Accelerando (2005)
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando.html- Read this years ago and reread the first two chapters just now. Brilliantly written and within the conceit of "what if technological and aerospace advancement continued beyond the materials limits to the thermodynamic limits and private entities became exponentially emancipated from states and the old moral panics never re-emerged" the content of the book is almost all good but for one thing that we now know to have aged horribly. That thing is augmented reality.
Every augmented reality device more advanced than subdermal hearing aids to have ever been built has found only a very small minority of users who actually enjoy the damn things. Most of the human race doesn't like augmented reality technology, smart vision, heads-up displays or VR in any way.
-- OgsyedIE Reply - That's just because those technologies haven't advanced "beyond the material limits" yet.
VR is amazing, but I don't play much with mine because its such a hassle to set up, manage the cables and having to wipe off the sweat during the warmer months. The same goes for everything else, once I can get for example map AR that projects directions for me and its a small clip on that goes on my shirt or whatever else, then that's going to be a game changer.
-- animal531 Reply - I would love to have a HUD that could remind me of stuff and add extra information to my surroundings.
The closest we've had was Google Glass but the tech isn't quite there yet to be able to have a powerful yet light device.
-- schnitzelstoat Reply - It's kinda wild to me that Stross literally wrote about cryptocurrency, smart contracts (the legal corporations in Accelerando written in Python 3000, AKA what is now called Python3) and cryptocurrency thefts (the robbing of a decentralized bank due to a bug at the beginning of "halting state"). All of this was years before Bitcoin, not to mention Ethereum, which is where most of that smart contract stuff started.
-- miki123211 Reply - I think this is a classic by now, with reason.
I think some of the concepts in the book are both very prescient and very disheartening, e.g. the autonomous corporations that keep haggling with each other way past their usefulness to the beings who created them.
-- riffraff Reply - One of my favourite bits is how most of the mass of the inner solar system gets converted to Computronium consisting almost entirely of legal bots battling other legal bots.
-- askvictor Reply - It was a fairly new concept in 2005 but the idea that the evolution of life as determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe terminates in inwardly-facing capitalist computronium predates Accelerando. While I'm unaware of the intermediate steps the idea took to get to Stross it's the thesis of many of the various essays that Nick Land scattered across Usenet in the nineties and probably goes back to Lyotard's writings in the eighties and earlier.
-- OgsyedIE Reply - The first time I read this was over GPRS on an HTC Typhoon smartphone running Windows Mobile during my 2-hour commute to my first job in tech after university, and anything seemed possible. Surprised to be sitting here years later feeling much the same.
-- thom Reply - When reading this for first time (like two years ago) it struck me how many issues of accelerando world we actually have right now in ours. In fiction they are just hyperboled to extreme (sometimes for comedic appeal).
-- mab122 Reply - Such a good book. This is the book that cemented exponential rate of improvement in my mind.
-- gnat Reply - A friend picked this for our neighborhood book club. Having read it, I told him that he should provide a cheat sheet for less technically inclined readers, covering for example "Thompson hack" and "Turing-complete". He did not--I think that he might have suggested that I draw it up--and it became one of the least popular books to have been read in the club's history.
-- cafard Reply - Recommend Dune, next time, for extra lulz
-- 0xEF Reply - Very high density of ideas that make you stop and go “shit, that’s exactly how it’ll turn out.” Blew my mind.
-- icaruswept Reply - WTF, I started reading this yesterday! Talk about coincidence.
I won't read other comments here because I want to go in blind, but I'm afraid I already spoiled something for myself (even though I supposed the book would take that turn) just by looking at the comment page.
At the moment it looks like run-of-the-mill post-cyberpunk-near-future fare, but I suppose it will take a different direction altoghether.
-- klez Reply - Charlie is on Mastodon, toots regularly and actually replies to others
https://wandering.shop/@cstross
-- thiagocsf Reply - cstross is also here on HN.
-- gpderetta Reply - He's everywhere, and not just as a PR presence, he's actually involved. I've had a couple of interactions with him on Reddit where he politely drive-by corrected me (a real brush with fame for me). Add to that everything he's written on antipope (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=antipope.org) and I find it amazing he gets commercial work done at all.
The first third of Accelerando is a tour de force - the ideas-per-page ratio is just phenomenal, and 20 years ago it left me feeling future-shocked. But it's pulp, in the sense that it's very much rooted in the time it was written (the curse of near-future SF). If anyone knows of any works that idea-dense but written in the 2020s, I'd love to hear about them. Short fiction especially.
-- flir Reply
-- Reply- Best (fiction) book I ever read, and I will always associate it with the amazing psychill album I discovered at the same time (Easily Embarrassed - Idyllic Life).
