Just Finished Reading: Accelerando by Charles Stross

Manfred Macx is a man on the edge – it’s where he lives and where he excels. Manfred surfs the wave of the future staying minutes and sometimes hours ahead of his closest rivals. Crossing and re-crossing a near future Europe increasingly wired and future ready he gives ideas to those who need them and watches as they make millions and sometimes billions from his throw-away lines and musings on possibilities. Manfred, much to the annoyance of his wife in Internal Revenue, cares nothing for money. He has his focus on better and bigger things. Manfred is out to change the world and herald the arrival of The Singularity beyond which the future is completely unpredictable based on anything that has gone before – not just a step change but a completely new way of doing things, a future literally beyond our imagination. All is going to plan until he hears rumours of a signal received from deep space apparently from an intelligent civilisation less than 100 light years away. At first denied to exist at all the message is said to be beyond our best minds capabilities to decipher. That is until Manfred’s heavily re-engineered robot cat intercepts the real message from space. Then everything changes…….

Despite the short synopsis above this is a very difficult book to describe in a single paragraph. I’ve managed to put down a few of the essentials (at least from the first third of the book) but this novel is far, far more than that. Its rare finding a work – especially one that isn’t a first novel – packed with so many ideas. The author could have very easily written 20 or more books exploring each of the major threads of this book – and probably another 20 with the elements in the background or those that lasted for a few pages at best. That’s not to say that this book is just a hodgepodge of ideas thrown into a melting pot in the hope that some of them are half decent enough to fool the reader into thinking the author is clever. It is so far from glitter to dazzle the uninformed that I was honestly staggered at his inventiveness. This is another example of why, after almost 40 years I am still reading SF. It is the sense of wonder I get when I read books like this that honestly leaves me amazed at one mans vision of a possible future. I was, much more than once or twice, awe struck with his vision. This book is jaw droppingly good. It’s a rare thing that I become more impressed page after page and chapter after chapter as the author builds on idea after idea. This is most certainly one author that you will be hearing a great deal more of in future as I intend to read everything the man has ever written. If you want to have your mind well and truly blown, fried and scrambled all at the same time and yet be left with a sense of awe (and with a crazy smile on your face) then you really need to read this book. Oh, and it didn’t do the book any harm at all that, amongst a whole host of great characters, the hero of the piece was (kind of) a cat. Very highly recommended.