I'll mention the bad stuff first. This book, particularly the first half, was a difficult read. I was considering stopping reading it at about halfway through because it was so tedious, and that was a fair investment of time I had already spent because this is a long book, my Kindle said it should take about 19 hours for the whole book. However, about halfway through, when I got to the part where the characters that were uploaded people in a shoe box size space ship flying to the edge of the solar system find a router built by some other advanced civilization, I decided I had to see how it finished.

Then, I started seeing the beauty in it. It was just so far out. Charles Stross seemed to try to shoehorn every Singularity-oriented technology out there into the story. It was a bit clumsy that way, but there were some new ones I was made aware of. Like automated contracts. The book mentions them a lot, and it's difficult to understand partly because of vagueness that most likely has something to do with the technology not being in existence yet, but I found on the internet that the same technology that Bitcoin uses to make transactions for money can be used for contracts too.

One of my favorite topics is the theory that sentient beings can be simulated and much to my delight that was brought up a couple times in the book. The first time is when one of the characters mentions the concept in a discussion about theism. The second time it is mentioned one of the characters explains that the evolution of theory of mind, that's the ability to figure out what someone else is thinking, progressed because there is an advantage to a predator knowing what it's prey is thinking. Eventually when the species ends up fighting itself, an advanced theory of mind is a simulation of themselves. That's pretty deep, and it's just one of the many profound ideas in the book.

I don't want to spoil the story at all because there is a nice twist at the end. But, to demonstrate how far out this book is, the bad guys are the Vile Offspring who are advanced AI beings that oppressed and possibly drove to extinction whatever organic life-form created them. The Vile Offspring are also turning all the dumb matter in the solar system into something that they can upload consciousnesses to because they need the space.

Charles Stross does very well with setting up an entire culture in this super-advanced society that includes an Economics 2.0 that only AI's can understand and a political system. Since the characters are uploaded consciousnesses in the last half of the book, the environment gets pretty crazy with characters taking the form of a flock of pigeons or other animals. The characters can also change their environment to whatever they want. This gives the author a lot of space to make the settings very unusual and fun, much like Micheal Moorecock did in his "end of time" series fantasy books by giving the characters creation rings. It works, and made the last half of the book much more enjoyable than the first.

Another thing I noticed is that there is a reference to Russia still using Microsoft, --- remember this is in the future ---, and there was a reference to a company with a name that was kind of an anagram for Apple, but I do not remember seeing any references to anything that sounded remotely like Google.

I wouldn't recommend this book to everybody, but the people who might like it probably already know who they are. Anyone who does get through more than a few hours of it and is struggling, I'd suggest to keep going because the last half of the book is better and the ending ties things together well.

If readability were the only factor I considered in rating this book, I'd have given it only two stars. Frequent naps were needed to get through the book because it kept making me drowsy. But the author did try to imagine the unimaginable - that is, to conjure up a picture of the post-singularity future. So I'll give him credit for taking a stab at the impossible. That vision, unfortunately, lacks even the tiniest smidgen of credibility. It's just out-of-control imagination, and it's very tedious to read.

Iron Sunrise was by far the best book of the series. Its plot line and characters were intriguing, and it hinted that some race (the Remastered or perhaps their "gods") was able to hide events from the Eschaton and maybe even threaten or destroy them. This turned out to be a major, dangling plot thread that was never addressed in Accelerando. The lack of follow-up was very disappointing.

So Accelerando is the back-story for books 1 and 2. Pre and post singularity events play out, starting on Earth and spreading out vastly, that presumably lead to the rise of the Eschaton. But that eventuality is only very loosely implied by the ending, and the Eschaton is never actually encountered in book 3.

This book certainly has flaws in character development and some peculiar verbiage, but on the whole it is the single best summation of all of the transhuman/posthuman science fiction themes in one package. If you had to read only one book about the technological singularity, read this one (due apologies to Verner Vinge).

The story spans several generations of a 'family' from just before the singularity until well past it. As with all Charles Stross books, the tone is cheeky, irreverent, and slightly manic, all of which produces a very engrossing read that makes this book hard to put down. And some of the ideas espoused in this book, especially what lies ahead in the post-singularity world, represent by far the strangest and most entertaining fiction I have read in a long time.

Although this may be an odd comparison, I felt that this book did for transhuman/posthuman genre what Neuromancer by William Gibson did for the cyberpunk genre- both built a well defined new world in which to tell weird tales and set the benchmark against which all other novels in their respective genre must measure themselves.

There was astonishingly little character development and real plot development in this novel. I'd already read and enjoyed two of the author's Manfred Macx short stories that were adapted into the first part of this book. Unfortunately I knew as much about Manfred, the lead character tying the book somewhat together, at that point as I knew at the end of the book. And the rest of the characters were even less well-drawn and pretty unlikable. I wanted to know more about the singularity and what it did to the people who embraced it rather than to those who resisted and fled from it, picking up only bits and pieces of the technology that caused it. It would probably be difficult to make post-singularity "people" feel comprehensible, since they'd be so different, but it would be fun to read a good attempt. Despite these problems the book pulled me in and I made it all the way to the rather random ending, which seems to set us up for more. There was plenty of foreshadowing of the book's "surprise" ending. There were probably lots of fascinating things going on elsewhere in the solar system, but the author didn't tell us about them. Many great SF writers have not been terrific at characterization (Clarke and Asimov, for example), but they did very well indeed with setting, and could tell a story.

The idea of the singularity in human history fascinates me, so I may even try another of Stross' books.