The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows......more
The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.
Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber's son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity.
For something is systemically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form.(less)
OK, let's start with the fact that the book jacket compared Charles Stross's writing with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson at their best.
As a reader who has a serious crush on Stephenson's writing, I instantly had an expectation was set up in my mind, as you can imagine.
How......more
OK, let's start with the fact that the book jacket compared Charles Stross's writing with William Gibson and Neal Stephenson at their best.
As a reader who has a serious crush on Stephenson's writing, I instantly had an expectation was set up in my mind, as you can imagine.
However, this novel was thoroughly disappointing. I like hard SF and cyberpunk that explores social mores and the impacts of technology and science upon society. And can do so with humor (or irony). The science was so outlandishly bad (e.g. generating sufficient power to run manufacturing plants on a satellite of Jupiter by wrapping conductors around the satellite, across the poles, to create a conducting loop to move through Jupiter's magnetic field), and the belief in the Singularity so without skepticism, that I stopped drinking the Kool-Aid at about page 220, and had to gut out the last half of the book without the necessary suspension of disbelief that is why I read science fiction in the first place. As the book proceeds use of science or IT concepts becomes increasingly absurd as the main characters (who are nearly impossible to feel any sympathy for) are rescued, Deus ex Machina style, from ridiculous crises with unexplored implications that abuse the reader's time and effort placed in attempting to understand what has been written.
The ability to dash out clever metaphors and create a story around a compelling idea (like the Singularity) does not guarantee that the story will be good. Stross has moments of true humor and irony, but the characters are leaden and locked in epoch-long neuroses that persist whether the character is in "meatspace" or has re-instantiated itself as an orangutan or a flock of passenger pigeons (I'm not making this up). There is also a level of omniscience and confidence in the main characters that suggests they know everything that has happened and will happen. While this may be a device to make the post-humans off-putting to us as human beings, part of the reason to write a book is to get humans to read it, and most real humans won't soldier through a book with know-it-all characters they cannot care about, who already have figured out everything that will happen to them, and seem unbelievably bored by anything except for their family squabbles.
The middle third (from around page 200 through 300) really lacks coherence and cannot be readily followed by any but the most careful reading. And, upon careful reading, you are not rewarded. This is not Pynchon or Faulkner; this is geek speak that does not connect with ideas that matter. At the point where the travellers encounter alien intelligences, the entire story completely falls apart and has to be rescued, again, from its own excesses.
I have spent too much time writing about this. If you read this review, you have been warned about what to expect in reading this book. I will not be picking up another Stross novel any time soon.(less)
‘
’
In the show
there is a character played by Martin Starr that loves to condescend everyone and insist
While reading
by Charles Stross, I kept thinking that it is the perfect book that he would be into. I mean, its undeniable this book i......more
‘
’
In the show
there is a character played by Martin Starr that loves to condescend everyone and insist
While reading
by Charles Stross, I kept thinking that it is the perfect book that he would be into. I mean, its undeniable this book is brilliant and conceptually it will blow your mind. Stross dares to depict the undepictable of a post-singularity humanity in a ultra-capitalist future where the quest for the meaning of life isn’t solved by immortality and everyone is straight up having a bad time. There are also a lot more sentient crustaceans than you might expect. This book is so overflowing with technological jargon and scientific examination it almost reads like a textbook—which is arguably awesome because I’m
aware Stross knows his shit enough to spit it—and this future that is fully couched in Cold War aesthetics comes to plausible life in ways that takes work to wrap your brain around. It’s incredible and visionary, yet I’d be hard pressed to name who I’d recommend it to in 2021 and had to slog through the writing hacking away at an overabundance of adjectives and wooden, overdramatic dialogue like I was clearing the first path through a dense forest.
is a genius novel of a bleak technological future that struggles to carry it’s own brilliance and though it succeeds at being mind bending the journey is so strenuously opaque and lackluster it is more a servitute to finishing than a fulfilling ride.
Starting this novel may feel a lot like dipping into some
where the tech discourse is heavy, but instead of dropping into an engaging plot it just sort of remains there. Which is cool, because each chapter begins with a news-bulletin-like aside cuing you into what society is like at this given point in time and as a reader you experience some of what
meanth by
.
