UK and US paperbacks now available
Accelerando is now on sale in paperback in the UK, and I have in my hands one of the first US paperbacks -- they should be in shops within another week or so. You can order them here:
Accelerando shortlisted for Hugo award
I'm very happy to be able to announce that "Accelerando" is on the Hugo ballot for best novel of 2005. More information on the shortlist and voting procedures here in due course.
Accelerando available for download
This free ebook edition is made available by kind consent of my publishers, Ace and Orbit, under a Creative Commons license with certain restrictions attached. In particular, you may not create derivative works or use the work for commercial gain.
(We hope that if you enjoy the ebook you'll consider buying a copy of one of the paper editions, but this is the only reminder you'll get. I'm not into shareware with nag screens ...)
Formats:
The book is available for reading in HTML, with minimal markup (to make it easier for web clipping utilities to digest it). In addition, zip archives are provided for download in a variety of formats. The primary formats are RTF and conformant HTML 4.0. For direct reading on PDAs and smartphones, a Plucker database is provided. Finally, there are (deprecated) plain text and Palm DOC versions – these lack typographic markup – and user-contributed versions (e.g. Microsoft Reader).
To save my bandwidth and your time, please use BitTorrent in preference to HTTP (web) for downloading, if you know how. (And please consider keeping your BT feed running as a seed for a while afterwards.) Also, please consider grabbing a zip archive of your preferred file format rather than reading the uncompressed HTML version directly off my server. Thanks.
- Plain HTML
- Accelerando (950Kb)
- Rich Text Format
- BitTorrent | accelerando-rtf.zip (380Kb)
- HTML (zipped)
- BitTorrent | accelerando-html.zip (370Kb)
- PDF (basic, no indexing)
- accelerando-pdf.zip (1.9Mb)
- Plucker e-book
-
BitTorrent | accelerando-plkr.zip
(430Kb)
You can learn more about Plucker here.
Download a viewer: HiRes PalmOS viewer | LoRes PalmOS viewer | Other PalmOS versions | PocketPC OS Viewer. - Palm DOC format
-
BitTorrent | accelerando-palmdoc.zip
(344Kb)
Note: Palm DOC cannot represent typographical styles effectively – the Plucker version is strongly recommended. - Old-fashioned ASCII
-
BitTorrent | accelerando-txt.zip
(360Kb)
Note: This text version omits typographical elements and accented characters may not be rendered correctly. - Microsoft Reader
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accelerando-lit.zip
(360Kb)
Note: contributed by Mike Eckardt..
Got typos?
I'm staring at the galley proofs for ACCELERANDO, the paperback edition (actually, at the laser-printed PDF output from Quark, but it amounts to the same), and I'm looking for typos. But one pair of eyes is never as good as ten thousand. Spotted something? Let me know about it here.
Award nominations
I'm pleased to accounce that "Accelerando" has been shortlisted for two awards -- the 2006 Arthur C. Clarke award for best science fiction novel, and the BSFA award for best SF/F novel of 2005. (The BSFA award is voted on by members of the British Science Fiction Association, and will be announced on April 15th at Concussion, the 2006 eastercon; the Arthur C. Clarke award is decided by a jury of writers and critics, and will be announced on April 25th in London.)
Worldcon, and a Hugo
I'm back from the world science fiction convention in Glasgow (and from AramadilloCon, in Austin, Texas). I'd like to thank everyone who voted for my work in the Hugo awards; thank you! (In case you missed the news, "The Concrete Jungle" picked up a Hugo for best novella – it'll be published in trade paperback as part of "The Atrocity Archives" by Penguin US next January 3rd.)
On a more whimsical note:
I sometimes collaborate with sometime Campbell Award winner, EFF activist, and all-around happening guy Cory Doctorow. Cory is a big noise in campaigning for consumer rights against the big copyright cartels, and he comes up with an idea a minute and gives them away for free under creative commons a license. Yet he sure as hell wasn't the model for Manfred in "Accelerando" (because I hadn't met him at the time), and nobody told the art director at Orbit to stick him on the cover of my book. Still, judge for yourself:
Shameless publicity seeking
I'm at Interaction (the worldcon) and I've been shamelessly consorting with the press. Here's an article about the con from the BBC; here what the Scottish Herald has to say, then back to the BBC, and over to The Scotsman.
