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Accelerando

Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author Charles Stross
Cover artist Rita Frangie
Country UK & US
Language English
Genre(s) Science fiction, short stories
Publisher Orbit (UK), Ace (US)
Publication date July 5, 2005
Media type Print (Hardcover), Ebook
Pages 400 pp
ISBN ISBN 0-441-01284-1
Followed by Glasshouse

Accelerando is a 2005 science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories by British author Charles Stross. Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born Leeds, 18 October 1964 is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located The United States of America —commonly referred to as the English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States The short story is a literary genre of Fictional Prose Narrative that tends to be more concise and to the point than longer works of fiction such Publishing is the process of production and dissemination of Literature or Information &ndash the activity of making information available for public view Orbit Books is a British publisher which specialises in Sci-Fi and Fantasy books Ace Books is the oldest active specialty Publisher of Science fiction and Fantasy books A hardcover (or hardback or hardbound) is a Book bound with rigid protective covers (typically of cardboard covered with Cloth Glasshouse is a Science fiction novel by British author Charles Stross, first published in 2006. Year 2005 ( MMV) was a Common year starting on Saturday (link displays full calendar of the Gregorian calendar. The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom, the UK or Britain,is a Sovereign state located Charles David George "Charlie" Stross (born Leeds, 18 October 1964 is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. As well as normal hardback and paperback editions, it was released as a free ebook under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-no derivatives license (CC by-nc-nd). Creative Commons licenses are several Copyright licenses released on December 16, 2002 by Creative Commons, a U

Contents

Plot introduction

The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a highly dysfunctional family before, during, and after a technological singularity. Generation (from the Greek γενεά) also known as procreation, is the act of producing Offspring. A dysfunctional family is a Family in which Conflict, misbehavior and even Abuse on the part of individual members of the family occur continually leading The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using Artificial It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the period 2001 to 2004. A novelette (or novelet) is a piece of short Prose fiction The distinction between a novelette and other literary forms like a Novella, is usually based A novella is a written, Fictional Prose Narrative longer than a Novelette but shorter than a Novel. Asimov's Science Fiction (ISSN 1065-2698 is an American Science fiction magazine which publishes Science fiction and Fantasy and

The first three stories follow the character of "venture altruist" Manfred Macx starting in the early 21st Century, the second three stories follow his daughter Amber, and the final three focus largely on her son Sirhan in the completely transformed world at the end of the century.

According to Stross, the initial inspiration for the stories was his experience working as a programmer for a high-growth company during the dot-com boom of the 1990s [1]. The " dot-com bubble " (or sometimes the " IT bubble " was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2001 (with a climax on March 10

A sequel novel entitled Glasshouse, loosely set in the same universe, was published in June 2006. Glasshouse is a Science fiction novel by British author Charles Stross, first published in 2006.

Explanation of the novel's title

In Italian, "Accelerando" means "speeding up" and is used as a tempo marking in musical notation. 2266-Tetramethylpiperidine-1-oxyl or TEMPO is the Chemical compound with the formula (CH23(CMe22NO See also Modern musical symbols Music notation or musical notation is any system which represents aurally perceived Music through the use It could also refer to the rate at which humanity in general, and/or the novel's characters, head towards the singularity by way of Moore's Law. In Futures studies and the History of technology, accelerating change is an increase in the rate of technological (and sometimes social and cultural progress throughout Moore's law describes an important trend in the History of computer hardware.

Characters

Plot summary and breakdown by story

In the following table, the chapter number (#), chapter name, original magazine date of publication (in red), and a brief synopsis are given. The nine stories are split into three parts.

