This is the hardest review I’ve had to write to date! Accelerando by Charles Stross is one of the most insane books I’ve ever read, and I find myself setting here grasping at a way to properly describe it. The book is written as a collection of 9 separate, but heavily connected, short stories dealing with three generations of the Macx family, from early in the 21st century to the end and beyond and explores the repercussions of humianity finally hitting the ‘technological singularity’, the time when the rapid advancement of technology changes the world we live in so much that it’s almost unrecognizable to past generations.

Normally I’d go though a plot outline but it’s hard to do in this case, we start with Manfred, the patriarc of the family as he travels Europe in the 21st century spreading his ideas freely and ‘living 30 seconds in the future’ as he describes it. Then he gets a phone call from some lobsters and it gets real weird. This book moves a mile a minute for the first 3 sections and if you can’t keep up it’ll lose you real fast. There’s a thousand pieces of technological jargon and even more confusing ideas spewed in these chapters that’ll make your head spin if you’re not already deep in into this sort of thing it’ll leave you scratching your head and re-reading whole pages.

From there it slows down a little and we get the story of Manfred’s daughter Amber as she escapes her ‘crazy’ mother Pam by  venturing off to the moons of Jupiter. It’s becomes more standard sci-fi fare as Amber and the family cat (now a massively powerful AI, later a ‘weakly godlike intelligence’) decode and alien signal and find a router that’ll give them access to the galactic ‘Internet’.  They do this by uploading their ‘state vectors’ to a tiny space ship and launching copies of themselves to the router several light years away. The flesh copies stay home.

The final section deals with Amber’s son Sirhan who’s been mostly raised on his own after the living copies of his parents either die or move away. He’s now living of Saturn with refugees of the inner solar system who’ve been displaced by the Vile Offspring, a huge number of weakly godlike intelligences who are dismantling the inner solar system as part of a project to turn all the matter in the solar system into ‘computronium’, or smart matter, to host a massive computer to run their minds. We’re past the singularity and the world is very different place for the surviving humans. They must now, however, escape what they have made.

As I said, this book is insane, however, it is very well written and the characters come alive as you follow their experiences thought he future of the human race. Stross was a computer programmer (and so am I) and you can really see the influence of our current emerging technologies in his writing. Computers progress from wearable personal area networks, to full neural interfaces, to whole mind uploading thought the course of the novel and Stross paints a very concise picture of where he thinks the future lies. The pace of the novel is as fast as Stross predicts our technological advance and as I said before can lose you if you’re not already in a technological mindset going in. This probably isn’t a book for people who aren’t computer nerds but if you are you’ll enjoy it immensely as it doesn’t try to dumb anything down.

As an added bonus, Accelerando can be downloaded for free from Stross’s website.

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Accelerando

P.S.: Warning, if you Google ‘Accelerando’ you’re going to get a bunch of Japanese animated porn…just a heads up.