A work of Speculative Fiction by Charles Stross. Set as a future history of the 21st century, it follows three generations of a family as humanity approaches a technological singularity.
This series provides examples of:
- A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In several manners of speaking. Examples include the Wunch, the Slug inside the Hyundai router, the Vile Offspring and even Aineko in the end.
- Apocalypse How: A variation on Class X-2 (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.
- Artificial Cannibalism: Nano-technology can make pretty much anything on demand, including "honey-glazed roast long pork with sautéed potatoes a la gratin and carrots Debussy".
- Augmented Reality: During the Field Circus journey to the router orbiting the Hyundai brown dwarf, Amber and 62 other passengers experience the journey as such, because they are brain uploads in a can-sized spacecraft. Later in the story, The City floating above Saturn can be considered as such and, even centuries later, the wargames between Sirhan's son and other kids are practiced in such a room.
- Bilingual Bonus: Aineko's name is derived from 愛猫 ("aibyō") which means "pet cat". The second character, 猫, the character for cat is also pronounced "neko". If you say "aineko" it's also like saying "A.I. neko" since it is also an Artificial Intelligence.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: The people of Earth that went through with The Singularity have developed some rather odd ideas about ethics and economics, among other things.
- Brain Uploading: A large part of the book is from the viewpoint of characters who uploaded themselves as a way of saving space on an interstellar journey. Uploads are legally the same person as their predecessor — to prevent people from running up huge debts, copying themselves, and then committing suicide — and work by neural simulation.
- Deus est Machina: The Vile Offspring, posthuman "weakly godlike" machine intelligences which are busily consuming the inner solar system and everything in it for their own ends (namely, building a matrioshka brain), in the meantime doing arbitrary things like resurrecting historical figures and devising a new form of capitalism in which baseline human beings are unsuitable for anything except as raw materials. It's telling that the characters never confront them; they run away from their subconscious immune system. Also The Reveal about Aineko, by the end of the book — and arguably a good bit earlier.
- Fantastic Religious Weirdness
- The story does strange things with the intersection between shari'a and corporate law. Amber emancipates herself at the age of twelve via a complicated scheme that involves the relationship between shari'a and modern corporate law — she essentially sells herself into slavery to a computer-run company operated by a blind trust of which she is the sole owner.
- To say nothing of the difficulties inherent in facing Mecca to pray while you're in space. Praying to an image of Mecca is evidently an acceptable compromise.
- Generational Saga: The book has three generations of protagonists immigrating into The Singularity.
- Goggles Do Something Unusual: Manfred's sunglasses contain a vast amount of smart computing power, permanently connected to his thought patterns. When he loses them, it's as if he's lost chunks of his memory, and the guy who finds them and puts them on starts thinking the way he does.
- Heroic Sacrifice: Pamela, chooses to send the Slug impersonating Aineko to the Bailiffs herself in an one-way trip. It isn't the case of Redemption Equals Death, though, as she still resents Manfred, Annette and Amber and informs them about it before leaving.
- Hive Mind: Called borganisms In-Universe. The first example is the Franklin Collective, a hive mind based on the personality of Bob Franklin, constructed after his physical death.
- Invisible Aliens: Aliens built Matrioshka brains and subsequently vanished. This is, it turns out, the natural course of development for intelligent life: they hit The Singularity, upload their minds into/get consumed by artificial intelligences, and spend the rest of their history centered around a single star, because traveling to another one is just too costly to be worthwhile. Needless to say, humanity faces the same fate.
- Mohs Scale of Science Fiction Hardness: A solid 5.5, Accelerando delves into Futurology territory, as all the stories are Speculative Science about the technology continuously accelerating like it did during the dot-com boom during the 1990s.
- Multiple-Choice Past: Sirhan has a real one, courtesy of his mother. That is to say, his personality is a merge of at least four different childhoods, grown in parallel.
- Non-Human Sidekick: Manfred's cat who is a combination of a Talking Animal and Robot Buddy and is behind almost everything.
- Oh, Crap!: When the protagonists realize why the Vile Offspring are resimulating individuals from human history.
- One-Word Title: Accelerando.
- Patchwork Story: Accelerando started its life as nine short stories.
- Post-Scarcity Economy: The novel chronicles the creation of one straight through The Singularity.
- Protagonist Manfred Macx is one of the first people on Earth to realize that in such a world the best way to get truly rich is to help other people achieve great goals and become rich. There are particularly odd things such as the market for reputation; it's not explicitly explained exactly what a valuable reputation is, but Manfred was kind of the template for how it might work. In short: as physical production becomes easier, there is less value in (easily automated) labor and more in creativity/novelty and initiative. A person with a valuable reputation is someone worth investing in — their work will give you back valuable ideas, access to valuable resources, or simple entertainment. It's like an elaborate amalgam of a stock market, venture capitalism, and one's social media followers.
- Also mentioned is "Economics 2.0", the foundation of the society of the post-scarcity Transhuman intelligences formed by modified uploaded humans and AI. It apparently isn't possible to understand nor engage in Economics 2.0 without your conscious mind being altered to the point where you are quite clearly no longer human, which also handily avoids the need for the author to explain what such godlike beings might trade in, or why. It's somewhat implied that the superintelligences are trading in lesser intelligences for control of creativity and novelty, but the characters observe from indirect contact with the remnants of other post-Singularity societies that they end up autocannibalizing as the superintelligences use (and use up) one another in their ever-more-complex economic interactions.
- Shout-Out: A few well-known lines from The Matrix and Aliens are copied.
- The Singularity: During the third part of the novel, the post-human protagonists are referred to as living in "the mentally retarded backwater slums of the universe," and yet they are immortal shapeshifters who can literally make their dreams come true. That is how amazing The Singularity they rejected is. On the other hand, it's not at all clear whether the entities at the center of the Solar System's computronium cloud are really sapient anymore. The logic of Economics 2.0 suggests that self-awareness might well be a market inefficiency to be dispensed with. Their behavior is so bad that the remaining corporeal post-humans take to calling them the "Vile Offspring" of the human race. Then there's Aineko, which is quite clearly a post-organic super intelligence who openly mocks and toys with post-humans living in an AI-moderated utopia, claiming that they are easy for it to manipulate with its superior theory of mind. How can you deal with something so powerful that its ideas about you are equivalent to you?
- Space Elevator: Used by the Matrioshka brain to disassemble the inner solar system.
- Starfish Aliens:
- The extraterrestrial entities encountered by the passengers of the Field Circus are almost incomprehensibly different from humanity — one of them isn't even a "real" alien at all, but instead a corporate scam disguised as a digital upload of a naturally evolved organism. The only reason that Amber and Co. are able to communicate with them is because of the hyper-sophisticated translation software they have at their disposal - and even that sometimes fails to get the job done.
- Although not "aliens" per se, the Vile Offspring can also be said to qualify for this trope, due to their Blue-and-Orange Morality.
- Transhuman Treachery: The Vile Offspring became so technologically and neurologically divergent from humanity that the humans had to flee the solar system to avoid being used as Matrioshka Brain feedstock — along with the planets of said system.
- Woman Scorned: Pamela. She went several orders of magnitude hunting down her ex, Manfred, and trying to stop him from doing his part for The Singularity. Her roles concerning the rest of the family are: My Beloved Smother for Amber and Mentor Archetype for Sirhan.