# Chapter Part 1 : Slow Takeoff - Synopsis
1 Lobsters
June 01		 In Amsterdam, Manfred receives a call on a courier-delivered phone from entities claiming to be a net-based AI working for KGB dot RU, seeking his help on how to defect. Amsterdam (pronounced) is the capital and largest city of the Netherlands, located in the province of North Holland in the west KGB ( Transliteration of "КГБ" is the Russian abbreviation of Committee for State Security ( Komityet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosty Eventually, he discovers they are actually uploaded brain-scans of the California spiny lobster looking to escape from humanity's interference. In Transhumanism and Science fiction, mind uploading (also occasionally referred to by other terms such as mind transfer, whole brain emulation Neuroimaging includes the use of various techniques to either directly or indirectly image the structure, function/ Pharmacology of the Brain The California spiny lobster is a species of Spiny lobster found from the southern tip of the Baja California Peninsula to Monterey Bay, California He manages to team them up with Bob Franklin, who is looking for an AI to crew his nascent spacefaring project - the building of a self-replicating factory complex from cometary material - which he created with Manfred's help. A self-replicating machine is an artificial construct that is theoretically capable of autonomously manufacturing a copy of itself using raw materials taken from its environment Raw resources and minerals could be mined from an Asteroid in space using a variety of methods Later, Manfred's predatory fiancée forces him to impregnate and marry her in an attempt to control him.
2 Troubador
Oct/Nov 01		 Five years later, Manfred is in the throes of an acrimonious divorce, and has a daughter, frozen as a prefertilized egg. He meets Annette again, and begins a relationship with her. Three schemes — to create a workable state centralised planning apparatus that can interface with external market systems, a way to upload the entirety of the 20th century's out-of-copyright movie-and-music output to the net, and a plan to thwart his grasping wife and her lawyers — come together perfectly. A market system is any systematic process enabling many Market players to Bid and ask: helping bidders and sellers interact and make deals Copyleft is a play on the word Copyright and describes the practice of using copyright law to remove restrictions on distributing copies and modified versions Copyright is a legal concept enacted by Governments, giving the creator of an original work of authorship Exclusive rights to control its distribution usually for A legal precedent is established that will help define the rights of future AIs and uploaded minds.
3 Tourist
Feb 02		 In Edinburgh, three years later, Manfred is mugged and his memories (stored in cyberware) are stolen, and so he must find out who he is and what he's doing in Edinburgh. Edinburgh ( ˈɛdɪnb(ərə Dùn Èideann) is the Capital of Scotland and is its second largest city after Glasgow. Cyberware is a relatively new and unknown field (a Proto-science, or more adequately a “proto-technology” The Lobsters are thriving in colonies situated at the L5 point, and on a comet in the asteroid belt, and they, along with the JPL and the ESA, have picked up encrypted signals from outside the solar system. The asteroid belt is the region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the Planets Mars and Jupiter. The European Space Agency ( ESA) established in 1975 is an intergovernmental organisation dedicated to the exploration of space, currently with 17 member Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence ( SETI) is the collective name for a number of activities to detect intelligent Extraterrestrial life. The Solar System consists of the Sun and those celestial objects bound to it by Gravity. Bob Franklin, now dead, is personality-reconstructed in the Franklin Collective. Manfred, his memories recovered, moves to further expand the rights of non-human intelligences. Amber, his daughter, has been defrosted, fertilized, born, and is being brought up by Pamela. Aineko begins its own study - and decoding - of the alien signals.
# Chapter Part 2 : Point of Inflection - Synopsis
4 Halo
June 02		 Amber Macx, now in her early teens, finally breaks free from her domineering mother by utilising a complex plot, thought up by Manfred and Annette, in which she indentures herself to a Franklin Collective-owned, youth-crewed spacecraft, mining materials from Amalthea, Jupiter's fourth moon. TemplateInfobox Planet.--> Amalthea (, or as in Greek Αμάλθεια Pamela hires Sadeq to issue a legal challenge against Amber, which she thwarts by setting up her own empire on a small asteroid. Space colonization (also called space settlement, space humanization, Space habitation, etc A microstate or ministate is a sovereign state having a very small population or very small land area but usually both The alien signals have been decoded, and a physical long-range journey to a mentioned "router" is planned. A router ('rautər in the USA 'rutər in the UK and Ireland, or either pronunciation in Australia and Canada is a Computer whose software and hardware are usually
