One Aging Geek

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Accelerando by Charles Stross

I'm reading the legal free download version of the book Accelerando by Charlese Stross. This book is dense with imagery of a possible near future. It reminds me of the experience of reading Neuromancer by William Gibson when that was new. Here's a very small example from an expository segment in the fifth chapter:

Manufactured by Airbus-Cisco years earlier, the Field Circus is a hick backwater, isolated from the mainstream of human culture, its systems complexity limited by mass: The destination lies nearly three light-years from Earth, and even with high acceleration and relativistic cruise speeds, the one-kilogram starwisp and its hundred-kilogram light sail will take the best part of seven years to get there. Sending a human-sized probe is beyond even the vast energy budget of the new orbital states in Jupiter system – near-lightspeed travel is horrifically expensive. Rather than a big, self-propelled ship with canned primates for passengers, as previous generations had envisaged, the starship is a Coke-can-sized slab of nanocomputers, running a neural simulation of the uploaded brain states of some tens of humans at merely normal speed. By the time its occupants beam themselves home again for download into freshly cloned bodies, a linear extrapolation shows that as much change will have overtaken human civilization as in the preceding fifty millennia – the sum total of H. sapiens sapiens' time on Earth.

The book consists of a number of connected stories that span several decades beginning around 2010. I've read versions of at least two of the stories before, probably in Garder Dozois' annual "Year's Best Science Fiction" series. Very highly recommended (both Accelerando and the Dozois' series)!