Accelerando

by Charles Stross

Overview

The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.

Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity.

For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form...

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101208472
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/05/2005
Series:	Singularity , #3
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	141,153
File size:	697 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England in 1964. He holds degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance journalist. He is now a full-time writer.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“A cornucopia of notions and neat writing.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Makes hallucinogens obsolete.”—Cory Doctorow

“Stross sizzles with ideas…whimsical and funny as well as challenging and thoughtful.”
—The Denver Post

“Like Bruce Sterling or William Gibson at their best, Stross surfs a wave of ideas and information that seems always on the brink of collapsing into incomprehensibility, but never does—a careening plunge through strangeness in which every page contains something to mess with your head.”—SF Site

Editorial Reviews

Stross (Singularity Sky) explores humanity's inability to cope with molecular nanotechnology run amok in this teeming near-future SF stand-alone. In part one, "Slow Takeoff," "free enterprise broker" Manfred Macx and his soon-to-be-estranged wife/dominatrix, Pamela, lay the foundation for the next decade's transhumans. In "Point of Inflection," Amber, their punky maladjusted teenage daughter, and Sadeq Khurasani, a Muslim judge, engineer and scholar, try to escape the social chaos that antiaging treatments have wreaked on Earth by riding a tin can-sized starship via nanocomputerization to a brown dwarf star called Hyundai. The Wunch, trade-delegation aliens evolved from uploaded lobster mentalities, and Macx's grandson, Sirhan, roister through "Singularity," in which people become cybernetic constructs. Stross's three-generation experiment in stream-of-artificial-consciousness impresses, but his flat characters and inchoate rapid-fire explosions of often muzzily related ideas, theories, opinions and nightmares too often resemble intellectual pyrotechnics-breathtakingly gaudy but too brief, leaving connections lost somewhere in outer/inner/cyber space. Agent, Caitlin Blasdell. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Manfred Macx, a 21st-century intelligence amplification entrepreneur, lives partly in the physical world and partly in the virtual world of artificial intelligences, the Internet, biotechnology, and molecular nanotechnology. His 12-year-old daughter Amber, who seeks independence from her controlling mother, indentures herself to a company aiming to extract a fortune from the resources of Jupiter. Decades later, Amber's son Sirhan, a victim of multiple virtual childhoods, researches his dysfunctional family and uncovers a sinister new life form that threatens the continuation of biological life in the universe. Expanding on his award-winning short story cycle that appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, Stross (Singularity Sky) reveals a vision of the future that encompasses and expands on the newest technologies and explores the possibilities of humanity's future. Joining the ranks of William Gibson (Neuromancer), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix), Stross fuses ideas and characters with cheerful abandon and creates a high-tech galactic adventure that belongs in most libraries. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A fix-up novel linking together Stross's innovative "Lobsters" stories. Stross (The Hidden Family, 2005, etc.) begins his story in the second decade of this century, just on the verge of the Singularity-the emergence of artificial intelligences superior to humankind. Manfred Macx, central figure of the first three stories, is an electronic entrepreneur, reinventing economics on the fly to exploit the potential of amplified human intelligence. His major struggle is staying one step ahead of his ex-wife, Pamela, an accountant who pursues him around the world with a huge bill for back taxes. A brief reunion results in the birth of a daughter, Amber, who uploads herself into a computer program to go on an expedition to a nearby star, where alien intelligence has been detected. The aliens turn out to be small-time (but highly advanced) con artists, preying on naive beings who fall for their crooked economic schemes. But her real discovery is the inevitable byproduct of the Singularity, the emergence of computronium, microscopic artificial intelligences who surround their star and convert all extraneous mass into further copies of themselves. Upon her return to the solar system, Amber encounters her son Sirhan, the offspring of an alternate version of herself and the cleric sent by Pamela to undermine her father's plans to insure her freedom. The last three stories reunite the entire family, including Aineko, Manfred's cyborg cat, now working to escape the solar system while there's still time. Stross spins this generational saga with great wit and energy, throwing in references to a huge range of literary and cultural material, an even more exhilarating mix in novel form than in theseparately-published stories. Stross also manages to make economics seem almost as cool as the runaway cybernetic revolution that serves as background to the story. Cutting-edge science fiction from the brightest star in the new British invasion.

Kirkus Reviews

A cornucopia of notions and neat writing.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune“Makes hallucinogens obsolete.”—Cory Doctorow

“Stross sizzles with ideas…whimsical and funny as well as challenging and thoughtful.”—The Denver Post

“Like Bruce Sterling or William Gibson at their best, Stross surfs a wave of ideas and information that seems always on the brink of collapsing into incomprehensibility, but never does—a careening plunge through strangeness in which every page contains something to mess with your head.”—SF Site

From the Publisher