members of the Macz family are suddenly confronted by an unknown enemy that is systematically dismantling the planets of the solar system in an effort to annihilate all biological lifeforms. By the author of Singularity Sky.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
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(364)
★★★★
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(303)
★★★
15%
(182)
★★
7%
(85)
★
23%
(278)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Ideas Looking for Work

As a lot of other reviewers have noted, `Accelerando' is teeming with ideas, and they show a lot of promise. In addition, there are also a lot of promises made within the text itself about the use of these ideas in creating a cool story. Unfortunately, the book is largely a record of wilted expectations and unfulfilled promises. There's a good example of this in the 7th story, where one character teases the reader by musing about the difficulties of writing a story about the post-human future, where people can "fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their relativistically preserved other copy." These possibilities could lead to all sorts of interesting plots and literary devices. It's surprising that none of them are exploited in any meaningful sense. There almost seems to be a deliberate effort to avoid dealing with any of the storytelling potential/challenges of the ideas-for example, on the one occasion when a relatavistically preserved copy could meet a stay at home original or copy , the opportunity is thoroughly ruled out.

Instead of exploiting any of these really cool ideas in constructing the plots, `Accelerando' delivers a strange stew of pointless and stereotypical dramatized scenes embedded in a matrix of flat narrative and sketchy scenes which move the story along. There aren't many attempts to maintain or build any sort of tension or interest even considering the chapters as short stories. Incidents, setbacks and ideas are introduced and summarily resolved within a few pages and most are dismissed within a few sentences or paragraphs. An oft-cited distinguishing feature of the post-human is the exocortex. This stems from the brain's development of expanded capacity as a result of the evolution of direct interfaces with technological and software/informational networks. It's a pretty cool idea. However, in the book the exocortex is generally treated as an occasionally useful fashion/information accessory almost indistinguishable from a Blackberry. The exocortex looms large once, when the character Macx has his interface (a pair of glasses) stolen. Anyway, the resulting mess could easily become the backbone of a whole chapter or three , but the final justification for this maimed and hastily dispatched subplot seems to be making fun of a Scottish accent.

`Accelerando' is remarkable for the amount of direct commentary from the person/s telling the story. A fair amount of the narrative is both unmediated and undramatized, so it has an essay-like or sermony quality. I think that several thousand years of storytelling experience suggest that narrators are most effective in such situations when they assume a character (however tenuous) so that the reader can experience the story with them and take the assertions, judgments and feelings of the narrative voices in the right vein. Another lapse in characterization has to do with the chronicling of the disastrous impact of post-Singularity developments on the population that doesn't want to participate in it. Although the nature of the Singularity is such that neither the people facing it nor we are supposed to be able to understand it, that's no reason to avoid showing how it threatens them and how the threat is perceived by its unwilling victims. Lots of authors have come up with good treatments about people dealing with natural and other types of vast, inevitable and incomprehensible catastrophes, and the disaster takes on a character of its own-case in point `A Perfect Storm'.

In the end, `Accelerando' seemed like a hodgepodge of material waiting for some big ideas to pull it together into a first draft.
35 people found this helpful
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This is not your father's science fiction.

By the time I finished ACCELERANDO, I was again reminded how it's just as well that we are, each of us, only so long for this world. With the increasing pace of technological change being what it is, this world is starting to get a little too weird for me already, and I'm not even 50! Imagine living in the mid-21st century timeframe Charles Stross sets his novel against: A time in which the interface between the human mind and the digital realm allows for a genuine expansion of consciousness and the evolution of our species into something new and just a little frightening.

