# Accelerando ![Book cover of Accelerando](/books/covers/accelerando.jpg) by [Charles Stross](/books/authors/charles_stross/) Awards: [Locus](/books/by-award/#locus-award) ★★☆☆☆ ## Review _Accelerando_, by Charles Stross, is a hard sci-fi fix-up novel. Originally published as 9 separate stories, it follows 3 generations of the Macx family as they upload, fork, merge, and scatter across a solar system slowly being converted into computronium. _Accelerando_ is about time and how fast change can come, but it is also a book solidly frozen in time. It was written from a corner of the geek internet that only existed from 2000--2005 on small forums and on Slashdot. It marks itself as such with shibboleths like IP rights, music piracy, Bill Gates and Microsoft. At the time, _Accelerando_ must have seemed like an eminently possible future, but the smartphone and cloud computing a few years later blew it away. Now it reads more like an alternate history of a technological ideal that never came to pass. The most interesting part of the book is how little it focuses on what we would consider "technology"---lasers and spaceships and computers and AIs---and how much it focuses on the legal technology that powers civilization. Stross predicts contracts as code, algorithmic law and the loopholes it opens. He sees evolution as a way to produce the next layer of life, things that look much less like humans and much more like corporations. It's a perfect fit for its 2005 techno-libertarian roots, the same era that birthed Wikipedia and Creative Commons, which used the protections of legal code to expand the rights of users rather than restrict them. Stross is fascinated with what constitutes the self. Manfred slowly bleeds his "self" into his glasses and external memories until by the third chapter, they are more Manfred than he is. When a thief steals them, the _thief becomes Manfred_ while the real human struggles to remember who he is. Lobsters are digitized and conscious;[^lobsters] Aineko isn't until she _obviously_ is. People fork copies of themselves, spinning off agents to research ideas and report back. Given his interests two decades ago, it is curious how blasé Stross is about modern LLMs, which are the closest we've gotten to creating a mind outside a human, and which almost exactly parallel the agents he envisioned. [^lobsters]: I appreciate the irony that it is the lobsters, apocryphally unable to sense the water boiling around them, who are the first to realize the need to escape the coming singularity. _Accelerando_, to my surprise, is a close successor to [Simmons](/books/authors/dan_simmons/)'s [_Hyperion Cantos_](/books/series/hyperion_cantos/), even though [Simmons](/books/authors/dan_simmons/) is writing pure space opera and Stross is writing hard sci-fi. Both works' primary theme is the rise of a new order, led by machine intelligences humans built, as they displace their creators. Both look at how this transition affects the structures of society---religion, law, government. And there are smaller similarities as well: houses connected by wormholes, simulated historical figures used to better understand humanity, and the [Omega Point][op]---[Teilhard de Chardin's][de Chardin] vision of consciousness evolving toward transcendence appears explicitly in [_Hyperion_](/books/hyperion/) and _Accelerando_, where the singularity serves the same theological function. But [Simmons](/books/authors/dan_simmons/)'s work combines beautiful prose and intertextuality to create a timeless masterpiece, while Stross's book already feels dated. [de Chardin]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Teilhard_de_Chardin [op]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega_Point In the end, I just didn't enjoy _Accelerando_. As a fix-up, the stories don't really come together into a whole; each feels disconnected, so there is no real payoff. Stross's goal was to write a book set in the singularity, something [Vernor Vinge](/books/authors/vernor_vinge/) said was impossible. But he failed. _Accelerando_ _isn't_ really set in the singularity; it's sampling the singularity at 9 different points, but each point is static. And finally, for a book about how fast things move, it's stuck in the past, reading now more like retrofuturism. I would have loved it in 2005. _Accelerando_ reminded me of many other books. Its closest cousin is [Rajaniemi](/books/authors/hannu_rajaniemi/)'s [_Jean le Flambeur_](/books/series/jean_le_flambeur/) series: both are set in post-human solar systems obsessed with identity, memory, and what makes "you" when minds can be copied and edited; both feature cryptographic control over who remembers what. The identity questions also echo [Watts](/books/authors/peter_watts/)'s [_Firefall_](/books/series/firefall/), which explores the many configurations a mind can take, and [qntm](/books/authors/qntm/)'s [_Lena_](/books/valuable_humans_in_transit_and_other_stories/#lena), which follows the ethics of uploading to their bleak conclusion. Pierre deleting his backups before committing suicide to make his death permanent is the same choice Masaq' Orbital makes in [Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/)'s [_Look to Windward_](/books/look_to_windward/). The dead in the final chapter, snapshots run forward from a fixed point for each conversation, are like the half-life state in [Dick](/books/authors/philip_k_dick/)'s [_Ubik_](/books/ubik/). The Saturn festival feels lifted from Stross's own _Eschaton_ series, where a traveling singularity disrupts every society it touches. [Martine](/books/authors/arkady_martine/)'s [_A Memory Called Empire_](/books/a_memory_called_empire/) shares the same interest in how societies structure themselves and who belongs. And [Vinge](/books/authors/vernor_vinge/)'s [_Zones of Thought_](/books/series/zones_of_thought/) looms over everything, with the sentient network packets as a direct nod to [_A Fire Upon The Deep_](/books/a_fire_upon_the_deep/). _Accelerando_ sat on my shelf for 20 years, and I was excited to finally get to it. I love Stross's _A Colder War_---bureaucrats versus cosmic horrors is one of my favorite subgenres---and I enjoyed his _Eschaton_ series: _Singularity Sky_ and _Iron Sunrise_. But I think I waited too long. The world isn't the same place it was when this was written, and I'm not the same person either. ## Reviews that mention _Accelerando_ - [_Field of Dishonor_](/books/field_of_dishonor/) - [_Ubik_](/books/ubik/) ## Related Books - [_Ubik_](/books/ubik/) by [Philip K. Dick](/books/authors/philip_k_dick/) --- ★☆☆☆☆: Ubik, by Philip K. Dick, is a 1969 science fiction novel about a prudence organization that hires out anti-psis and anti-precogs to protect people’s and corporations’ privacy. Everything begins to fall apart when they’re lured into a too-good-to-be-true job where their boss is murdered. Suddenly, reality starts deteriorating, with objects reverting to older versions, and the characters start dying one by one. - [_A Memory Called Empire_](/books/a_memory_called_empire/) by [Arkady Martine](/books/authors/arkady_martine/) --- ★★★★☆: A Memory Called Empire, by Arkady Martine, is the first book in the Teixcalaan series. It follows Mahit Dzmare, an ambassador from the space station Lsel, as she tries to save her home from being annexed by the Teixcalaanli empire. - [_Look to Windward_](/books/look_to_windward/) by [Iain M. Banks](/books/authors/iain_m_banks/) --- ★★★★★: Look to Windward, by Iain M. Banks, is the seventh book in the Culture series. It explores the aftermath of the Idiran–Culture War and Chelgrian civil war.