Meanwhile, the first copies of the UK edition of "Accelerando" have been sighted in bookshops and on the dealer tables at the convention.
Signed UK hardcovers now available from the publisher
Accelerando is officially published in the UK next week by Orbit. You can now order hardcovers direct from the publisher, here; the first hundred are pre-signed.
[Link]
A reminder: downloading the book
Due to the bloggy format of this website, instructions for downloading Accelerando have dropped down the front page. I'll refresh them once a month; meanwhile, click here for links to the downloadable versions.
Accelerando nominated for Prometheus Award
I am informed that "Accelerando" has been nominated for the Prometheus Award for the best libertarian novel of 2005. (Novels are nominated by the membership of the Libertarian Futurist Society and the winner is selected form a shortlist of top nominees by a panel of judges.)
This is the first (and so far, the only) award nomination for "Accelerando" as a novel. I'm very pleased, but if it wins it'll be a first ... and the separate nine stories that went into "Accelerando" have been shortlisted for a bucketload of awards already:
- Lobsters
- Hugo Award, best novelette (2002), Nebula Award (2002), Sturgeon Award (2002), Seiun Award (2004)
- Troubadour
- No nominations
- Tourist
- No nominations
- Halo
- Hugo Award, best novelette (2003), Sturgeon Award (2003)
- Router
- BSFA Award (2003)
- Nightfall
- BSFA Award (2004), Hugo Award, best novelette (2004)
- Curator
- No nominations
- Elector
- Hugo Award, best novella (2005)
- Survivor
- No nominations
(NB: this list does not include Locus Readers' Awards or Asimov's SF magazine reader polls – all the stories flagged as "no nominations" received nominations for one or the other of these two.)
Oh, and the punchline: despite this illustrious list, not one of these stories won anything.
Accelerando review in Library Journal
Text of review:
Manfred Macx, a 21st-century intelligence amplification entrepreneur, lives partly in the physical world and partly in the virtual world of artificial intelligences, the Internet, biotechnology, and molecular nanotechnology. His 12-year-old daughter Amber, who seeks independence from her controlling mother, indentures herself to a company aiming to extract a fortune from the resources of Jupiter. Decades later, Amber's son Sirhan, a victim of multiple virtual childhoods, researches his dysfunctional family and uncovers a sinister new life form that threatens the continuation of biological life in the universe.
Expanding on his award-winning short story cycle that appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine, Stross (Singularity Sky) reveals a vision of the future that encompasses and expands on the newest technologies and explores the possibilities of humanity's future. Joining the ranks of William Gibson (Neuromancer), Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash), and Bruce Sterling (Schismatrix), Stross fuses ideas and characters with cheerful abandon and creates a high-tech galactic adventure that belongs in most libraries.
– SF/Fantasy column by Jackie Cassada
(Author's note: None of the "Accelerando" stories actually won any awards – as of this date – although they've received numerous nominations.)
Accelerando technical companion
WikiBooks is a spin-off project associated with WikiPedia, providing a complete library of freely downloadable books.
Someone's started a project to write a technical companion to Accelerando – a glossary of technical terms used in the novel. It's still in its infancy, but hopefully when it's finished it'll make the book somewhat more accessible and provide jump-off links to further reading on some of the ideas it touches on.
[ Link]
FAQ: "I want to send you money"
People keep asking me "I liked the book and I want to send you some money. How do I do that?"
The short answer is, I'd rather you didn't.
