Continuing my string of book reviews (or more likely, just bragging that I read a book) is Charles Stross’ “Aceelerando”. The book was published in 2006 (I think) and is a very interesting read in the Science Fiction “Singularity” genre. I have written a bit about the Singularity concept before and don’t particularly think it will happen anytime soon: the idea that technology will become so advanced that human will not be able to understand it, and become surpassed by or transcend through technological means just doesn’t seem realistic to me: I know too much about computers to think that there will be any really advanced Artifial Intelligence anytime soon. I think that is forty or fifty years out at least before we start seeing real learning systems that do not depend on humans to supply them with a framework to run inside.

This novel focuses on one family as they travel through the singularity point. Stross as an author is a joy to read: funny, and he has a great knack for explaining technology. He throws in a lot of references to computer science concepts, and does something that is rare in media: he doesn’t make technology do ridiculous things. Hollywood movies are the worst, but you come across it even in science fiction as well. Of course I only notice it when the author writes about things that I know about, and I’m sure that generally any expert in a field will find problems with the popularizations of things that they know about, but it is really nice to see things done well.

This novel has a bit of a flavor of Neuromancer, and is reminiscent of Rainbow’s End as well. The book kind of flirts with the unreliable narrator gimmick that I sometimes like and that sometimes annoys me, but you are never quite sure after reading it exactly how the narrative structure is set up. There are interesting questions about conciousness and what it means to be human and sentient, but that isn’t anything new to these kinds of novels.

It also has a very interesting take on the Fermi Paradox that I did find original, but I haven’t been scouring the world for books that address this issue (although see also A Fire Upon The Deep (Zones of Thought)
for more on that.

I really enjoyed this book, and think that anyone interested in the Cyberpunk / Singularity stuff will find it interesting too. Best of all: you can get it from Amazon (like I did) or you can download it for free from Charles Stross’ website. That is really great that he has made the book available for free. I wish I had known that because then I would have read that first, then probably bought some of his newer stuff. I do have one more of his books on my pile of “to read” books, but it would have been nice to get some of his other stuff. I really like what I have read so far though, so I plan to buy his other novels (assuming they have reasonable priced versions on the Amazon Japan site – which isn’t always the case.)