Science Fiction Book Review: Accelerando by Charles Stross
I recently finished reading Accelerando by Charles Stross and I thought it was a great book… it does exactly what I want from a future-focused science fiction book… it takes plausible advances from today and takes them to their logical extremes. Bing tells me that “accelerando” means “it indicates a gradual increase in tempo, or pace” which, in this context I think refers to the increasing in technical progress over the years the book covers.
Stross starts with some very simple suppositions about future advances that are not a far cry from where we are today: personal devices will help us remember more things and even offload some of our thinking. We will interact with them using outputs such as video glasses and inputs such as invisible keyboards. Stross plays this through many stages evolution up to and past the technical singularity. At each stage Stross colorfully deals with all the social implications of the level of technical advance. He certainly left me asking deep questions about what does it mean to be human, or even sentient. Stross does interject a bit of political views around freedom of information, etc but they don’t really take away from the story..
One of the things that got me hooked on the book was the free ebook download.. i read a bit then went out and got the hardback edition. the “free ebook” also fits nicely the meme of the book.
Give it a read!
