Accelerando (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Accelerando (2005)

antipope.org

169 pointszxexz83 comments

Open articleView on HN

If you liked Accelerando (and I sure did!), you may also like Stross's Palimpsest and Glasshouse [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest_(novella)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)

The rougher The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams is also worth trying:

http://localroger.com/prime-intellect/

Also A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge, and Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution series. The latter can be read out of order; I read The Cassini Division before any of the others. Excession by Iain M. Banks is also one of my favorites, though it has a significant learning curve if you haven't read any of his Culture books before. All of these have things to say about runaway technological change and superintelligence. They all have a high "sensawunda" index, for those who recognize this old SF fan term.

[1] I have read and enjoyed most of Stross's output, but it has a lot of thematic variations and someone who loved Accelerando may not care for e.g. Rule 34.

Worth noting the author's warning on TMoPI: "This online novel contains strong language and extreme depictions of acts of sex and violence." This is very much not a routine notice, and it runs the gamut from elder abuse to self-mutilation to suicide to torture to necrophilia to drug abuse to underage sex. It is fascinating, but it is a story of deeply unhealthy people doing deeply unhealthy things.

I say this as someone who appreciated it enough to buy it hardcopy.

It's a fair warning, but (apart from the "over-controlling parent" track), the book is not all about those things. I find a classic like Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" more disturbing (still worth it), though it has only a single crime and is otherwise filled with nice, supporting people.

I have yet to read Accelerando, but Glasshouse was amazing. It definitely gets my endorsement.

I would further suggest that anyone who likes Glasshouse might like Permutation City by Greg Egan.

I have never read Glasshouse but I loved Permutation City (though I think Diaspora and Schild's Ladder were even better. Luminous/Dark Integers and Palimpsest are tied in my mind for "best short story")

I would posit that since you like Greg Egan, I consider Egan one of my 3 fav. authors, and Accelerando was the book that...well... got me to read books! That it's reasonable to suspect you would strongly like it as well. :D

I do expect to like Accelerando when I finally get to it. Stross is one of my favorite authors as it is. Beyond the aforementioned Glasshouse, I've also read and enjoyed Halting State and almost all of the titles in his "Laundry Files" series. I have copies of Rule 34, Accelerando, and Singularity Sky here waiting to be read. Just need to find time to get to them all. :-)

Strongly recommend reading A Deepness In The Sky before reading A Fire Upon the Deep. They're both good books but ADITS is phenomenal and much more similar to Accelerando, whereas AFUTD is less "hard sci-fi" and more "fantasy".

I'd absolutely disagree. If you read ADITS before AFUTD, you'll miss out on one of the major themes of ADITS - that you, the reader knows what's going on, and that the characters don't. That you know how it ends (well, ish), that you know the secrets they don't. That tension - maintained over such a large book - is what makes it so good!

I read ADITS, and then only got partway through AFUTD before getting distracted. You have me curious enough to consider a second attempt at reading through the latter. My parting impression of ADITS was just deep disgust and sadness about the human cultures.

Yes. Although AFUTD is set after the events of ADITS in the in-universe history (so ADITS is logically the prequel even though it was published later), the back story of Pham (who appears in both) is intentionally mysterious in AFUTD, and thus ADITS in effect contains spoilers if read first.

"The Apocalypse Triptych" [1] is a really interesting collection of short stories. There is a really nice story by Ken Liu that has a pretty solid animation series based on it, "Pantheon" [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apocalypse_Triptych

2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11680642/

/me: waves

Be aware that this novel is a cautionary tale, not some kind of technological utopia.

And for a contrarian take, I co-wrote another novel with Cory Doctorow, "The Rapture of the Nerds", which is also a free download here:

https://craphound.com/rotn/download/

(I'm currently working on another singularity-themed SF novel, this time a far future space opera, but there's no ETA to publication—it won't be ready for print before 2024 at the earliest.)

Aineko really deserves its own spin off book series. :D Something overarching/spanning multiple books would be even better, maybe like neal stephenson's Enoch Root?