This novel makes you feel technology surpassing you and even if you have the knowledge to adequately assess his terminology and visionary futures you still feel it as something you must chase and adapt to understand. It really embodies the idea that ‘
’ and with each jump in time (each chapter is written as a stand-alone short story with similar characters like a monster-of-the-week sci-fi show) Which is a really excellent concept, but once you are hip to the game he doesn’t relent and it gets rather exhausting and deflates the fun. It doesn’t help that by 2021 this book, not yet a decade old, feels incredibly dated. There is great stuff going on at the beginning that feels very much a Cold War-hangover with nation states legislating new tech and the UN trying to wrap their heads around what constitutes Rights for artificial intelligence, but so much of the post-human future seems weirdly antiquated in early 2000s perspectives. Which isn’t a complaint really, even solid
novels have some tech references that are sure to invoke an embarrassed giggle today.
‘
’
There is so much going right for a novel that just doesn’t register well. It is incredibly anti-capitalist featuring a protagonist that refuses to be beholden to anyone and won’t accept payment and has mind blowing concepts like sentient corporations of sentient
embodied as giant turtles floating in space (you get used to this after awhile) and much of the book involves weird shell companies embodied as living beings as loophole escapes from bad situations. This lampoons corporate paperwork in the best way. There is even this amazing moment when they first make contact with alien civilization only for them to be preying on folks wowed by first contact in order to devour them. A lawyer gets it first like this group, the Munch, are a
. This shit is cool and should be fun, but Christ it is not fun to read. Alien battles, BDSM sex (SO much) and dialing a phone are all written with the same level of no-tension and mundanity that it's hard to get excited even when things are exploding on the page. No tone, no atmosphere, but the jargon is dope.
Which is a shame, really. It’s a real extreme version of telling and not showing. Like, ever. Very few descriptions of where you are and it always feels like regardless the situation you are in some 90s sitcom apartment. Which would be cool had that been intentional for a purpose but here it just feels off and awful. This feels like a draft the caustic kid in your computer course would hand you, because you are an English major, to read and it’s just...brilliant but nearly unbearable. And it’s hard to critique because any point about how he’d need to slim down descriptors and, even without easing it up on the jargon which is honestly pretty badass and impresses me, get to the fucking point will just be met with a retort that you didn’t “get it” enough. Which is fair. But reading all of it also felt like when a character ponders, if ‘
’ Had this not been for bookclub I doubt I would have finished, though ended up being one of the few that did and defended it against people that openly hated it. It’s not bad, but still. Do I fully comprehend his Matryoshka brain future where death is irrelevant and your uploaded memories aren’t reliable but, screw it, it’s what you’ve got so make the best of it: ….okay no, I’m a big foggy.
But was it enjoyable to read at least?
Also no.
Okay, but like, it blew your mind and you loved the concepts so that’s gotta count for something?
Ehhhh, I wont hate on it?
Good enough?
Good enough.
It makes me think of why I like
so much. With Stross, it's all why and how and then, despite being the intention of the book, very little of how that interacts with humanity other than broad strokes. With Le Guin its all what happens. Which is what I, personally, enjoy best (if this isn't you, by all means love this book, I'm happy as hell for you if you do). I don't really care why. Oh okay, it's a thing, cool. Now tell me what the implications of that being a thing means. That's what I'm all about. Fuck me up with some speculative fiction of stuff I can just asume is plausible because, fuck it, why not?
‘
’
Yet still the bleak vision of the future is kind of great. It’s one where ‘
: because nobody gives a flat fuck about you as an individual aside from being part of a consumable civilization turned into capitalist gears for profit production. Yet it also isn’t a society that values a society at large. Death has become meaningless as you can upload your consciousness into a flock of seagulls if you so choose (it happens, it’s weird) and dying is considered the most horrible of horrors (take that, mortal reader that will inevitably experience total finality, bwahahaha. It’s actually a really cool fuck you to...well YOU when reading it). The future here seems absolutely terrible even though technology is astonishingly awesome. Plus the villain ends up being a demonic cat, which rules though the super anti-climactic conclusion hinges of a small child having a surprise scythe for a third arm that has in no way been figured previously into the novel. But whatever, it was cool and it’s your book, Charles Stross, do whatever the hell you want.
