The final part of Accelerando has, at least compared to the previous two frenetic installments, a peaceful, almost elegaicl feel. Time and place are uncertain and possibly irrelevant now; we might be ten years further on, or a hundred, and humans live in the spaces between the stars, in the shadow of posthuman grandeur. The cast is thinned: various ( Read more... )

Manfred is back, and with him an eye on the big picture: not the preservation of life, of course, but the preservation of information. The talk in Elector is of escape, from the posthumans who would dismantle what remains of the solar system. It's particularly pleasing that the characters ask the obvious question: if they leave, isn't it all just ( Read more... )

From the FAQ in Elector, p314-5:Money exists, and is used for the usual range of goods and services, but the basics - food, water, air, power, off-the-shelf clothing, housing, historical entertainment, and monster trucks - are free.
None more zeitgeist!

Meet Sirhan: Macx generation three, son of Amber-that-stayed, living on a floating city in the upper atmosphere of Saturn, arranging a family reunion - and to sue Amber-that-went for a couple of decades of maintenance ( Read more... )

It's the 2050s, but there isn't a recognisable world to describe. Most of the inner solar system has been dismantled, converted to computronium to provide digital playgrounds for posthumans. A version of Amber watches this from Jovian orbit and the relative safety of her Ring Imperium. The other version of Amber, the alien-chaser, has woken ( Read more... )

Router is the midpoint of the sequence. It's trying to do more things, and as a result is the longest story so far. Amber has gone exploring; meanwhile the solar system has reached the moment of maximum change. There's definitely some flab, but also some passages where the scope of the narrative really hits you:"Here we are, sixty-something human ( Read more... )

In most books, you'd have a sense of the world by this point. You might not know all the rules, but you'd have a general idea. But then, most books aren't trying to provide the sort of historical perspective that Accelerando is. In this book, the rules keep changing, and you have to learn again ( Read more... )

Tourist may be my single favourite part of the Accelerando sequence. Another few years, another jump: now we're in Scotland, just shy of the start of decade three ( Read more... )

I'm at King's Cross, eating a bagel and waiting for my train. Manfred is in Milton Keynes, and Rome, and three years further into the future. He's struggling through a messy divorce and trying to stay ahead of the curve ( Read more... )

Accelerando, if you don't know, is the umbrella name for a near future short story sequence, written by Charles Stross and published in Asimov's over the past few years. Now the stories have been edited together to make a novel ( Read more... )