Accelerando
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4.5 • 16 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
His most ambitious novel to date, ACCELERANDO is a multi-generational saga following a brilliant clan of 21st-century posthumans. The year is some time between 2010 and 2015. The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake. He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much. And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world - and the world of his descendants - is turned on its head.
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.
Customer Reviews
This is one of my favourite stories.
Seriously, get this, people. It handles covering multiple generations of characters well, the setting is plausible and shows that even the seemingly utopian society by the end of the story still has flaws. At times, the characters seem to be less differentiated as the story goes on, and begin to merge, but that might be because I'm a habitual skim-reader, and may have missed character bits. I was worried that it was going to devolve into characters becoming a soapbox, an author insert, but that never happened, for which I am greatful.
It is available for free on the author's website, but I advise you all buy it so he can eat, drink, and most importantly, write more.