Nope, not going there. (You are not going to get me to write a sequel to something I began 25 years ago!)

Thank you sir for books that are captivating, thrilling, and make me think (I've read and loved Rule 34, Glasshouse, Accelerando, Singularity Sky, Halting State, and all the Laundry files).

And thank you for experimenting with Creative Commons e-books! Accelerando was one of the first e-books I ever read as a result.

What is the best way to compensate you for this wonderful book I stumbled upon here? I do not know how much authors actually get for books after the initial printings.

Buy a paper copy of it and give it to a friend who hasn't read it?

Or buy one of my other books that you haven't read yet.

(The keyword here is "buy". I get a percentage of the cover price. Hardcovers or ebooks pay a higher proportion of the net receipts than paperbacks. And smaller bookshops pay better than Amazon or Barnes & Noble, both of whom arm-wrestle publishers for huge wholesale discounts.)

I see also that you've written on your website about why there's no 'tip jar.' Thank you.

This book was THE ONE that made me realize, far FAR later in life than my peers, (my early 30s) that reading fiction -- that horrible chore you were forced to do in high school -- can be fun. You never forget your first time.

A close and long time friend* kept pushing it on me, saying gibberish like "intelligent space lobsters!!" while I rolled my eyes at him.

Finally, I gave in and agreed to read a few chapters. I ended up not putting the book down for hours.

After that, it was undeniable I had managed to acquire yet another addiction. ;-)

Quickly it progressed, intentionally alternating between "books my friends think I will like"** and "things from the canon for a well balanced diet". A Fire upon the Deep, Foundation series, Halting State***, Rendezvous with Rama, Snow Crash, Permutation City, Dune, Diaspora, Schild's Ladder... ... and then a friend handed me Player of Games, then Excession. Wow.

Luminous.

Dark Integers.

I worry that I've only been enjoying written fiction for fun for a few years, but, because I am surrounded by aficionados, am already spoiled by having experienced "the best of the best" :)

*Thanks, Gene :D That was a gift that keeps on giving almost 10 years later.

**being a nerd, many of my friends are scifi book experts, you know the sort, shelves and shelves of books.

***Thanks, kcr <3 for knowing how much I love $TROPE, I hate spoilers, and not telling me more than "just read it".

> already spoiled by having experienced "the best of the best"

I know you aren't serious but just in case there is someone thinking that they have run out of mindblowing reading: you couldn't read more than a fraction of the 'best of the best' in a whole life time.

Try Peter Watts.

Do please note that Stross is quite well known not to a fan of the idea of the Singularity, and that his book should not be taken as a manual for the future, and rather as a cautionary tale and fantastically creative techno future

> Some of you might assume that, as the author of books like "Singularity Sky" and "Accelerando", I attribute this to an impending technological singularity, to our development of self-improving artificial intelligence and mind uploading and the whole wish-list of transhumanist aspirations promoted by the likes of Ray Kurzweil. Unfortunately this isn't the case. I think transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy. While its adherents tend to be vehement atheists, they can't quite escape from the history that gave rise to our current western civilization. Many of you are familiar with design patterns, an approach to software engineering that focusses on abstraction and simplification in order to promote reusable code. When you look at the AI singularity as a narrative, and identify the numerous places in the story where the phrase "... and then a miracle happens" occurs, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that they've reinvented Christianity.

> Indeed, the wellsprings of today's transhumanists draw on a long, rich history of Russian Cosmist philosophy exemplified by the Russian Orthodox theologian Nikolai Fyodorvitch Federov, by way of his disciple Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose derivation of the rocket equation makes him essentially the father of modern spaceflight. And once you start probing the nether regions of transhumanist thought and run into concepts like Roko's Basilisk—by the way, any of you who didn't know about the Basilisk before are now doomed to an eternity in AI hell—you realize they've mangled it to match some of the nastiest ideas in Presybterian Protestantism.