The long answer is, if I start accepting money for the ebook I also have to accept certain consequences. Firstly, I'd be in breach of the contract I signed that says my publishers have the exclusive right to sell the ebook edition for money. Secondly, I'd have to start tracking that income stream and keeping accounts for the Inland Revenue (which means spending my time on book-keeping rather than book-writing). Thirdly and most significantly, if you send me money directly rather than buying the book, my publishers will end up selling fewer copies. If they do that, they'll judge the book to be less of a success than it would otherwise be, and they'll print fewer copies of my next novel.
So I don't want money for downloads of "Accelerando".
If you like the book, I hope you'll buy a paper copy of it. (Or a paper copy of one of my other books.) If you don't like owning lumps of dead tree, consider buying a copy as a present for someone who'll appreciate it. If you think the hardcover's too expensive, feel free to wait for the paperback to come out (but note that I receive five times as much money per hardcover sale as I get from a paperback).
Finally, don't feel you're under any obligation to send me money. All I'm doing is saving you a trip to your local library. Do you feel compelled to send money to authors whose books you borrow from the library? No? I didn't think so – and I don't hold it against you. If you enjoy "Accelerando", just spread the word and/or buy a copy. That's good enough for me.
Accelerando review in Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly reviewed "Accelerando":
ACCELERANDO Charles Stross (Ace, $24.95) Three generations of the Macx family evolve into nerdy post-humans by embracing technological paradigms that threaten to ruin the economy and render governments obsolete. Earth Is Overrun... By computer intelligence. Future Teen Angst Amber Macx rebels against Mom by selling herself into space slavery and then colonizing her own asteroid. Upshot Accelerando is to cyberpunk what Napster was to the music industry: volatile, visionary, a bit flawed, and a lot of fun. A- – Noah Robischon
(If I took this sort of thing seriously I'd now be keeping a weather eye out for lawyers with cortical upgrades and mirrorshades threatening to shoot my mp3 player. Like in chapter two.)
Signed copies now available
My local specialist SF bookstore here in Edinburgh is Transreal Fiction. If you want to get hold of a signed copy of "Accelerando" you should contact Mike Calder, the proprietor. He can take payment by credit card or PayPal and he can arrange for me to drop by and sign books before mailing them out. For the Ace hardcover of "Accelerando", which just arrived today, the price is £16 per hardcover, plus £4 postage in the EU and £4 (surface) or £8 (air mail) for everywhere else. (If this price strikes you as high, please bear in mind that (a) these books are international imports so you're effectively paying two sets of international postage, and, (b) Mike runs a tiny hole-in-the-wall shop and can't get the same discounts as, say, Amazon.)
Transreal's phone number and email address are on the website; note that Edinburgh is four hours ahead of EST, so if you're going to phone rather than email please take the time difference into account! The shop closes for the evening around 10:30am by California time.
[Link]
Update
I've just updated the HTML and Plucker versions of the book, correcting the typos I've been notified of. (Most of these were introduced in the RTF to HTML conversion process, so I haven't updated the RTF version. The Plain Text version can fend for itself.) There's also now a basic PDF version, thanks to OS/X's built-in ability to handle PDFs – don't expect working bookmarks or an index, though.
Amazon quirk
A couple of readers have contacted me today to say "Amazon just cancelled my order! What's happening?"
If you're in the UK and ordered via amazon.co.uk, you may have ordered a non-existent edition by accident. (There's a rogue entry in Amazon's UK database that purports to be a paperback edition to be published by Ace on July 1st.) Amazon are now cancelling these pre-orders. If you think this has happened to you, follow the links in the sidebar at the right of this web page and you'll be directed to the correct Amazon page for the UK hardcover edition.
(The real paperback edition won't come out for another year.)
Accelerando review on the Agony Column
Rick Kleffel, SF reviewer, has a review of Accelerando on his website. This may also be showing up in the Metro Santa Cruz paper, and possibly as a reprint in Metro San Jose.
'Accelerando' fast forwards a not-so-average family through three generations and into a future in which humans seem far more alien than any critters from outer space. With heart, humor and extreme technophilia, Stross embarks on a voyage that unwires humanity and rewires readers to experience the Singularity. Welcome to the Rapture of the Nerds.
