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The 5th Book: Accelerando

Accelerando Cover.jpg If Charles Stross’ goal with Accelerando was to explode the reader’s head, he succeeded with this customer. I’m not sure that’s a good thing though.

First off, Accelerando is built out of nine short stories. This is not made obvious within the paperback edition (or I missed it in the cover notes, intro, etc.) so it doesn’t quite read like a complete novel. For the first couple of chapters, the temporal leaps between tales are disorienting. And since these are nine distinct stories, while there are common elements, there’s not really a unifying plot.

The [nine stories](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando_(book)) break down into three segments of three, chronicling characters from three generations of the Macx family: Manfred, his daughter Amber, and her son Sirhan. Events in Accelerando start from Manfred’s near future world, similar to ours where the onset of The Singularity is beginning. Amber lives in a post-Singularity, but still human oriented milieu. However, post-AI entities are starting to compete with humanity for domination of the solar system. Finally, Sirhan emerges in a world where planetary matter is being turned into “computronium” and humans are being banished from their home planets. Lesser beings and species are suffered existence as long as they stay out of the super-intelligence’s communication lines. This apparently is the natural order of the universe.

Stross’ attempts to stuff every sentence with a reference or nod to some aspect of singularity based Nerd Rapture. The flux of advanced concepts quickly becomes overwhelming. If the goal is to illustrate how a rapidly accelerating pace of technical advancement would feel to a lesser being, consider Accelerando a success. However, an accessible, completely coherent literary work this is not. The book is not without its charms, and is elegantly playful in spots, but it takes a lot of work on the reader’s behalf.

I’m sort of on the fence about Accelerando. On the one hand, I think it’s good enough that people I respect would get something out of reading the book. On the other hand, I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend Accelerando to them. If you’re a Stross completist, or into hard Singularity science fiction, then this is your book.

For more on Stross in general, check out this “Charles Stross book event”, hosted by Crooked Timber. A number of luminaries, e.g. Paul Krugman, comment on various of Stross’ work, although there are some notable omissions, like The Atrocity Archives.

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