Accelerando (2005)

My expectations were set too high with this book and it could be argued that my low rating is a bit exaggerated. I stand by it, however, because WOW did I not enjoy reading Accelerando. Stross was highly recommended to me by people whose opinions I hold in high regard and I loved the shit out of his A Colder War novella. I was strapped in for a hard sci-fi ride!

Yeah. I wasn't thrilled very quickly and I plodded along in the hopes that things got better. I hated the characters to whom we were introduced. The rapid-fire high vocabulary became tiresome after a few instances. I did learn a few new words throughout the barrage, so it wasn't a futile endeavor. I understand that those passages were meant to show how on-the-ball and superior Manny was, but I can be reminded that I'm dumb only so often in my leisure reading before I surrender and venture forth in search of windows to lick.

I was thrilled when Stross took a page out of Asimov's Foundation series and leaped forward a generation because I hoped I would like this new protagonist. Nope. Add on heaps and heaps of politicking and a brief nod to the question of what makes a person and I just clicked the page bumper on my Kindle hoping it would get better eventually.

It didn't. At least for me. More characters I couldn't stand (and some who would simply disappear without a trace!), more situations I couldn't bother to ponder, and more apathy toward the conclusion. I couldn't even muster enthusiasm for the threat of the explosive annihilation of the Macx family at one point.

So maybe I'm not a hard sci-fi fan. Eh, it happens. I'm not going to hold it against Stross because he still comes highly recommended and did I mention I loved the shit out of A Colder War? On to The Atrocity Archives for redemption. ( )

I've read all of Charles Stross's Laundry novels, which are humorous neo-Lovecraftian espionage adventures. Those involve extensive homages to various earlier writers, with some consequent inflections of writing style. Accelerando is the first of Stross's straight-ahead science fiction books I've digested, and I presume it represents a more direct delivery of his authorial voice. (There's a simulated Lovecraft cameo at page 337, though.)

In subject matter, this book seemed most comparable to the excellent work of Ian McDonald, with an ambitious 21st-century futurology involving radical technologies of simulation, artificial intelligence, and enhancement of human capability. But true to his title, Stross imposes a pace of change far in excess of what I've seen in McDonald's books. He has evidently taken Moore's Law of integrated circuit development and its extrapolation in Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns as the axioms of his story about what might become of our species and our planet. Not only does Stross have the intellectual fortitude to narratively stare down the "technological singularity" but he also confronts Fermi's Paradox. He enlists Ray Bradbury's notion of the matrioshka brain, Robert L. Forward's starwisp, and other inventions that seem inevitable in the face of unchecked technological development.

Given some of the topical focus, I was prepared for the futurological flavor of this book to have something in common with Olav Stapledon's Star Maker. Instead, I was surprised to sense a certain kinship to 1970s-era Robert Heinlein novels. Perhaps Heinlein's orientation to the aerospace research of his day has its analog in Stross's own background in software engineering. Moreover, the characters and their motivations are sketched in the manner that reminds me much more of Heinlein than, say, McDonald.

The novel has a triple-triadic structure, with the nine chapters having seen individual publication as short stories prior to their assembly here. As a consequence, there is something of an expositional "reset" at the start of each part, with a little redundancy and narrative hand-holding. But in light of the huge changes in context imposed by each transition from one part to the next, the effect is barely noticeable, and actually somewhat comforting. Another effect of this compositional process is that each chapter seems to have roughly the same dramatic weight as the others. The last of them could be read equally as climax or denouement, depending on the reader's inclination. Each of the three larger sections is focused on a successive generation of a single family moving deeper into the trans-human condition.

While not as overtly comedic as the Laundry books, Accelerando definitely has its share of laughs, many of them with a black sense of humor, such as the throwaway mention of cannibalistic cuisine on page 262. The characters are strong enough to keep the narrative rolling, despite its frequent interruption with bulletin-style text bringing the reader up to date on the state of (post-)human affairs for the decade in question. The entire book -- excepting the occasional retrospective glance -- is written in the present tense, and it is a mark of Stross's artistry in using this unconventional technique for novel-length fiction in English that I didn't even notice until I had read most of the way through the first large chapter. In the seven years since it has been collected into a novel, history has of course provided some contradictions to point up the status of Accelerando as a fiction, but the sort of events it proposes could still credibly be in our future.

It's a sci-fi book, and tosses around words like singularity and wetware and all kinds of words that seem to be required knowledge for reading sci-fi (since I recognise them from Ken MacLeod's books). To be honest, I'm rapidly discovering I'm out of my depth with a lot of sci-fi. I'm alright with Le Guin, Alastair Reynolds, Tad Williams and Asimov, but a lot of the rest is beyond me.

Most of the book basically flew right over my head. The characters weren't that special, either. About half way through the book I got more interested in it all -- perhaps because I finally got into the world and characters a little.

I'm pretty sure that for someone who reads more sci-fi, or maybe does physics and also knows a bit about business/law, it would have been a really, really interesting book. Some of the ideas intrigued me. It felt very, very fast paced -- which makes sense, considering the speed of the world its set in -- and felt to me like a succession of ideas, none of which were fully realised.

Really, I was left with the overwhelming feeling that I am not the target audience for the book. It's not keeping me from picking up one of Charles Stross' other books, Singularity Sky, but that's only because I already have it. I don't think I'd buy it. ( )

This book, too many words about world building, too little characterisation, and I know Stross can do it because I've read another of his books. Interesting but not satisfying, no-one is particularly engaging and the deus ex machina is kind of a let down. ( )

A geek's delight. ( )