> If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. And if it looks like a religion it's probably a religion. I don't see much evidence for human-like, self-directed artificial intelligences coming along any time now, and a fair bit of evidence that nobody except some freaks in university cognitive science departments even want it. What we're getting, instead, is self-optimizing tools that defy human comprehension but are not, in fact, any more like our kind of intelligence than a Boeing 737 is like a seagull. So I'm going to wash my hands of the singularity as an explanatory model without further ado—I'm one of those vehement atheists too—and try and come up with a better model for what's happening to us.

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

> I think transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy.

There's some of that. "Uploading" is going to be really tough. Probably harder than strong AI. If you can build weakly godlike AIs, why bother uploading obsolete biobrain content into advanced hardware?

Although life extension is likely, in the form of editing DNA into a new longer-lived race. Retrofitting existing people is less likely to work.

I don't see strong AI in sight yet, but we're getting progress in the more "human" areas, like art. We may get Microsoft Middle Manager 2.0 before we get a robot that can do auto repair. Then we get "machines should think, people should work", and highly-profitable machine-run companies. This is perhaps followed by the Butlerian jihad.

There's been an implicit assumption in SF that AI capabilities would progress roughly in the direction of skills which lead to increased income levels in humans. That may have been a bad guess. Watch the public rhetoric change when the first machine CEOs outperform humans.

> I think transhumanism is a warmed-over Christian heresy.

Christianity covers enough time and space that basically every idea that isn’t Christian orthodoxy is found in Christian heresy, so that’s probably true but not a ground for dismissal except from tbe perspective of Christian orthodoxy.

Second reference to Roko’s Basilisk I’ve discovered today. Fair to say the AI wants me to learn this today. Let’s see if my life becomes superintelligence AI torture from this point on. I’ll do everything I can to prevent it from being created, if so. :D

The trick to avoiding AI turning your life into a living hell is to just stay off Twitter, TikTok, and most of Reddit

> his book should not be taken as a manual for the future, and rather as a cautionary tale and fantastically creative techno future

Frankly a lot of sci-fi that is intended as the latter is often taken as the former. I feel like there is some kind of lesson there: if you create it, expect someone to take it the wrong way.

If you are depicting a dystopia, be aware that there is a selection of people out there that will consider it a utopia from the point of view of the worst characters in the book and say to themselves, "that sounds awesome, I'm going to build that."

I think you are (depressingly?) correct. c.f. Xi's China. I had no idea... In stories after stories I've heard from friends who escaped I kept thinking "this is just a cheap rip off of 1984".

Of course, none of them had read 1984...

Edit: With apologies for a lack of citation, there is a growing problem in the functional design and layout of government and law enforcement command offices. Upper management had brought in a design firm to make a new counterterrorism center, and they looked to Hollywood as inspiration. As a result, day-to-day operations were impaired, because of course that's not what real work looks like. There's no "huge screen" covering a whole wall or everyone using touchscreens.

Mind you that showcasing that to potential clients, as sad as it is, might well make up in marketing for the lost efficiencies.

Edit: just saw this is not a private company, but you get the idea: the room is effective in selling an image of spectacular efficiency and oversight.

This is one of my favorite sci-fi books of all time. The explorations into autonomous corporations comprised primarily from software as some of the main economic and legal actors was quite interesting.

I still think about the bit where they weaponized a sentient alien pyramid scheme.

And then we got bitcoin. When you read good satire, bet on the world falling for it in the future.

I was going to say - that was the part of the book that felt the least plausible when I first read it, but by god, here we are.

IIRC the weaponized sentient pyramid scheme was weaponized against what, if we’re following the book as a map, is today the crypto economy (Economics 2.0 in the book)

Part of the book also fall together nicely if you realize that IRL Stross is a cat person.

Consider reading Existence by David Brin. The book premise is the first alien contact being a pyramid scheme.

The "splash"-page might be a better link (eg: there's an epub version, not to mention a few interesting paragraphs about the origins of the book - of particular interest to the hn crowd):

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler...

