Accelerando
by Charles Stross
Charles Stross's science fiction novel follows three generations through humanity's technological singularity and posthuman transformation
"Capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete".
Editorial Summary
Accelerando is a 2005 science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories written by British author Charles Stross. The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity. The first three stories follow the character of "venture altruist" Manfred Macx starting in the early 21st Century, the second three stories follow his daughter Amber, and the final three focus largely on her son Sirhan in the completely transformed world at the end of the century. As events progress in Accelerando, the planets of the Solar System are dismantled over time to form a Matrioshka brain, a vast solar-powered computational device inhabited by minds inconceivably more advanced and complex than naturally evolved intelligences such as human beings. Accelerando won the Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for several other awards in 2005 and 2006, including the Hugo, Campbell, Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards. Charles Stross presents a vision of capitalism and artificial intelligence consuming everything in their path, transforming humanity into something unrecognizable.
Perspective
"Reading this feels like experiencing intellectual vertigo as Stross hurls you through a technological maelstrom where the narrative perspective, Aineko, is not a talking cat: it's a vastly superintelligent AI, coolly calculating, that has worked out that human beings are more easily manipulated if they think they're dealing with a furry toy. The book's distinctive contribution is being perhaps the first novel to have a storyline which traverses directly through a technological singularity, refusing to leave the unknowable transformation safely offstage but instead plunging readers into the disorienting reality of posthuman existence. AI researchers and transhumanists need this unflinching exploration of what happens when capitalism eats everything then the logic of competition pushes it so far that merely human entities can no longer compete; we're a fat, slow-moving, tasty resource – like the dodo, finding a prescient warning about the trajectory of our current technological acceleration."
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