ACCELERANDO deals with three generations of the Macx family, beginning in Manfred, who could have been born in the 1980s and now, as a thirty-something adult, has vast amounts of computer processing power sewn into his clothing and experiences so much of his reality via the web that without his hardware he's all but deaf, dumb, and blind. In Manfred's world we are learning to literally "upload" the brains of living creatures, neuron by neuron, into cyberspace. Later, in the world of Manfred's daughter, Amber, humans can use digital technology to spin off "ghosts," rudimentary copies of their consciences that can worry about rudimentary tasks. By the time Amber's son, Sirhan, starts coming into his own, most of the human beings in the inner solar system have uploaded into cyberspace, the inner planets are being systematically pulverized and turned into raw material for increasing computer bandwidth, and our own sun is little more than an energy source for a growing, almost God-like digital mind. Stranger still is the suggestion that intelligent lifeforms elsewhere in the universe often share similar fates.

Needless to say, ACCELERANDO is highly speculative and ideological, even veering toward satire at times. The novel raises all kinds of provocative questions about the nature of consciousness, identity, and even what we commonly call the soul. In the process Stross throws at the reader all kinds of techno-jargon that we can barely make heads or tails of, though computer geeks will probably have a easier time of it. For me, this made the novel rather difficult to absorb at times, and the parts that take place in purely virtual reality got a bit annoying.

And yet I couldn't shake the suspicion that maybe Charles Stross is really on to something here. 200 years ago a 70 year old and a 17 year old could carry on a conversation in mutually understandable terms. Today that's just not possible, and the pace of technological change is accelerating ever more. Technology, specifically digital computer technology, is shaping who we are as humans and what our society is becoming. Resistance is futile.
22 people found this helpful
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Jargon porn.

I was looking forward to reading this one, but in the end I barely made it through. Stross shovels on an unbelievable amount of jargon from page one, and that's all there really ever is. I never got the sense that Stross was ever interested in making this more than an bolted together mess of the current hot topics in Sci Fi.

The characters are two dimensional, poorly formed and motivated, and undergo almost no development. You never get the sense that they're anything more than jargon mouthpieces - with the one exception, they largely march through the plot, never really taking in, reacting to, or feeling anything. The bold print passages that link what I'm assuming were formerly independent short stories seem rushed. And don't even get me started on the endless run-on sentences...

In the end, I'd hoped for a lot more given the hype surrounding this book.
17 people found this helpful
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hard core singularity scifi

An excellent look at the next century from an author who not only believes in the singularity, but looks beyond to see where it will take us on all levels. Good hard science, but interesting characters too. It's presented as a series of chapters which appear at first almost like a collection of short stories, but in reality they link together seamlessly. This almost put me off when I first saw the structure, but it works brilliantly, and allows him to cover a century in detailed chunks, without having to write a 15-novel saga.

If you've enjoyed other Stross novels, or other hard sci-fi writers like Alastair Reynolds, then you will love this book.
8 people found this helpful
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Thought provoking visions

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.
5 people found this helpful
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An Amazing Work Whose Form Fits Its Subject Matter

This book is all about future shock and the accelerating pace of technology which reaches the point that humans are no longer equipped to deal with it. The book itself is so loaded with rapid fire ideas and technological spin-offs that it is in itself an example of its own subject matter. I have a technological background, but there was much here that I had to re-read several times to get the references, and still didn't get it all, I'm sure. This is Science-Fiction which is about as close to the limit of how "high bit rate" it can become without becoming inaccesable to an audience at all.

Like Finnegan's Wake for techno-nerds, it almost needs annotations for the average reader to keep up with all the ideas it spins off- i.e. using sentient beings as currency, reducing the entire mass of the solar system to computronium, self-replicating 3-D printers, star travel as data downloads, and on and on, laced with lots of casual techno-speak, some of it newly minted here. Stross even manages an explanation for Fermi's paradox (If there are advanced civilizations on other worlds, why haven't they come visiting?).

People have complained that the characters are flat, and that is true, but this somehow fits with the subject matter. Human beings, such as ourselves, faced with such a constant barrage of future shock are likely to end up stunned and unable to keep up with the characters' intellectual motivations. These people's motivations are very complex as they react to their environment, and often their actions are related to technical issues we may not even understand. Thus it is natural that we don't relate well emotionally to the characters. In this way, the book and its effect on the reader mirrors its subject matter, whether intentionally or otherwise.