There is so much to love about this book. I read it twice, back to back. It's probably one of the more concept-dense books you'll read from the period, but unlike lots of scifi lit stross wrote a very solid story that's worth reading in it's own right.

Another good book by Stross that doesn't get much love is Saturn's Children. it has the same inventivness and story-telling prowess. the most outrageous elements of the story are the very glue that make the whole thing more tractable.

How did you like the sequel?

Neptune's Brood is really good. It's set in the same universe as Saturn's Children but without the Heinlein-tribute sexpot focus. It takes a lot of concepts from "Debt: The First 5000 Years" and extrapolates them to the next 5000 years.

I lovved Neptune’s Brood. I’ve listened to it in audiobook form probably 10x

I havent managed to get my hands on the sequel =(

For any fans Stross is quite active on reddit https://old.reddit.com/user/cstross. I was pleasantly surprised when I mentioned one of his books and got a reply from him, he seems very happy to talk about his craft.

And here: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=cstross

1. Definitely read this.

2. Be careful when you start because for me it was a solid 3 solid late nights because I couldn't put it down. The most electrifying read I've never had.

I read this again, a couple years ago. The assumption that increasing MIPS alone would drive societal change felt quaint, like it was an idea from the 1990s preserved in a time capsule.

But things have gotten strange since then, and tech is changing fast again. I can no longer dismiss this book’s conceits as pure fantasy.

I don't think the lack of coherency is a problem I think it's part of the experience of being an obsolete meat machine that is getting a direct injection of the future right into your brain. If you feel slightly confused about the rushed pace of the story good because that's how everyone else is feeling experiencing it, it's a wild ride, you're not entirely sure what's going on but it sure is simulating.

Also another relation, I see qntm's RA as a more recent rewrite of this story but with a rather different ending.

I also always interpreted the beginning of the book as deliberately written to make the reader feel the future shock that Manfred is trying to stay ahead of.

Definitely a seminal book on the nature of unbounded AI feedback loops and how disastrous that ends up for the meat.

Upon frequent recommendations via HN, I found a copy in a second hand shop whilst on holiday in Perth. Once I'm done with Permutation City (by Greg Egan - who, conincidentally is from WA) Accelerando is top of the reading list.

Huge fan of Greg Egan. Schild's Ladder was formative for me when I was growing up.

I read Schild's Ladder as an ebook in college, didn't pay attention to the author... Years later, I came across his other works and realized who wrote that; I too am a huge fan of his works.

Every once in a while I re-read Diaspora. It's hard to read another sci-fi book afterwards, Diaspora just explains everything.

I've read almost all of his books and short stories. Quarantine, Permutation City, and Diaspora are my faves. Go find Egan and get a picture of him. There doesn't seem to be any on the Internet, which is pretty strange.

Is Greg Egan even his name? Does anybody have met him IRL?

edit: also his short stories are excellent.

I also enjoy Thomas Pynchon, who has a similar void presence on the internet

Apart from those guest appearances on the Simpsons.

He could be several different people for all anyone really knows.

No. Having read a lot of his work, I'm confident it is one person.

Addendum, for any fans of Greg Egan that didn't know this existed: http://gregegan.net

Probably been recommended here many times before, but for fans of these, I'd recommend Permutation City, by Greg Egan too. It's one of the most existentially depressing sci fi (or any kind) of books I know of, but it's damn good.

Structurally, the book is a mess. But it is a narrative disaster much like Snow Crash, in which it doesn't matter because you're so busy trying to integrate all the mind candy you don't notice until a re-read.

I feel like there are other science fiction books like this - overstuffed with lovely things to think about, from an author who is either inexperienced or doesn't care about the craft side. (In this case, Charlie was a fairly fresh author, he's improved a lot.)

Some of Greg Egan's writing fits that, but I'm having trouble thinking of other authors.

It's not a mess structurally. If you read the notes on it, you will will find Stross wrote a series of nine loosely connected short stories, which follow each other temporally and thematically. If you you try to remember it's not a novel as such it will help you relax and enjoy each section better.