I so badly want to like this. It’s undeniable brillant and it blew my mind and made me think of things in a cool way. But it’s also such a burden to read and hellishly unfun despite how completely fun it seems. If you are down with Hard Sci-fi I could see this being your thing, and I really hope it is because I want someone to love this. It deserves it, it’s made with love but I’m just not the partner for this torrid affair.
(less)
Acclerando is Stross’s most frustrating, annoying, idea-packed, difficult, dense, and arguably best novel. Can feel like taking a crash course in astro-physics, computer science, economics, sociology, while reading a dozen blogs, Bruce Sterling’s “Deep Eddy Stories” and Shismatrix , and cliff notes ......more
Acclerando is Stross’s most frustrating, annoying, idea-packed, difficult, dense, and arguably best novel. Can feel like taking a crash course in astro-physics, computer science, economics, sociology, while reading a dozen blogs, Bruce Sterling’s “Deep Eddy Stories” and Shismatrix , and cliff notes of science fiction’s back pages. But once you get over the buzz of the overload it is a hauntingly odd story of a dysfunctional family in a world of increasingly weird technology and its implications. Spooky, funny, surreal, spastic and brain warping, and shifting between space opera, near-future post cyberpunk, and hard science, this book has enough material for hundreds of stories and essays. It is made of fix-up stories but holds up thanks to the third section pulling the threads together. May not be to most peoples taste and you should probably read the rest of his oeuvre before attempting this one ( I gave up a half dozen times). If you do respond to it, check out his earlier unpublished (available online) novel Scratch Monkey, which is more macabre take on similar material.(less)
Stopped at p. 289. This book has been haunting me for
, and it isn't even that long. The idea of finishing it began to seem like a chore several weeks ago, and at some point I realized that at my steadily decelarating (ha!) reading pace it would haunt me for months more if I didn't just ......more
Stopped at p. 289. This book has been haunting me for
, and it isn't even that long. The idea of finishing it began to seem like a chore several weeks ago, and at some point I realized that at my steadily decelarating (ha!) reading pace it would haunt me for months more if I didn't just stop.
This is clearly supposed to be a fun, bubbly, readable book. What turned it into such an albatross?
I guess the problem is a fundamental difference between my worldview and the worldview assumed by the book. I don't know if the book's view is Charles Stross' own view, or whether he's just playing around with it -- this is fiction, after all -- but the difference grated on me, page by page, sentence by sentence, until it ultimately ground me down.
This is another science fiction book that depicts the singularity, something I've
. In that review I talked about how the singularity was originally supposed to be something that was
to depict in fiction, and that I thought that when writers tried to do it anyway they often failed to sufficiently disorient the reader. If you're going to depict something that's supposed to be beyond our comprehension, you'd better not be too comprehensible!
With Accelerando the problem is quite different. Stross is clearly working very hard to make his future continually disorienting. Barely a paragraph goes by without some new bit of gee-whiz terminology or the positing of some not-before-mentioned feat of engineering. The dialogue is filled with odd terms and assumptions and seems intended to make the reader think again and again,
The intended impression is one of a future receding away from our comprehension at an accelerating rate.
But rather than steady accelerating future shock, my experience was more of a sudden, gigantic shock right at the beginning, followed by woozy indifference. The gigantic shock came from the fact that, even at the beginning, when Stross is merely showing us the day after tomorrow, his world seems fundamentally different from the one I live in. Specifically, it seems to be a world in which there are no truly difficult technical problems -- a world in which everyone talks in breezy, arrogant language full of colorful metaphors and vague, commingled ideas, and where this kind of talk somehow leads directly, as if by magic, to wonderful new technologies and a better world for everyone. Typical dialogue runs something like this:
That's from the
. Granted, the character speaking here is supposed to be a bit of a wild-eyed singularity nut, and the fact that he ends up being
is supposed to be somewhat jarring, to the reader as much as to the other characters. But it's not just his specific ideas that are vindicated -- it's his whole way of thinking, or rather
quite thinking, but bouncing incoherently from one glitzy idea to the next like a Wired magazine writer on acid.
Stross' own prose sounds like this more and more as the book goes on, as do the other characters. A character is described as "a strange attractor within the chaotic phase-space of Italian politics," as though this meant something definite and readily comprehensible. Another "doesn't believe in scarcity or zero-sum games or competition -- his world is too fast and information dense to accommodate primate hierarchy games." Reference is incessantly made to the "state vectors" of people's brains, which appears to be nothing more than a way of making the word "state" sound more mathematical. This is how Stross describes the political environment of the mid-term future future: "globalism and tribalism have run to completion, diverging respectively into homogeneous interoperability and the Schwarzschild radius of insularity." At a later point he tells us, ominously, that "the human memesphere is coming alive."