Commentary: Buying the cow, though the milk is free
The Book Standard is running an article about authors and publishers who give books away free. You can find the whole article in printable form here:
Charles Stross recently posted the text of his book Accelerando on his site, weeks before it will be available in bookstores on July 1. Since he posted the book on June 16, Stross has logged 22,000 direct downloads from his web server, and another 500-1,000 downloads via BitTorrent, a free, open-source file sharing application. Though it's too early to judge the effect on sales, Stross estimates that he's already garnered a great deal more attention than he would have through traditional routes like review copies or advertising. "Readers like samples, and the ultimate sample is the entire book," says Stross. "People are more likely to download the entire thing, because there's the promise that they can read it all on their computer. However, in practice, most people don't like reading on a screen or a PDA. If they get hooked, they'll continue reading until it hits their personal pain threshold. Then they're highly motivated to seek out the paper edition – in hardcover, if necessary."
A marketing exercise
Despite the fact that writers have been giving their books away on the internet since, oh, about five minutes after the internet existed, there's a paucity of data on the subject of how books spread and who reads them. I'd like to go some way towards remedying this.
I'm going to place the text of Accelerando on this website in a couple of days. My server logs will tell me how many people download the book. A script I hacked together that polls Amazon.com's web services API will tell me how the book is selling. (One may assume that what goes for Amazon also goes for other booksellers.) But I don't know how downloads from my site reflect the real body of readers: is a surge in sales related to a surge in downloads three days earlier, or to something else? In the interests of joining up the dots, I'm therefore going to conduct a little experiment. (You may opt out of it if you don't want to participate – details below.)
The novel will be distributed in a variety of formats, including HTML (as a web page). The HTML version contains a web bug: an invisible image that calls my server whenever it is loaded by a web browser with internet access. This will (I hope) give me a crude count of the number of people reading the book, as opposed to the number who download the HTML file from this site.
I'm not going to collect any information about you, other than the raw fact that someone opened the file at a given date and time. Indeed, collecting individually identifiable information would be illegal under UK law without my complying with the Data Protection Act and related regulations. Nevertheless, if you still feel I'm infringing your privacy you have my permission in advance to (a) download and read the file on a machine that isn't connected to the internet, or (b) to chop out the offending web-bug. (It's right at the end, along with a helpful comment.) But please don't redistribute copies of the file from which the bug has been removed. Doing so will skew my figures, and potentially make it harder for me to argue the case for releasing future novels as free downloads with my editors.
Ordering signed copies
Some folks like autographed books. This entails getting the author to sign a copy, either in person or at a bookshop. I'm not visiting the USA much over the next few months (aside from a trip to Austin, TX in late August) so signed copies of "Accelerando" will be rare in North America.
My local specialist SF bookstore here in Edinburgh is Transreal Fiction. If you want to get hold of a signed copy of "Accelerando" (or any of my other books) you should contact Mike Calder, the proprietor. He can take payment by credit card and he can arrange for me to drop by and sign books before mailing them out. (Please allow a couple of weeks to get items signed – I'll try to get round to requests rapidly, but I'm out of town about 25% of the time and Mike doesn't have the space to stock crates of signed Stross first editions.)
Transreal's phone number and email address are on the website; note that Edinburgh is four hours ahead of EST, so if you're going to phone rather than email please take the time difference into account! (The shop closes for the evening around 10:30am by California time.)
Note that while Mike stocks both British and American editions, the American ones have to be shipped across the Atlantic first. Thus, it's unlikely that he'll have the Ace edition of "Accelerando" in stock before the Orbit edition becomes available.
[Link]
On beginnings ...
The Science Fiction Book Club are going to be releasing "Accelerando" later this summer, and Andrew Wheeler asked me if I'd like to write a short piece explaining the origins of the book and giving something of a feel for it. "How much space do I have?" I asked. "700 words or so," he said, "there's no hurry." This struck me as being a little short – I could easily burble on for 7000 words instead – but I buckled down and wrote a 700 word explanation and mailed it to him. And got a reply along the lines of "I was wrong about the length; I meant to say 70 words."
