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annathepiperMy reaction to Accelerando can be summed up thus: What the hell did I just read?
This is not to say that I think this is a bad book. On the contrary, there's a lot of hard SF goodness to be found it these pages, from space elevators to computronium, wormhole traversals to Matrioshka brains. All of these things are set off against three generations of a brilliant family at the forefront of the rapid evolution of humanity from the species we know to a godlike collection of intelligences who have devoured the solar system in its quest to create enough processing power to sustain itself. What plays out in our neck of the cosmic woods is a subset of the universe at large, where existence itself is portrayed in terms of one great big gigantic network.
And it's all woven together into a tapestry so dense that as a reader I found myself with only two options for how to approach it: either take it slow and digest every idea as I found it, or say ctrl-alt-fuckit, charge through the thing, and worry about absorbing it all once I was finished. Needless to say, I wound up going the latter route.
Here's the thing, though--for me at least, it was ultimately not as satisfying as Stross' later novel, Glasshouse. The same crystalline precision of language is present, but the book's packed with far more ideas than it is a truly cohesive plot, and the ending in particular was a letdown.
Still, though, this is worth checking out as a character study, both at the individual level and at the species level. For a more polished work, you should check out Glasshouse; for this one, three stars.
This is not to say that I think this is a bad book. On the contrary, there's a lot of hard SF goodness to be found it these pages, from space elevators to computronium, wormhole traversals to Matrioshka brains. All of these things are set off against three generations of a brilliant family at the forefront of the rapid evolution of humanity from the species we know to a godlike collection of intelligences who have devoured the solar system in its quest to create enough processing power to sustain itself. What plays out in our neck of the cosmic woods is a subset of the universe at large, where existence itself is portrayed in terms of one great big gigantic network.
And it's all woven together into a tapestry so dense that as a reader I found myself with only two options for how to approach it: either take it slow and digest every idea as I found it, or say ctrl-alt-fuckit, charge through the thing, and worry about absorbing it all once I was finished. Needless to say, I wound up going the latter route.
Here's the thing, though--for me at least, it was ultimately not as satisfying as Stross' later novel, Glasshouse. The same crystalline precision of language is present, but the book's packed with far more ideas than it is a truly cohesive plot, and the ending in particular was a letdown.
Still, though, this is worth checking out as a character study, both at the individual level and at the species level. For a more polished work, you should check out Glasshouse; for this one, three stars.