The ultimate effect of all of this, compounded over hundreds of pages of dialogue and description, is the evocation of a world in which everything that matters can be discussed in these bullshit terms. Deliberately or not, Stross' book is fundamentally a kind of fantasy novel about the alternate universe conjured by breathless tech journalism and Silicon Valley hype. A world in which science gets done and technology gets made by people speaking this kind of language, and there is no deeper, more grounded level where the metaphors disappear and everything is hard data and math.
The core personality trait of virtually all the main characters -- and, really, of the book itself -- is a boundless confidence in their own hazy thinking, a complete lack of any tether to hard facts, to a wide harsh world outside this Wired magazine sci-fi headspace. The universe itself conforms to the contours of the characters' thought patterns, and the whole thing ends up feeling like some sort of Brave New World-like utopia/dystopia. Part and parcel of this is Stross' complete inability to write engaging human relationships: in this world whose fundamental metaphysics is made of buzzwords, it's hard to have subtle or uncertain shades of feeling that can't be captured in a tech metaphor or distilled into a snarky quip. (Fittingly enough, most of the sex in this buzzworld is BSDM, and pretty stunningly unsexy.)
I'll concede that Stross is relentlessly inventive, and that he appears to be pretty talented at this strange task he's set for himself. I've certainly never read anyone else like him. A friend on Facebook wrote that he'd "never read anything so gleefully wrapped up in its own cheerful balls-to-the-wall insanity," and I can easily imagine a slightly different version of myself finding that particular package very enjoyable. But to actual-me it was just grating -- page after page of fingernails on chalkboard, of annoying guy at party who won't shut up.
I guess it also makes me wonder about all the people who take the singularity seriously as a prediction about the real future. Do they find this book as grating as I do? A lot of the enthusiasm for the concept comes from people who work in the software industry; I've noticed a lot less of it among scientists, even though many of the important barriers between us and the singularity (e.g. understanding the brain better) are science challenges, not engineering challenges. Maybe the Accelerando mindset is simply the engineer's mindset taken beyond the limits of good sense -- a mindset formed by interacting with human creations that were made to be understood and combined. Metaphors (sometimes) work in that world because it was made by us, for us, and we're creatures of metaphor; they break on the more alien crags of the physical universe itself. Which might be one reason not to listen to people from the tech industry when they talk about the singularity, even when they sound really smart.
Well, I dunno. It's a thought.(less)
Many people recommended this highly to me. I found that the plot and ideas, as summarized on Wikipedia, were brilliant and mind-expanding.
The writing of the book was intolerable. I couldn't get past page 20. It was like reading Wired Magazine--Stross drops every current technology name ......more
Many people recommended this highly to me. I found that the plot and ideas, as summarized on Wikipedia, were brilliant and mind-expanding.
The writing of the book was intolerable. I couldn't get past page 20. It was like reading Wired Magazine--Stross drops every current technology name and buzzword, apparently without a deep enough understanding to know which might have staying power 15 minutes into the future. When "slashdot", "open source", "bluetooth", "wimax", "state vector" and more terms all appeared on the same page, I felt like I was reading a Bruce Sterling novel. This guy's trying to impress or snow me with dumb vocabulary, rather than telling a story.
I hope he drops the silly vocabulary and trashy sci-fi sentence structure to expand his great ideas in the other books. More Arthur C. Clarke and less Bruce Sterling, please.(less)
I am trying so hard, but I still haven't read a Charles Stross I like as much as I like his twitter feed, and that makes me frustrated. I want to fall in love with his books! This gets closer than the two I've previously read, but not quite there. It's a good book, but I'm still a little on the fenc......more
I am trying so hard, but I still haven't read a Charles Stross I like as much as I like his twitter feed, and that makes me frustrated. I want to fall in love with his books! This gets closer than the two I've previously read, but not quite there. It's a good book, but I'm still a little on the fence.
Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the recent changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision
.