-- pixelpoet Reply - These size books by Charlie Stross are great fun, especially with the quick pacing.
For some reason on longer journeys I keep trying his longer ones and don't get on with them at all.
-- stuaxo Reply - Fun to re-read that. So many dated references - Windows NT! Communism in Russia! Patents being valuable!
-- Animats Reply - Very cool story for anyone into far-future, post-humanity, and trans-humanity. I also discovered this here, in a comment.
-- Semaphor Reply - Loved this book, curious how it holds up but have way to many other things to read to find out for myself.
-- mulderc Reply - ok so I've been hearing of this for a while. Seems to be somehow similar to Diaspora, which I didn't enjoy that much and I have currently put on hold (I am around halfway through). Wonder if I would like it.
-- valbis Reply - Diaspora is a book for Math PhDs, involving a lot of physics and math theories. Accelerando is a book that anyone can read. Involving hyperintelligent cats and sentient shrimps (actual shrimps, not aliens).
I would recommend it not just for the philosophical aspect (it has a very interesting way of placating transhumanism) but also for the entertainment aspect (aforementioned shrimps, did I mention the Iranian space program?)
Stross is a very approachable author, Accelerando is not his most accessible book, but if you can go through half of Diaspora, you can easily go through the entirety of Accelerando.
-- nicopappl Reply - I think you mean lobsters.
Accelerando is a fixup of a bunch of short stories, and one was "Lobsters".
https://reiszwolf.wordpress.com/2020/04/11/lobsters-%E2%80%A...
-- lproven Reply - I don't mind technical fiction, and I love a good hard scifi, but I guess the part of science I am most interested on (when I read literature) is the psychological one - Blindsight is by far my favourite sci-f. However I am totally up for trying Accellerando, so thank you for the reccomendation, you sold it to me :P
-- valbis Reply - Just always remember: it's a dystopia. It's not a happy positive uplifting book: the conclusion is intended as a genocidal, catastrophic nightmare.
-- lproven Reply - Exactly. It's a fantastic book and extremely fun, but in Stross' own words: "In the background of what looks like a Panglossian techno-optimist novel, horrible things are happening."
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/05/crib-she...
On it's origins (extreme burnout as a programmer in a high growth environment during the dot com boom):
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...
-- possibleworlds Reply - I’ve found that dystopian sci fi has to be clear about this to the point of bashing the reader over the head with it, which unfortunately can ruin it as art.
Think of 1984 as a classic example, though good writing rescues that one as art. If the author hadn’t included a “Hannibal Lecture” from the party boss about what The Party actually was there would be trads and neoreactionaries praising it as a work about how great it is to have a state that provides meaning.
If you don’t do that you get people who think for example that Paul Atraides in Dune is Luke Skywalker and the monopolistic feudal system is good when he’s more of a tragic villain in a dystopia.
People even think the world backdrop of Neuromancer is cool. That would not be a cool place to live. The arc across the three books is really showing the twilight of humanity and the ascent of machine intelligence. We are reduced to the street life that William Gibson saw in the downtown East side of Vancouver while the machines take over.
-- api Reply - Like you, I find that sci-fi and its derivatives is where many readers often miss the point. It's not a overly "happy ending" genre, which I think is important to provide balance to all the literary genres as a whole, since many of them aren't exactly trying to make the reader depressed. That's not so much the goal of sci-fi authors either, but instead to make the readers think, which, yes can and often does drive is into the darker parts of what society, humanity and existence has to offer. It's important to have a functional place to approach these things, in my opinion, which is why I shy away from the utopia/optimistic stuff in the genre that rarely seems to gain the popularity the more darkly speculative and dystopian stuff does.
It's not for everyone, I guess. But it should be. Your 1984 example is fantastic since we are seeing this exact thing play out in US politics today, with a tyrannical group trying to usher in a police state and the sycophants that walk lock-step right along with it, enamored by the delusion that they are the good guys because their demagogues don't explicitly say the quiet part out loud.
-- 0xEF Reply - William Gibson would object to the notion that the Sprawl is a dystopia though - at least not directly as one.
His point about it was that the conditions of the sprawl are a good deal better then the conditions huge, even the majority, of humanity live in today.[1]
[1] https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/william-gibson-archangel-apo...
-- XorNot Reply - FYI guys, this excellent author posts here on HN :-)
This is my fav of his books, but his others are often just as gripping. Glasshouse is my 2nd fav.
-- senectus1 Reply
-- Reply- Discovered this here a few years ago, wound up basically taking up the next 2 days ploughing through it unable to put it down.
A case where the title implies a journey it'll deliver on.
-- XorNot Reply