Accelerando by Charles Stross

[lightreads]

Accelerando by Charles Stross


My rating: 2 of 5 stars
Hard SF. Three generations of an entrepreneurial family invent and scheme and survive the singularity, the point where artificial intelligence power bypasses old-fashioned organic brains, and humans first augment themselves, then disassemble the planets to build a solar-system wide computer and become something else entirely.

What a disappointment. I can forgive unapproachable characters in hard SF, and frequently have. I tried hard to cut some slack, because the point of the book is the screamingly insane pace of progress and just how fast and how far we would change into something entirely different. But indeed, I did have the revelation, around the three-quarter mark, that not only didn't I care whether any of our protagonists permanently bit it or not, but the supposedly precarious fate of the entire human race also made me yawn copiously.

But when I forgive that failing in hard SF it's because the big ideas are awesome enough. And these ideas were big, sure, all intergalactic packet-switched router systems and AI cats and what all. But there was something so . . . smug? Self-involved? I can't really put my finger on it, except that a lot of this book was so in-jokey to such a specific stripe of internet-age scifi geekery that it tipped over from pleasing into masturbatory. Something like that.

Does Stross have anything better to offer?

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Comments

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Does Stross have anything better to offer?

No. I would in particular recommend highly against Glasshouse, which again tries to do Big Ideas and fails utterly (unless you count Big Ideas With Extremely Large Holes in Them, Not to Mention Smug).

I did read the first book of the Merchant Princes (The Family Trade) which I found mildly entertaining, enough that I'll probably go and check out the second book someday, but definitely on the side I regard as fluff rather than serious (and thus wasn't particularly on the watch for plot holes, of which I'm sure there were plenty).