Customer Reviews

Accelerando

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

ACCELERANDO(2001-2004) is actually a series of recently-published short stories, combined into a novel.

It took me a few pages to come up to speed with the author's writing style, which reminds me a lot of Harlan Ellison's writing style. Once I got the hang of it, I started blasting through the pages quickly, it was easier to spot the numerous humorous passages, and was easier to keep track of the rapidly-changing technology (the main character from the first chapters uses the Internet to issue new patent applications and front companies at an expanding exponential rate, before his wife's divorce lawyer starts suing his companies using a similar online ruse).

I've got to give the author credit for attempting all these short-range predictions... while most may come out looking silly in 15 years, it sure is fun to consider that even some of these technologies might be possible within the next few decades.

I've read most of Stross' work, and enjoyed it all. This book was a roller coaster of ideas, using the history of a key family to pull the reader along. Was it complicated? Yes. Was it very technical? Yes. But that's all part of the fun. I really enjoyed this book, and found the future history it proposes frighteningly believable and just around the corner.

As for it becoming dated and irrelevent too soon - I just re-read the E.E.Doc Smith Lensmen series, where space ships were controlled by teams of people doing calculations (no computers), but that dated content didn't make the series any less enjoyable.

While I will acknowledge that Stross' depiction of the future is imaginative, this book is devoid of both plot and characterization. It is no more than a bombastic showcase of his numerous technological ideas and an exercise in self-indulgence.
To use one of his terms, this book is "dumb matter."

I just finished reading the book for the 3rd time since it was released. I found the concept utterly fascinating and his world infinitely vast, intellectually and scientifically bright, stimulating and hip. Imagine taking Cory Doctorow, strapping him to a relativistic rocket and seeing what he looks like in a few hundred years of breakneck societal and technological change.

Although the book suffers from a little "Neal Stephenson ending" (where the book is so powerful it becomes impossible to conclude it gracefully) and the character development slows down after the first few chapters, the unbelievable journey it takes you and humanity is worth the price of admission.

It's still on the bookshelf of novels I will read again. As a previous reviewer stated, resistance is futile.

Another great novel on the singularity by Stross. If you liked Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise, you'll like Accelerando. Like his previous work, he's a non-stop idea factory, turning out a new idea every few pages (although this slows down in the second half of the book). But it's not just ideas that are his strong suit, he follows through with the ramifications of a post-human civilization and what could become of it. Great story and interesting characters.

While Mr. Stross is bursting with some amazing ideas, he really lacks a clarity of prose and exposition that leaves me feeling like I got bees in my brain. Grab your tech dictionary, acronym list, and a lot of patience for this one. I gave it a good try based on all the good press and the Hugo nom, but it gave me a headache.

This book is incoherent. I read plenty of Sci-fi and saw some of the rave reviews and thought I would try this novel. What a mistake- I could not get past the first 30 pages. After that I just flipped through the pages without reading them to see, in vain, if something would grab me. I could not understand what was going on, or what this book was about. I dont understand how someone could write so incoherently. A possible explanation is that some of the reviews mention that this book was originally separate stories.

I think the author has a great imagination, is creative and has innovative concepts with respect to cyber technology. However, none of that resulted in a novel that I could comprehend.