Well, after I finished chewing my beard Andy got his piece. But there's an international word shortage and I figure recycling is the wave of the future, so here's the original 700 word explanation, fleshed out slightly; make of it what you will.
"Accelerando" is a creature of its time, and that time is the late 1990s. I spent most of the 90s on a kind of sabbatical from writing fiction (my first love), with my head stuck up the fundament of the software industry. In the early 90's I worked for SCO (back when it was a UNIX company, rather than the unholy terror that came back from the dead to haunt the free software movement). Then I discovered the web, back around 1993. I remember a wee daily email bulletin titled "what's new on the web" that came from an address at NCSA; I used to visit all the interesting new web sites every day, until the volume grew too great some time in late 1994. I was supposed to be writing UNIX manuals, but I distracted myself by learning Perl – and was inadvertently responsible for the development of the robot exclusion protocol (by writing a web spider that annoyed people who knew more about what they were doing than I did). I moved to Scotland to join a web startup that went bust, freelanced for a couple of years while writing a web architecture book, landed myself a magazine column about Linux, and joined another start-up that turned into a successful dot com, went public, and much to my surprise is still in business.
The last sentence covers a multitude of sins. I signed on with the company two weeks before its official formation, and left two months after the IPO – three and a half years later. Along the way I bolted together about thirty thousand lines of object oriented perl that swallowed credit card numbers at one end and talked to obscure British banking systems in strange protocols. And it had a psychotherapy bot wired into the middle just to help me de-stress when things got too heavy, which was almost every other day, because ...
You've probably never had to work inside a business that's growing of 30% per month. Take it from me, it's an experience you don't need. Especially when you're not a brilliant programmer, you know damn well your code has bugs in it – it's actually a prototype that they pressed into service six months too early – and it's handling millions of pounds of other people's money. If things go wrong they scream at you. And exponential growth means the workload is always growing faster than the budget for hiring minions to do the donkey-work. At first it's fun, a buzz like a caffeine high: but it goes on too long and you get old and feel stupid, and at some point you find you can't stop running because your feet are locked to the treadmill and there's a wall of spikes right behind you.
The germ of "Accelerando" dates to that time. To be specific, it dates to a particularly bad month in early 1999, when I was trying to brainwash Datacash into talking to a French credit card system (and if you think obscure 1970's-vintage British credit card protocols sound awful, you've never dealt with the French equivalent). I was under a lot of pressure, not aided by the French bank programmers not actually wanting to expose the guts of their communication protocol to, gasp, developers who were trying to communicate with their servers ... things were not looking good. One Thursday when things had been not been going well in an especially emphatic manner, I wandered over to my boss the CTO's desk and said, "I'm taking tomorrow off."
"But what if we need you – " he began.
"I'll be in Amsterdam."
He looked at me. Then he did a double-take: "Amsterdam. Okay." I hadn't taken any vacation time in the preceding year, my caffeine intake was measured in the direction of gallons of coffee per day, and I was developing an uncontrollable facial tic and a tendency to jump at loud noises. "Take tomorrow off."
This was very sensible of him. Most directors of a company that's going public in six months and has a server development team consisting of 1 (one) geek who is developing an incontrolable facial tic and demanding days off in Amsterdam might actually get a little bit nervous about the idea of said server development team fleeing the country on short notice. But my prepared fallback position to taking a long weekend somewhere with lots of beer and no French bank managers to scream at was to try to quit on the spot, and if that failed I was going to spring a full-scale nervous breakdown ... and it probably showed.
"Just come back on Monday," he said.
I think I nodded, but maybe it was just the caffeine pulling my strings.
Anyway, I was wandering around Amsterdam the next day – on a rainy Friday – trying not to fall apart at the seams. I'd spent the whole night lying awake, looping on re-drafting my resignation letter, and I had the shakes. Then my phone rang.
