Book Review: Accelerando, by Charles Stross

[inverarity]

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

Comments

[thirdgorchbro]

If you are a fan of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos, I highly recommend Stross' "Laundry" stories, collected in The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. It's a strange but brilliant mix of Cthulhu, James Bond, and Dilbert.

He's also written some sci-fi that touches on similar themes as Accelerando, but is probably a little more accessible. Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise are both pretty good. Glasshouse is sort of a sequel to Accelerando, but it doesn't feature any of the characters from that book (as far as I can remember). It's much more character-driven than Accelerando.

[count_fenring]

I'll second the suggestions for both the Laundry novels and Singularity Sky and its sequel. The Laundry novels are interesting partly because they're each riffs off of a different cold war spy novel series; the first is an homage to Len Deighton, while the Jennifer Morgue is James Bond.

Singularity Sky is one of my favorite novels dealing with the concept of a singularity. It's much, much less WHOAWHOAHWHOAH off a cliff than Accelerando, and has one of the most fun concepts I've ever seen in singularity SF - a roaming fleet of nanite-bearing ships that grants wishes indiscriminately. His characters (the two main ones, anyway) are really solid in this, at least as far as "super-competant secret agent" characters get.

His best book is probably Halting State, which is a near-future story that starts with a bank robbery inside an MMORPG, and the very real consequences thereof.