This book is fantastic hard SciFi in the emergent post-human genre. From what I can gather, this book has done for post-humanism what Neuromancer did for cyberpunk. It's a touch dry in some places and the characters are a bit clunky, but I feel Charles is most interested in describing the "singularity" rather than telling a traditional story.Post-humanist writing is obsessed with the concept of "singularity" - a point at which the old ways of doing things (relying on grey matter and the associat...

Very cool book, highly recommended for Stross and hard-SF fans. Stands up pretty well to reread -- some of the early, dopier Manfred Macx stuff drags a bit. Available as a FREE ebook from the author, http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...Here are Stross's story notes, from 2013, "roughly the year in which Accelerando was set, when I began writing "Lobsters" on a rainy day in 1998." SPOILER WARNING: you probably shouldn't read these notes before you read the book...."Accelerando" as a whole doe...

Can Hype Machines Think?Stopped at p. 289. This book has been haunting me for months, and it isn't even that long. The idea of finishing it began to seem like a chore several weeks ago, and at some point I realized that at my steadily decelarating (ha!) reading pace it would haunt me for months more if I didn't just stop.This is clearly supposed to be a fun, bubbly, readable book. What turned it into such an albatross?I guess the problem is a fundamental difference between my worldview and the w...

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...

Charles Stross is more intelligent than me. His intelligence oozes through the book on every page, but unfortunately intelligence is not the only quality needed to make a book entertaining. I won't rehash the plot as it's available above. Suffice it to say that this is Stross' concept of humanity's movements from a post-cyberpunk, connected reality through transhumanism into post-humanism, and our stumbling attempts to connect with alien intelligences as well as deal with the increasing hostilit...

Hard SF. Three generations of an entrepreneurial family invent and scheme and survive the singularity, the point where artificial intelligence power bypasses old-fashioned organic brains, and humans first augment themselves, then disassemble the planets to build a solar-system wide computer and become something else entirely.What a disappointment. I can forgive unapproachable characters in hard SF, and frequently have. I tried hard to cut some slack, because the point of the book is the screamin...

I am trying so hard, but I still haven't read a Charles Stross I like as much as I like his twitter feed, and that makes me frustrated. I want to fall in love with his books! This gets closer than the two I've previously read, but not quite there. It's a good book, but I'm still a little on the fence. Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.In the meantime, you can read the entir...

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...

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...

The The Fractal Prince meets The Ware Tetralogy. There is a lot going on in these pages. Everyone's mileage is going to vary but for me, BDSM is a deal-breaker. This story would have succeeded just fine without it and it limits the recommendation I can give for the book. Which is sad because this is the first Stross book I didn't absolutely love.

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....

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 beca

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

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...

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...

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...

This book starts off with a headache inducing deluge of acronyms and technogadgetideas, some of which are well known realities now. It's something that might be familiar to readers of some other Stross books, for instance the ones set in a near future Scotland e.g. Halting State. A geek-guru makes a living from freebies given by grateful companies he puts in touch with other grateful companies in order to realise whatever mad idea he's come up with next.The future overtakes even him, though, and...

‘Widespread intelligence amplification doesn’t lead to widespread rational behavior.’In the show Party Down there is a character played by Martin Starr that loves to condescend everyone and insist ”I’m into Hard Sci-fi.” While reading Accelerando by Charles Stross, I kept thinking that it is the perfect book that he would be into. I mean, its undeniable this book is brilliant and conceptually it will blow your mind. Stross dares to depict the undepictable of a post-singularity humanity in a ultr...

"From the book itself:"An old-fashioned book, covering 3 generations, living through interesting times... A work of postmodern history, the incoherent school at that - how do you document people who fork their identities at random, spend years dead before reappearing on the stage, and have arguments with their own relativistically preserved other copy? ... I thought that perhaps as a narrative hook I'd make the offstage viewpoint that of the family's robot cat."Yep. That about sums it up.(That q...