Accelerando

This is easily some of the best sci-fi I've ever read. Stross doesn't just tell an amazing story, he suggests one. The main plot revolves around the growing influence of technology in the main characters lives, and their attempts to figure out where their places in the universe are.

But what most impressed me about this story was the incredibly subtle ducking and weaving necessary to write a story that spans centuries and actively involves exponential growth in technology, without wasting a lot of words to explain the technologies themselves.

Fantastic read.

A wild ride moving fast from a recent future into a huge and crazy galactic post-world existence. It was impossible for me to understand all the details of what was going on, I wish I had some skull wear, but you don’t need to grasp it all to enjoy the plot. The ending was a surprise and hard to guess. Great imagination, loved the whole story.

When reading science fiction, I really enjoy it when a book presents me with a new concept that I have never before considered. This amazing book does so not just once but several times. Add enjoyable characters and plot - highly recommended. If you are a scifi fan (or even if not), do not miss this one.

I read these stories in Asimov's and maybe missed an installment or two, but whenever I hear someone speak of the Singularity these are what comes to mind.

Fast-paced, quirky, Douglas Adams with-an-edge-and-a-PhD-in-physics-style SF. Stross takes the reader on a fast trip through post-modern Europe in the first third of the book, then halfway across the Solar System in the next third, and then into utterly unimaginable places from there, never losing his wicked sense of humor (and it is VERY wicked) or his acuity of vision in the posthuman, postsingularity, and ultimately postbiological future.
A damn good read.

An excellent work regarding our future and the ever shifting definition of the Singularity. If you're interested in transhumanism, the singularity, cloud computing, search engines, futurism, etc. you'll probably enjoy reading this novel that is chock full of ideas--Stross shoves more ideas into a single chapter than most authors fit into an entire novel, which is quite a feat.

The novel won the 2006 Locus award, and was a nominee for the Hugo. Parts of it won earlier Hugos as novelettes.

Be sure to know your science/tech before embarking on this one. It may start as a usual postcyberpunk story but includes three generations, alien contacts, and a technology singularity. This was certainly, apart from Lem, the most far-reaching science fiction I've read so far. It's even hilariously funny, at times.

Well, it's epic and it's weird. It stretches the imagination. At times I'm inclined to feel too much so, with the result that the reader is, in effect, distanced from the characters. It's difficult to have a passion about a story when you find none of the characters of a nature that you can relate to in any way. On top of this, the book is so far reaching in some of it's ideas that you feel rather lost in the chaos of what the author is trying to describe. Of course, the future probably will be as wonderfully strange and incomprehensible as the portrait Stross paints. One only has to imagine how bizarre our own time would seem to someone transplanted from the nineteenth century. What would they make of the plethora of technology we so take for granted? Imagine how stunned they'd probably be by Bluetooth-enabled phones, where people walk around the streets seemingly talking to themselves. Cars and even planes they might understand, but could they really make sense of computers and the Internet?

If you want to get a taste of what it might be like if you were suddenly shifted ahead in time a hundred or more years, try 'Accelerando'. Just remember this isn't your father's SF.

Lindsay Brambles (author of In Darkness Bound)

Full of novel ideas. The book is slightly overlong - the last section being a bit tedious, and some of the relationships between characters made it seem like a hi-tech soap opera at times. Apart from those very slight blemishes, it's definitely a Must Read for science fiction fans.

Overall, I'd give it 4.75 out of 5.

btw, there's an explanation of Accelerando's technical terms at wikibooks.org

Fast paced and fun, but you need to be a computer nerd, a post-modern economist and a futurologist to really understand it. By the end the characters had melded into a high-tech digital melting pot.