"What's gone wrong?" I asked, my heart sinking.
It was my boss the CTO. "The French fuckwits," he said.
I got that sinking feeling. "What have they sprung on us now?" I asked.
"Their parent institution is so unhappy with them that they're being shut down! I thought you might like to know ..." (In the background, I could hear the entire office cheering.)
I immediately headed for the nearest pub, and my girlfriend and I celebrated in time-honoured fashion. For a couple of bright hours in the middle of a rainy afternoon, the high pressure bubble in the core of the dot com boom actually looked like an optimistic, cheerful place to be. And something about the sudden release of stress took root, and began to germinate. I got far enough away from the coal seam to blink, look at it in amazement, and ask once more the classic science fictional question, what happens if this goes on? What happens if you keep piling on the changes? What kind of person can actually live on the edge of a singularity, keeping pace while all around them the world is melted down and re-forged monthly, daily, hourly?
I pulled out my Psion 5MX and scribbled a brief paragraphs about a very strange guy named Manfred. Then I proceeded to get side-tracked by beer for the next couple of days.
It has taken me nearly five years (until early 2004) to finish answer the question. The soil in which the seed sprouted had long since withered, the bust following the boom; the dot com IPO didn't make my fortune, but it left me with "Accelerando" by way of payback And I'm not unhappy about that outcome.
[Link]
Where to buy "Accelerando"
"Accelerando" is published by Ace (an imprint of Penguin-Putnam) in the USA, and by Orbit (an imprint of Time-Warner Books) in the UK. Additional non-English translations are pending.
Currently, "Accelerando" is only available as a hardcover. The Ace edition has been printed, is on its way to the shops right now, and is officially on sale from July 1st, 2005. The Orbit edition is in the pipeline and will be officially on sale from August 4th, 2005. In addition, the Science Fiction Book Club will be printing their own edition in August 2005.
You can order the US hardcover via Amazon.com, and the British edition via Amazon.co.uk.
I don't get over to the US very often. For readers who want a signed copy, I'm currently talking to a local specialist SF bookshop who may be able to take credit card orders via email and ship internationally. More on this as/when we've got a system in place.
If you're a bookseller and want a listing here, contact me.
This is a copyright notice
I'd prefer not to have to say all this, but my publishers will probably yell at me if I don't, so here goes:
If you've ever bought a house, you've probably seen a deed of sale for a chunk of real estate. Page after page of inscrutible legalese, complete with crossings-through and footnotes and sidenotes and whatever. When you sign your name in blood on the bottom of the last page against the signature of the vendor, it is generally taken as meaning that you "own" the house, but if you get into the small print it's a lot more complicated than that.
Ownership of a novel is like ownership of a house. I wrote "Accelerando" and I "own" the copyright on it, but I'm like a landlord who owns a plot of land, then sells the right to build on it and live in the building to someone else. Worse still: to several different folks on different continents at the same time. The "tenants" are publishers, who take the unformed land (the book) and turn it into something people enjoy using. And they like to sublet the property for money to other tenants -- the reading public. They don't want squatters moving into the attic and setting up home without paying them -- or worse, claiming to have owned the land all along.
So, to explain the copyright situation of this website: everything except the novel is covered as follows:
Unless specifically noted to the contrary on individual pages, the textual content of this website is © Charles Stross, 2005. The images on this website are © their original creators. Unless specifically noted to the contrary on the individual pages, the text and layout of this website (but not the novel "Accelerando") is licensed under the terms of the Creative commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.
Got that? It's nice and simple and about as easy as it gets. You shouldn't reuse the book cover art without getting permission from the publishers (Ace in the US, Orbit in the UK), but I don't much care what you do with the rest of the website as long as you credit me as the original author. Exceptions may apply to individual files, as noted on the pages concerned.
The big exception is the novel "Accelerando", which is covered separately.
"Accelerando" is © Charles Stross, 2005. The downloadable version on this website is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license .
