Accelerando by Charles Stross
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I remember being blown away by this twenty years ago, being flabbergasted by the fantastically rich, almost line-by-line idea smorgasbord of this Strossian youthful exuberance.

It was my first taste of his writing and I was gleeful to be burst apart with the so, so bright idea machine-gun fire.

Singularity fiction may not be for everyone, but a bona fide Rapture of the Nerds is a glorious, if rather ominous, thing.

Enter Accelerando, a saga of three generations, continued, redux, redux again, and redux again as humanity finds its way to ever higher computational states, uploads, re-instantiations, and enough fantastic Easter Eggs throughout the text to choke a colony of post-lobsters in the Oort cloud.

Truly, I think this novel is one of the brightest, kick-you-in-the-pants, funky future SFs I've ever read. A cat that becomes an AI? Klein bottle Earth-instantiation? Lobster astronauts? Visiting a funeral as a cloud of avians?

Or how about the realization that all business entities, once they become AI constructs, turn into basic primordial soup when left to run on their base principles? Muahahahahahaha Faster and faster breakdowns of value turn everything into slime.

Truly, this is one of those unique books that should never be forgotten. The generational stuff is fun and quirky, even if it is also a bit weird, but goodness gracious... THE CAT. Muahahahahahahaha

Post-human SF at its finest.

View all my reviews