Apr. 14th, 2010

inverarity: (Default)
Charles Stross is one of the most prolific and popular science fiction authors of this generation whose books I've never read. So, I finally dived into Accelerando, and a couple of headache-inducing weeks later, finished it, and got another headache trying to decide how to rate it. I liked it, I hated it, I thought it was brilliant, I thought it was really @$%#!ing annoying. There were parts of it that reminded me of Heinlein at his best and Heinlein at his worst. It reminded me most of Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novels (notably Snow Crash and The Diamond Age), which I enjoyed a great deal.

Accelerando is cyberpunkish, but it's really more in the transhumanism genre, with most of the novel revolving around the coming of the Singularity, and what happens to humanity afterwards. It starts in approximately the present day, and spans about a century of "wall clock" time, but because of all sorts of tricks with relativism, wormholes, and people being "uploaded" as state vectors into super-intelligent machines in which experiental time is highly variable, some characters experience centuries and multiple lifetimes over the course of the novel.



If this sounds like the sort of story you'd like, then you'll probably enjoy Accelerando.That said, it had a lot of drawbacks for me.

The review )

It was worth reading, but I don't think I'd dive into a book like this again any time soon. If anyone has read anything else by Stross, I'd be interested to hear what you thought of his other works.

My rating (based on the Inverarity rating system):

Plot: 4 (it has a grand, epic scale, but the human-level story is a bit flat)
Characters: 3 (interesting but unlikeable, and they are secondary to the tech)
Style: 4 (brilliant, witty, headache-inducing)

My weighted score: 3.65 stars (out of 5)
inverarity: (Default)
Charles Stross is one of the most prolific and popular science fiction authors of this generation whose books I've never read. So, I finally dived into Accelerando, and a couple of headache-inducing weeks later, finished it, and got another headache trying to decide how to rate it. I liked it, I hated it, I thought it was brilliant, I thought it was really @$%#!ing annoying. There were parts of it that reminded me of Heinlein at his best and Heinlein at his worst. It reminded me most of Neal Stephenson's cyberpunk novels (notably Snow Crash and The Diamond Age), which I enjoyed a great deal.

Accelerando is cyberpunkish, but it's really more in the transhumanism genre, with most of the novel revolving around the coming of the Singularity, and what happens to humanity afterwards. It starts in approximately the present day, and spans about a century of "wall clock" time, but because of all sorts of tricks with relativism, wormholes, and people being "uploaded" as state vectors into super-intelligent machines in which experiental time is highly variable, some characters experience centuries and multiple lifetimes over the course of the novel.



If this sounds like the sort of story you'd like, then you'll probably enjoy Accelerando.That said, it had a lot of drawbacks for me.

The review )

It was worth reading, but I don't think I'd dive into a book like this again any time soon. If anyone has read anything else by Stross, I'd be interested to hear what you thought of his other works.

My rating (based on the Inverarity rating system):

Plot: 4 (it has a grand, epic scale, but the human-level story is a bit flat)
Characters: 3 (interesting but unlikeable, and they are secondary to the tech)
Style: 4 (brilliant, witty, headache-inducing)

My weighted score: 3.65 stars (out of 5)

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