What this means in a nutshell is: you can download it. You can read it, and give a copy (under exactly the same terms) to your friends. You must not sell it, modify it (other than converting to a different file format for storage or reading) or file off the serial numbers and pretend you wrote it. You must specifically not create derivative works such as movies or TV adaptations or role-playing games or translations into other languages, without obtaining a separate commercial license. If you do any of these things, I and/or my agent and publishers will come after you with lawyers, guns, and money -- but mostly lawyers.
If you do want to obtain media, translation, or other subsidiary rights -- whether commercial or non-commercial -- you should contact me; I'll say one of "yes", "no", or "talk to my agent".Sunday Times Interview
The Scottish edition of The Sunday Times (that's the Sunday edition of The Times -- the original British version, not the Times of anywhere in particular) ran an interview and article about me on June 5th. Here's the text version.
Extract:
Andrew Wilson, the editor of Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction (an anthology of new Scottish sci-fi to which Stross has contributed an original twist on the Faustian pact), sees Stross as being in the vanguard of a new wave of Scottish science fiction writing: "It used to be that if you spoke about a Scottish spacecraft, people just laughed. But now we are the country that produced Dolly the sheep, the country that develops artificial intelligence," says Wilson. "You don't need to pretend to be American to write science fiction. Charlie is clearly a massive talent. Rather like taking a broken down old car and sticking a fusion engine in it, he has the capacity to transform material that was looking old and give it new life.
"I think Accelerando is a crowning achievement. And this will be his year."
[Link]
Coming soon ...
The text of "Accelerando" will be available for download under a Creative Commons license from this site later this month (June 2005).
(Yes, you read that right. Now go away, I'm still preparing the text.)
That "S" word deconstructed
The focus of "Accelerando" is a fictional depiction of a possible Technological Singularity lying in our near future.
Being fiction, it will of course be misunderstood or misinterpreted by at least 10% of the total reading population.
So here's a Tough Guide to the Singularity, as drafted by my inner 14-year-old, with an eye to turning it into a GURPS supplement, or something even worse. (Be afraid, be very afraid.)
NOTE: The Tough Guide is a TiddlyWiki page. You'll need a modern Javascript enabled browser to view it properly; Internet Explorer 3.0 simply won't cut it. (Personally, I use Firefox.) In particular you should enable Irony 2.0 before approaching this content.
[Link]
Notes from the archives
You don't write a novel the size of "Accelerando" overnight. In my case, it took close to five years (during which time I wrote and sold four other books). With a quick project you can sometimes hold all the details in your head at the same time, but for something this big it helps to jot down notes. So here's a file full of notes I wrote around winter 1999, to remind myself what assumptions I was making about the underlying tech background of the book.
Today they're curiously dated. There's stuff missing that I'd put in if I was doing them again, stuff that's now part of my armory of tools for looking at the future. So read this as a document of its times, the optimistic dot-com bubble still inflating, no wars and turmoil on the horizon, NASDAQ still at record highs, and the future so bright that ... well, we saw where that went, didn't we?
[Link]
Harriet Klausner
Harriet Klausner, the most prolific reviewer on Amazon.com, has of course gotten her hands onto an early copy of Accelerando:
Extract:
This novel has appeared as short stories in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 2001-2005. Each story has been extended with its own chapter in a seamless plot. The individual members of the Macx family and those who came into their orbit show three generations of technological change and how it affects society. All three Macx characters are fully developed and have their own distinct personalities but when they come together they are a force to be reckoned with. Charles Stross has written the singular most explosive work of his career.
(I'd take this review with a pinch of salt. Harriet means well, but her output of 3-5 reviews per day should speak for itself. I include it here in the interests of completeness.)
[Link]
Welcome to Accelerando!
This is going to be the website for Accelerando, a novel by Charles Stross.
That chugging you hear is the noise of heavy excavators ...
If you came here looking for the files that were sitting on this site a day ago, don't worry, they'll be back in a short while.