Type of bind: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: July 05, 2005
Sale Popularity Level: 818286
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Brief Book Summary:
Expanding on his award-winning short story cycle from the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction, Charles Stross delivers the story fans and peers have been expecting with Accelerando, a novel destined to change the face of the genre.
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Rated by buyers 
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I believe Cory Doctorow said it best when he said something like 'makes hallucinogens obsolete' This book is brain meltingly lovely. Instead of being sci fi to inspire the dreams of yesterday (which seems to be so much of what's out there), Stross creates sci fi that is truly future speculative (not predictive, just mentally inflammatory in the best possible way). Don't get me wrong, this book has it's flaws, and there are bumps in the narrative. However, they're totally forgivable, as Accelerando takes you along for a ride that is both outlandish beyond belief, and all too believable.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers 
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Having read some of the author's short stories and loved them, and being a fan of all forms of science-fiction, I snatched up "Accelerando" when I saw it in a store. I took it on holiday with me, where in two weeks I read seven books. At the start of the holiday, I read the very first 100 pages of "Accelerando". On the plane trip home, with nothing to read, but I left the book unfinished.
Despite the enthusiasm with which the author writes, and the great dialogue and narrative, the story just doesn't go anywhere. For two hundred pages the main character spoke to other characters and had his external memory stolen, leaving him semi-amnesiac. But that was all. He found his memory, which was stored in his intelligent glasses. I didn't find any motivation to read on.
The book's full of awesome ideas. There are a lot of ideas for tech, for how the world might be, how it might look, what its people will be like - there are philosophical questions, emotional tangles, relationship difficulties. But there are so many of these that the story goes nowhere. It's interesting to read, but there's no drive to continue the story, because the very first half of the book has little story indeed. In fact it seems to be structured in smallers stories lumped together to form a disjointed novel, with gaps of years in places and few stories threads picked up from the last chunk. Really, it's too much of a good thing - far too much. Why the author didn't incorporate these ideas into a focused series of short stories, for example, and take advantage of them, I have no idea. He instead wastes them in a novel that passes them by immediately, while at the same time managing to slow the actual story to a crawl.
It's a shame I never finished this book. I tried. I've only ever failed to finish one other book in all my life, and I'd hoped it would be the only one. I'd only recommend "Accelerando" if you have a lot of time and a lot of patience. The ideas are truly wonderful, as is the snappy style. It's just a shame it gets in the way of the actual plot.
Rated by buyers -
I've never read Stross but I had high hopes going in to this one. I couldn't have been more let down.
His writing is so complexly written that it is barely readable. And I don't mean he needed to dumb it down. I mean his sentence structures were convoluted enough to make Accelerando seem worse than it was. A few examples:
"A standard network of independent companies, instantiated as cellular automata within the Ring Imperium switched legal service environment." (Pg. 206)
"Economics 2.0 apparently replaces the single-direction layer of conventional money, and the multiple-inderection mappings of options trades, with some kind of insanely baroque object-relational framework based on paramatized desires and subjective experiential values of the players, and as far as the cat is concerned, this makes all the transactions intrinsically untrustworthy. (Pg. 341)"
"...and in this reincarnation-intermediated traditionalist polity for the hopelessly orthohuman, you can score credit for formality. (Pg. 382)"
Add to that a dizzying amount of "ideas" for virtually everything, such as suitcases and handbags that have emotions, lobsters that talk, ghosts of yourself everywhere collecting information, spaceships the size of a coke can, or duplicating yourself and having different lives and consciousness. It is all too much and drowns out any possible storyline that is hiding behind all the superfluous ideas.
A quote on the back of the book says "Stross sizzles with ideas...", unfortunately that is all there is to this book. I might try another book of his but it may be a long time coming because of how boring and slow this one was, and if I do it will be with trepidation, knowing that I will probably find the same style of writing. Not a recommend.
2.5 stars.
Rated by buyers 
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At least, 160. Perhaps verging on 170 or 180. And this is evident in every sentence. I have never ever read anybody who tries so hard to show his intellect in every sentence, in every word. If Stross could show how intelligent he is in spaces between words, he would do it. Reading Accelerando demands a portable wikipedia (I think I even spotted an all your base are belong to us reference) a great deal of Egan (who he shamelessly rips, even though he credits Vinge)and a lot of time. Read it at a pace of ten or fifteen pages per day and it will start making sense. Nice way out for the Fermi paradox, would like to see the Matrioshka brains fleshed out some more. Overall, nice Singularity effort.
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