This book is an amazing achievement but also disturbing in its treatment of Vingean singularity. It makes you wonder if it is inevitable that humans become obsolete.
3 people found this helpful
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Imaginative, Frightening, and All-Too Believable

Accelerando begins in the not-too-distant future, and spins the tale of a family living during the techno-pseudo-rapture of humanity from physical form to digitized representations living in a Matrioshka brain. The conflict that develops between "meat" humans and "post" humans forms the basis for most of the story. What makes this unpalatable situation so frightening is that the steps leading to it each seem relatively benign and harmlessly logical.

One striking aspect of this work is that it was the first bit of science fiction I've read that actually left me feeling as though people living today could see the events described in the book unfold. While the malleable world available to silicon "uploads" certain sounds fun, there is also a dehumanizing element -- how can creatures "born" in a world where death is virtually impossible understand why it's bad to harm physical entities? What worth does a person have if any necessary physical posessions can be congealed out of smart goo/nanomachines at virtually no cost? What value does one have in an information economy when your brain has a fraction of the computing power of your bedroom wall?

My only minor gripe with the book is the ending is a bit abrupt, and didn't quite ring true to me. Still, the fascinating glimpse of a possible future and the enjoyable trip through the first few gigaseconds of post-singularity human history are enough to leave me very satisfied.
3 people found this helpful
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Some "technus interruptus" does not diminish a great hard sci-fi read

Okay, so the novel began life as a series of short stories, this is obvious as you read through. There are sections of text that both explain the surroundings and historical situation at that moment as well as bridging together leaps of time and location. These seem intrusive and detracted from the overall flow of reading, but I can't deny that they were in needed to make sure you "got it" and weren't wondering/wandering how we got here. The core of the book for me were the truly original concepts of the future and our evolution, the hard core science part of the fiction, regarding the conversion of our solar environment to computational material and nano-transformational matter, and how we expand our sense and reach of self beyond our physical limits. This was great stuff. It was both the base atmosphere of this literary environment and a key to generating suprises and twists. Are we directing our own future or are our inventions directing it/us? And if there are aliens, wouldn't they evolve this way as well? The story kept me entranced and entertained AND started me thinking. And for me that is a good book.
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Great, hard sci-fi

This book freed my mind man! I'm no longer constrained to the 21st or even 20th century mindset that holds back the rest of you. I have seen the future and I am riding its wave to bigger and better things.

But it also alienated me from society. I can no longer have a conversation with untouched minds without receiving puzzled stares or forced smiles. I'm a stranger in a strange land.

Fear not. This conflict only serves to heighten my sense of responsibility. I will drag this spinning ball of meat and matter to its destiny sooner rather than later. And you will all thank me.
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The future has never been so dense with ideas

I slogged through Accelerando rather rapidly despite its density. I have never seen anything like this writing, which includes mind-boggling concepts as stagecraft as we move into a post-singularity future. These concepts appear in bewildering thickets of verbiage on every single page. Occasionally, in slightly darker type, the book will do summaries of developments before plunging back into the doings of its many related characters. Such things as the disassembly of the inner planets into nanoparticles that reassemble as computronium and form Dyson spheres--pardon me--CONCENTRIC Dyson spheres around the sun, the innermost of which converts solar energy into calculation and feeds its waste heat to the next layer, etc. Matrioshka brains. The main characters are Manfred Macx, his two wives, his daughter, who in one incarnation for a time is the queen of the kingdom that floats in orbit around Jupiter for a while, and her son, who comes in later of course. Macx, when we first encounter him, is a supergenius who gives away (after patenting) each of his brilliant ideas to help various entities, nations, worlds, build whatever it is he conceived of and thereby become wealthy, so that early in the book, we are in a post-capitalist society... And then there's the cat, an AI entity in the form of and with many of the characteristics of normal cats, who or which takes on increasing importance as the plots develop. Anyway, if you enjoy having your mind boggled on every page of a 400+ page book tour of the future of--if not mankind, then Intelligence itself--this book will do that.
1 people found this helpful

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