Accelerando

Like the golden age SF of the '60s and the cyberpunk of the '80s, the singularity SF is emblematic of the '00s. And there's hardly a better example of the phenomenon than Accelarando.

Re-reading it after almost 20 years, the book has clearly aged - but it also still shines, perhaps even more so, because so much of the technoscientologic corporate bullshit it extrapolates is actually happening - being made to happen, by those who took the singularity gospel as, well, gospel. Stross was (and is) quite uniquely on point when it comes to pointing out the multitude of moral, ethical and simply economical problems with such people.

Polish translation (Próchniewicz) is quite brilliant.

I don't remember much about this one. Weird tech-y stuff.

This was like wading through porridge from the get go, until part way in I looked it up on Wikipedia where they have a chapter by chapter synopsis. Once I got an idea of where it was heading the reading got easier. Accelerando is a music term meaning, keep getting faster from here. The book is hard SciFi about the rapidity of AI taking over human consciousness, starting from neural implants to full downloading of the person into software to the point of being able to split off multiple copies of yourself. He packs every sentence with crazy terminology and new concepts so that many sentences don't make sense, although page by page it's somehow coherent. There's a famous sentence in writing, 'colourless green ideas sleep furiously' which is nonsense as a sentence and filled with self-negations even though it is grammatically correct. That is this book in a nutshell.

About two thirds the way through I suddenly thought, "This is one giant piss-take. He's filling the story with all this crazy stuff and all the while sitting there with a smirk thinking, 'See, I'm still doing it to you.'

Too much technobabble. The author is clearly just throwing cool sounding words together without knowing what they mean. But as someone who knows what all the words mean, it's awfully distracting to have to suspend my disbelief every paragraph about this supposed future technology. Abandoned.

DNF page 84.
It suffers from the old style of writing sci-fi where bombarding you with phrases and gobitygook and gee golly the future sure is crazy you can barely recoginize it. Not enough personality .

It kills me when good ideas are killed by shoddy construction. Meta fictional elements are so inconsistent that it's confusing and kills the pacing of the plot. Cardboard characters.

I think the people who did not like this book are not used to Science Fiction that actually uses Science concepts in its plot and dialog. They should probably stick to Space Opera or YA SciFi if a book like this makes them complain that [a:Charles Stross 8794 Charles Stross https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1355510574p2/8794.jpg] is a smarty pants.

Post-human, post-posthuman, and a robot pussy cat. It started quite promisingly, but it lost the plot (literally) about two thirds through. Still, on balance, I enjoyed it.

An interesting and gripping book with food for much deep thought on the nature of morality, but the “story over many generations” format has always left me feeling as though I've read a group of short stories, each with an unsatisfactory end.

It's difficult to recommend this book, because it has a structure so unlike anything I've read before–Stross manages to tie together 6 or 7 stories, all of which can (and did, I think) stand on their own, without getting repetitive or confusing, and then end it all with a bang. This would make a great comic book serial, in that sense, if drawings of Matroishka brains could be interesting enough. You will likely either hate or love this book; I loved it.

Got this on a recommendation from Warren Ellis, so it's fitting there is a quick Transmet reference (don't blink!).

Also: Keep an eye on the cat.

Kind of weird, but good weird. This was recommended to me after I requested solid fiction about the Singularity, and it delivered. Extra points awarded for the cybernetic transhuman (transfeline?) cat as an important character. Slight demerit for a strangely-underplayed rape scene in the first chapter and a hilariously-inaccurate representation of BDSM.I liked the middle of this book a lot. I thought the first few chapters were hard to follow and the ending was anticlimactic... and I didn't really bother trying to grok a lot of the legal/economic stuff, which in any case was I think meant to be incomprehensible. I feel like this book has a lot of overlap with [a:Greg Egan 32699 Greg Egan http://www.goodreads.com/assets/nophoto/nophoto-M-50x66-e07624dc012f2cce49c7d9aa6500c6c0.jpg] (especially [b:Permutation City 156784 Permutation City Greg Egan http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1287341300s/156784.jpg 1270567] and [b:Schild's Ladder 156780 Schild's Ladder Greg Egan http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1172264160s/156780.jpg 151292]), and that generally I find Egan's take a little more interesting.It was a smart, engaging read and full of pleasant little pop-culture references. Felt surprisingly short for 400+ pages. I definitely plan on reading some of his other books.

This was a good read that was packed with ideas. It was a bit of a struggle during the third quarter of the book but it was well worth persevering.