Accelerando [Bargain Price] [Hardcover]

Charles Stross (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• ISBN-10: 0441012841
• ASIN: B000EUKQZU
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,509,304 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Where is the plot?, July 10, 2006

By 

Greger Wikstrand (Höör, Sweden) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Accelerando (Hardcover)

This book has received great acclaims for the many ideas and concepts presented in it — if you trust the raves on the cover. As I see it there are mainly two ideas: 1) convert all available matter to "computronium" and 2) upload yourself, your pets and your companies. What you get is basically an intersolar internet with "ghosts in the machine".

Now try to add a plot to this... Well here is where it fails. The plot is basically non-existing and reading about the same "great ideas" over and over again gets boring after a while.

This book was a disappointment after having read "Singularity Sky " and "Iron Sunrise" by the same author. Exciting books with both ideas and a plot.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Let's Date Our Writing Like A Mofo!, March 7, 2008

By 

Guy Montag (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Accelerando (Hardcover)

I have a hard time disliking Charles Stross. I really do. He writes like someone who's in love with their subject and in a good way. The first book of his that I read, "The Atrocity Archives", sold me at the first Cthulhu reference. "Iron Sunrise" was quite enjoyable also.

But "Accelrando"? Oh god. Where to begin?

One of the noted qualities of good literature is that it ages well. In other words, a reader can pick up the book fifty years after it was written and find it enjoyable. Some even hit the hundred or multiple hundred year mark (Dante, Shakespeare, etc) and have survived so long because they aged well.

If your central character is talking about updating his blog with travel photos and suffering from being Slashdotted in a bar in the very first chapter, you've already dated yourself horribly at this point. Fifty years down the road, people will read this and have a hard time empathizing with it. Hell, three years down the line it's almost making me laugh.

The barrage of pop-culture memes and references aren't helping much either.

When all of these things are dated, irrelevant, or just plain wrong a few years down the line, the book suffers for it. And it's painful to see a good writer suffer for it too.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars realistic novel of the human/transhuman/posthuman transition, January 23, 2008

By 

William B. Swift (Cumberland, MD, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Accelerando (Hardcover)

While characterization and plot is somewhat lacking, it is no worse in those respects than many other hard SF books. Accelerando is THE most realistic novel of the human/transhuman/posthuman transition I have yet encountered. Its history as short stories brought together shows in the structure, but I think that is possibly the best way he could have shown such a difficult and complex issue.