In the meantime, you can read the entire review at(less)
I finally understand why Charles Stross is so popular even though I often find his fiction borderline unreadable. I think he writes for a tech savvy readership and they love him for it. It's great when an author gives you credit for intelligence and understanding and never talk down to you. However,......more
I finally understand why Charles Stross is so popular even though I often find his fiction borderline unreadable. I think he writes for a tech savvy readership and they love him for it. It's great when an author gives you credit for intelligence and understanding and never talk down to you. However, while I know my way around Windows and Android phones I don't consider myself tech savvy, certainly my understanding of programming is minimal. A lot of what Stross puts in his fiction goes right over my head.
This is my third Stross book, originally it was going to be the first as it is available as a free e-book under Creative Commons licence, Unfortunately on that first attempt I could not read more than 50 pages and had to give it up. I had better luck with his
which I quite enjoyed, not long after that I read
which I partially enjoyed, very much like my second attempt at Accelerando. I wanted to give Accelerando another try because it is a highly rated book among my friends at
online discussion group. While I don't rate the book quite so highly myself I kind of understand my peers' enthusiasm for it, there is a lot to admire in Accelerando even if the end result does not quite work for me.
Charles Stross has an immense imagination, he knows his science, and he has a sense of humour. In addition to all that his blogs and other online posts give the impression that he is a great guy, kind, friendly, modest, and enthusiastic about science and science fiction. The only snag is I find his prose style difficult to read. He employs a ton of technical jargon and neologism, most of which is never clarified I understand that he has numerous fans who do not have any problem comprehending his work, more power to them, I can only speak for myself.
Accelerando is a fix-up novel comprised of nine short stories about events shortly before the advent of the singularity, through the singularity and events post-singularity.There lies the weakness of the book as a novel for me, the nine stories do not bind together into one cohesive tale. The fix-up nature of the novel plays hell with the narrative rhythm, I find myself veering crazily back and forth between enjoying the book to feeling a bit bored and frustrated with it. The end result is on the positive side but not by a large margin. Practically every page is brimming with new ideas and concepts, sf readers who in this genre for the technological speculation is likely to have a field day. This is under the proviso that they are able to follow the author's technical expositions. I have to confess about 25% of these ideas flew right over my head, may be I just don't have enough bandwidth or storage space to cope with them. Be that as it may, the reading experience can be frustrating from time to time. Another complaint I have is with the characterization, most of the characters (except that weird cyber-cat) are of not worth caring about as Stross does not spend much time developing them, they just exist to drive the plot forward. I really do like the ideas that I was able to absorb though, especially those concerning posthumanism and Stross' speculation of what our race may eventually evolve or transcend into.
After being disappointed with
I kept telling myself that Charles Stross' sf books are just not for me, yet somehow his ideas always manage to entice me to pick up another one. I like Accelerando over all but I am also disappointed in it. The trouble is I am almost certain to read another one of his book in the near future and I probably won't enjoy it!
(less)
2006 –
won the Locus Sci-Fi award, beating the Hugo winner,
.
Personally, I would have given the award to
’
, the sequel to 2004’s winner,
(one of my all-time favourite books). But I’m very glad the guys and gals voting for the......more
2006 –
won the Locus Sci-Fi award, beating the Hugo winner,
.
Personally, I would have given the award to
’
, the sequel to 2004’s winner,
(one of my all-time favourite books). But I’m very glad the guys and gals voting for the Locus gave it to
– because that way it got onto my reading list.
After making the decision to read every Locus Sci-Fi winner, this is the book I started my quest with. It was recent, sounded interesting, was a new author for me, and was available from Amazon second hand for just 1p (plus delivery).
This book made me feel:
Christ-On-A-Bike-Doing-Bunnyhops-Through-Bethlehem!
I would describe it as:
A charismatic geekazoid ideagasming into my optic nerves.
What I said at the time to my wife:
The main guy I was telling you about, well he’s now a flock of pigeons living in his grandson’s space habitat (orbiting Saturn) which is controlled by the AI who used to be an orangutan, his daughter’s ship and his cat.
It’s that kind of book. Like riding a rollercoaster through a technology museum then being quizzed about the exhibits.
It throws a lot of information at you, opens up a lot of different angles and doesn’t explain much. Then it lurches off down one of these angles into the future and does it again. While you’re trying to figure out what’s happening this time, you’re also trying to figure out which details were relevant from the last chapter to get you here. Then we lurch forward again and a pattern emerges – we’re trying to look at the present, then at the past for how the hell we got here, then to the future for where we’re going next. Each lurch gets more extreme, accelerating the profound post-singularity changes on individuals and society.