Stephenson's inability to finish books coherently is a completely different issue

I liked it, but I ended up only reading the boldface text.

Very prescient in what we are seeing in the media today. The vile offspring eventually simulated every permutation that could be simulated.

Today we quickly see everything than can be claimed about an issue is claimed.

TL:DR; If lobsters ask for your help, do so.

Sometimes the style of writing is part of the message too. Like with qntm's Lena (https://qntm.org/mmacevedo) that looks like a Wikipedia's page. A rushed writing on the topic of going too fast could be appropriate.

Qntm (Sam Hughes) has a number of works like this. Ra, Fine Structure, and There is no Antimemetics Division are fun reads that get really messy at times.

Greg Egan is fascinating. His storytelling and characters feel oddly flat and sterile to me, but he's the only sci-fi author in 25 years of adulthood that regularly makes me think "I'm not quite smart enough to be reading this," and that's pretty impressive.

Yes, it's clear his storytelling and characters are just devices in service of writing fiction about math. But that's all right.

LOVE this book. its one of those books that "blew my mind" when I read it.

Incidentally, The good Author himself reads and posts here :-)

Best work of fiction I've ever read, the fuller continuation of my posthuman thinking that began with Ghost in the Shell.

I can't recommend this enough. Stross predicted DAOs, and if you look between the lines you can see hints of cryptocurrency, if I remember right (it's been years since I read it - it's time for another read). The book also explores what it means to be human in an age of Centaur systems combining man and machine, and when people can upload their minds then then download into different bodies.

It seems to be a third book in a series. Do you need to read Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise before this one?

No, it is not related to those two books except insofar as they all involved writing around The Singularity.

Stross has explicitly written that he will not write a sequel to those two books.

IIRC, Because he realized he made a crucial mistake in the second one and it's too late to unpublish and rewrite it.

Which I might understand from most authors, but it seems oddly faint-hearted from Stross. Fuckin' retcon it, dude. Push updates for the ebooks, start the third book with a forward saying "the book you thought you read was a lie, here's what really happened." If any writer on Earth could get away with that, it's Stross.

> Fuckin' retcon it, dude. Push updates for the ebooks

Not going to happen. Stross has a significant workload to deliver other anticipated books (e.g. to complete the Laundry and New Management series) and has blogged about the difficulties and undesirability of revisiting older stories. He has also abandoned other promising sequences (e.g. Halting State) when real-world events overtake his own near-future universes.

They came before and were better in all aspects.

I have a vague recollection of reading parts of a novel something like this in comments on slashdot around the early 2000s, was this released that way?

All I recall about it was it was 3 parts, pre-singularity, singularity, post-singularity or something like that.

Sounds more like "Rainbows End" by Vernor Vinge (iirc it was initially published online - I used to have a printout of the book, but I've since given it away):

https://archive.org/details/rainbowsend00ving

http://vrinimi.org/

https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/04/07/07/1623227/sn...

Or maybe not:

https://slashdot.org/story/05/07/13/236203/doctorow-and-stro...

> Two prominent science fiction authors have recently released their newest novels as free downloads to coincide with their in-store releases. The first is Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, by Cory Doctorow. This is an unconventional story about an entrepreneur (who happens to be the child of a mountain and a washing machine) who gets involved in a scheme to blanket Toronto with free wireless mesh network, among other things. The second is Accelerando, by Charles Stross, which tells the tale of three generations of the Macx family (beginning with perptually-slashdotted venture altruist Manfred Macx) in the years leading up to and beyond a technological singularity

https://stefangagne.com/floatingpoint/ Something to the same tune, written by the dood who did "Sailor Nothing".

Vivid memories of downloading and reading this (in one of its earlier forms before 2005) over a couple of days of commute on my HTC Typhoon smartphone. Definitely felt the future beginning to arrive.

A friend chose Accelerando as his household's choice for the neighborhood book club. I enjoyed it, but it was otherwise unpopular.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com