Accelerando is the kind of book I would either highly recommand or strongly discourage people from reading depending what kind of reader you are. But first of all, lets it clear: this is a realy good book — Hey! It was nominated for the Hugo Award last year. It simply isn’t a book for everybody.

Accelerando is a book about Singularity and, like most books doing their best to describe things post-humans struggle with, it’s complex and tend to easily slip into techno-babble and geek-speak. If you’re not used to play with concepts like virtual and augmented realities, cybernetic implants, nanotechnologies, artificial intelligence, cloning, etc. you might find Accelerando difficult to read because it takes all of that for granted and only then start to mix things together to tell the story.

But Accelerando is also a family saga. We start with Manfred Macx, then follow with Amber and then Sirhan. It’s also the story of Aineko, the family pet. We get vignettes of the major events of their life. Because of the way the book is written, it would be hard to describe the story without giving up too much spoiler. Indeed, the book was initially written as a collection of short stories sharing the characters. Charles Stross did a pretty good job at putting all those pieces together. The story is coherent, fast-paced and the characters are strong, credible and interesting things happen to them.

Accelerando is the latest eBook I read. It’s available for free from the author web site and, to be honest, if you got all the gadgets to read eBooks, you might just have the personality to enjoy this book. I did.

Technorati Tags : book | ebook | accelerando | charles stross | science fiction | singularity | review

Filed under:
Lectures by Alexandre Lemieux