It’s a fascinating experience with a wonderful, free-wheeling spirit.
But it lacks heart. By surfing the wave of progress, the characters in
are moving further and further away from traditional norms, and as such the emotional hooks they exert upon the reader are increasingly abstract and tenuous. It’s a brilliant thought-experiment, but lacking in soul.
Delighted to give it 4 stars – but quite firm that it doesn’t deserve 5.(less)
Hard SF. Three generations of an entrepreneurial family invent and scheme and survive the singularity, the point where artificial intelligence power bypasses old-fashioned organic brains, and humans first augment themselves, then disassemble the planets to build a solar-system wide computer and beco......more
Hard SF. Three generations of an entrepreneurial family invent and scheme and survive the singularity, the point where artificial intelligence power bypasses old-fashioned organic brains, and humans first augment themselves, then disassemble the planets to build a solar-system wide computer and become something else entirely.
What a disappointment. I can forgive unapproachable characters in hard SF, and frequently have. I tried hard to cut some slack, because the
of the book is the screamingly insane pace of progress and just how fast and how far we would change into something entirely different. But indeed, I did have the revelation, around the three-quarter mark, that not only didn't I care whether any of our protagonists permanently bit it or not, but the supposedly precarious fate of the entire human race also made me yawn copiously.
But when I forgive that failing in hard SF it's because the big ideas are awesome enough. And these ideas were big, sure, all intergalactic packet-switched router systems and AI cats and what all. But there was something so . . . smug? Self-involved? I can't really put my finger on it, except that a lot of this book was
in-jokey to such a specific stripe of internet-age scifi geekery that it tipped over from pleasing into masturbatory. Something like that.
Does Stross have anything better to offer?(less)
This book is fantastic hard SciFi in the emergent post-human genre. From what I can gather, this book has done for post-humanism what Neuromancer did for cyberpunk. It's a touch dry in some places and the characters are a bit clunky, but I feel Charles is most interested in describing the "singulari......more
This book is fantastic hard SciFi in the emergent post-human genre. From what I can gather, this book has done for post-humanism what Neuromancer did for cyberpunk. It's a touch dry in some places and the characters are a bit clunky, but I feel Charles is most interested in describing the "singularity" rather than telling a traditional story.
Post-humanist writing is obsessed with the concept of "singularity" - a point at which the old ways of doing things (relying on grey matter and the associated sensory organs and limbic systems) is replaced by virtual people and artificial realities. I don't understand this fascination with the point of the eschaton. If humanity survives long enough to get to a point where we can spin off various copies of ourselves to process information in different, simultaneous timelines, wouldn't that mean that the beginning of the next phase of human development is marked by The Great Multiplicity?
That rant aside, Accelerando was a great read, as I am a hardcore geek who believes math is entertaining and science tells the greatest stories of all, and I have a background in information technology. Without at least a cursory understanding of astrophysics, calculus and computing technology this book would quickly bog down into a lot of technobabble. Unlike some of the other classic SciFi books, Charles doesn't show how the technology works, he explains it then shows what it's like to live with it.
The story is engaging. There are three parts to the book, and each section has it's own conflicts and resolutions, and each could stand alone as a novella. The book follows the progression of a finite set of characters, who through copying themselves into different hardware each live out alternate timelines, and these copies occasionally intersect with themselves and other characters. This all takes place over the better part of a century, when the computing power of the human race explodes exponentially at ever shortening durations, causing a total phase shift in what it means to be human and how people view the universe and humanity's place in it.
Charle's ability to rationally explain how that could happen, and make the science work, is how this book gets five stars. I couldn't put this book down once the acceleration started; it was too fascinating to read his theories on how the post in post-humanism could come about.
The character-driven part of the story is the weakest part of the book. I would have liked to see the pressures and generational divides play out a more finesse. There is a lot of room for the human story to be told in this book, but it falls to the side for the sake of technologie's story.
I truly enjoyed this book, because I'm a hardcore nerd. I don't forsee their being a lot of attraction outside of nerdville for this book. If you like your scifi hard as nanospun diamond, however, I can't recommend this book enough.(less)