5 Router
Sep 02		 The alien router, orbiting a 3-light-year-distant brown dwarf star named Hyundai +4904/-56, is visited by the spacecraft Field Circus, a Coke-can-sized mass of computronium propulsed by a Jupiter-based laser and a lightsail. A light-year or light year (symbol ly) is a unit of Length, equal to just under ten trillion Kilometres As defined by Brown dwarfs are sub- stellar objects with a mass below that necessary to maintain Hydrogen -burning Nuclear fusion reactions in their cores as do stars In Futures studies, computronium refers to a hypothetical material engineered to maximize its use as a Computing substrate A laser is a device that emits Light ( Electromagnetic radiation) through a process called Stimulated emission. Solar sails (also called light sails or photon sails, especially when they use Light sources other than the Sun) are a proposed form of Amber and 62 others have uploaded themselves to become the virtualized crew. In Transhumanism and Science fiction, mind uploading (also occasionally referred to by other terms such as mind transfer, whole brain emulation They are contacted by a group of aliens called The Wunch who occupy virtual bodies based on Lobster patterns "borrowed" from transmissions - these turn out to be mere third-rate "barbarians" who, after a struggle, are thwarted. Amber and a few others make the decision to travel deep into the router network.
6 Nightfall
Apr 03		 The router explorers find themselves trapped by yet more malign aliens in a variety of virtual spaces, but are eventually set free by Aineko's machinations. They discover that they are being hosted in a Matrioshka brain, the builders of which seem to have disappeared (or destroyed by its own creations), leaving an anarchy ruled by sentient, viral corporations and scavengers who attempt to use newcomers as currency. A matrioshka brain is a hypothetical Megastructure, based on the Dyson sphere, of immense computational capacity The crew finally escape by offering passage to a "rogue alien corporation" (a "pyramid scheme crossed with a 419 scam"), virtualized as a giant slug, who opens a powered route out, after which they begin the journey back home. A pyramid scheme is a Non-sustainable Business model that involves the exchange of Money primarily for enrolling other people into the scheme without An advance-fee fraud is a Confidence trick in which the target is persuaded to advance sums of money in the hope of realizing a very much larger gain
# Chapter Part 3 : Singularity - Synopsis
7 Curator
Dec 03		 Back in the solar system, the crew find that "home" is now Saturn, on a floating habitat in the planet's upper atmosphere, where they meet Sirhan, son of the physical Amber & Sadeq who both stayed (and died) at home. Space colonization (also called space settlement, space humanization, Space habitation, etc The crew upload their virtual states into new bodies, and find that they are all now bankrupt, unable to compete with the new Economics 2. 0 model practiced by the inner system. Manfred, Pamela, and Annette are present. Bailiffs - sentient constructs - arrive to "repossess" Amber and Aineko, but a scheme is hatched whereby the Slug is introduced to Economics 2. Bailiff (from Late Latin baiulivus, Adjectival form of baiulus) is a Governor or Custodian (cf 0, which keeps both constructs very busy.
8 Elector
Sep 04		 In the increasingly populated Saturnian floating cities, Amber, Annette, Gianni and Manfred begin a political campaign to finance a scheme to escape the predations of the Vile Offspring by journeying once more to the router network, with Amber as the leader of the Accelerationista party. She loses the election (to the stay-at-home conservationista faction), but once more the Lobsters step in to help, by offering passage to uploads on their large ships if the humans agree to act as explorers and mappers.
9 Survivor
Oct/Nov 04		 The router has, once again, been reached. Learning from it, the refugees have created their own network, enabling them to explore vast distances. Habitats built around Hyundai are home to copies that wish to stay put, including child-clones. Aineko returns to make Manfred an offer that, if he accepts it, will result in Aineko leaving them alone for ever.

Allusions/references to current science

Awards and nominations

Release details

Online versions

See also

External links

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