Accelerando
| Written by: | Charles Stross |
|---|---|
| Central Theme: | |
| Synopsis: | |
| Genre(s): | Short story collection |
| First published: | July 5, 2005 |
Accelerando is a Speculative Fiction series by Charles Stross.
Accelerando follows the lives of the Macx family through several generations as the world goes through The Singularity, beginning in a near-future setting and progressing through more and more advanced settings.
Tropes used in Accelerando include:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: in several manners of speaking.
- Amnesiac Dissonance (the main character of Glasshouse practically exemplifies this trope, although it's subverted in that he was good both before and after he had amnesia, but he was simply more violent)
- Apocalypse How: A variation on Stellar, in the sense that the solar system isn't destroyed per se, just converted from dumb mass to computronium by the Vile Offspring. The (trans)humans who weren't active (or involuntary) participants got the hell out while the getting was good.
- Augmented Reality: Pretty much everybody.
- Cats Are Snarkers / Cats Are Superior: Aineko lives for this.
- Brain Uploading: a large part of Accelerando is from the viewpoint of characters who uploaded themselves as a way of saving space on an interstellar journey
- Fantastic Religious Weirdness (Accelerando does strange things with the intersection between shari'a and corporate law)
- To say nothing of the difficulties inherent in facing Mecca to pray while you're in space.
- Invisible Aliens (in Accelerando, they built Matrioshka brains and subsequently vanished)
- Generational Saga (Accelerando has three generations of protagonists)
- Memory Gambit (in Glasshouse, the main character erased whole chunks of his memory so he could infiltrate a secret facility)
- Mind Virus: "CuriousYellow", a virus that's done an unknown amount of damage...because one of the things the virus did was erase the memories of anyone who knew why it was released in the first place.
- Non-Human Sidekick (Manfred's cat who is a combination of a Talking Animal and Robot Buddy and, it turns out, is behind almost everything)
- Patchwork Story (Accelerando started its life as nine short stories)
- Shout-Out: In Glasshouse, Curious Yellow is named after to the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) (or more directly, after a paper about computer worm design).
- the Linebarger Cats are named in honor of Paul Linebarger, who literally wrote the book on psychological warfare, and his well-known proclivity for cats and catgirls. He's better known to sci-fi fans as Cordwainer Smith. One of the cover companies the Cats use is Cordwainer Heavy Industries. Another is the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.
- The Singularity: the entire point of Accelerando. Glasshouse on the other hand stars the people who survived it and decided it had been a really bad idea for the most part.
- Space Elevator (Used by the Matrioshka brain in Accelerando to disassemble the inner solar system)
- Transhuman Treachery: The Vile Offspring became so technologically and neurologically divergent to humanity that the humans had to flee the solar system to avoid being being used as Matrioshka Brain feedstock -- along with the planets of said system.
- The Virus (Curious Yellow is a worm in Glasshouse that infects people when they pass through A-gates so they, in turn, infect other gates and other people. It not only erases blocks of memory, but erases the reason for what started the war in in the first place)