I love this book! The part about the implication of digitized minds and long distance space travel was really eye-opening. It really makes you understand that, no, aliens are not visiting earth.
The entire thing is an amazing exploration of how the concept of time becomes a bit meaningless though with those capabilities: traveling at relativistic velocities for hundreds of years? Several of your backups live out whole lives and also a centuries old lawsuit is still in progress and a lawyer is slowly uploading on your laser propulsion source to talk about it. When you get back everyone will still be around because it's also surprisingly hard to actually die anymore.
I read this book a few years ago and it was just chock full of interesting ideas. I think I didn't really "get" it, or enjoy the story that much but I definitely was impressed by the imagination. Every once in a while I think of random things in it. IIRC, it was this book where corporations become kind of important, central entities at some point, and that resonates more and more these days.
Do I remember correctly that one of the major characters in what we would now call an influencer with always-on video glasses? I think his spectacles get slashdotted at one point.
I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.
The first three shorts, when initialy published, had a real "15 minutes into the future" vibe. Substantial ideas thrown away as quick asides gave it that "acceleration" vibe - a society with its finger mashed on the fast forward button. William Gibson is positively static by comparison.
Some of those throwaway ideas seem quaint now (there's some stuff about body modems I think?), but one of the interesting things about the book, to me, is the further away from "the present" it gets, the more like traditional SF it becomes: it slows down, gets more spaceopera-y. But those first three shorts were something special, and for me might be the best thing cstross has ever done. Right place right time I guess, like that album you first heard when you were fourteen.
Anyone have recommendations on books that can rival the first part of Accelerando in number of prescient ideas about how the near future, pre singularity might look?
My own list is:
Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon
Counting Heads by David Marusek
Nexus by Ramez Naam
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
But I'm always on the look out for more! The more predictive the better!
Toss "Signal to Noise" and "A Signal Shattered" both by Eric S. Nylund into the pot - interesting conceptual things around biotech/selfmodification singularities in addition to the more common computational singularities.
Lovestar by Andri Snaer Magnason (2012) is a good story around ubiquitous advertising, remote work, and veneration of Tech Bros and tech in everyday life gone too far.
For one example, if people are in debt, a debt collector is allowed to force their brain implants to take over their body at random to shout advertising jingles at strangers, to pay off the debt with advertising money.
Rampant consumerism, a United States so dominated by corporations that there is a senator from Cocoa-Cola, and advertising so aggressive you might even prefer the world we live in... published in 1953.
Pantheon/the stories it's based on by Ken Liu (though I really do recommend the animated series).
Maybe more conventional/dated, but I always recommend it for "getting" the emotional, person-to-person side in a particular way that few others do: .hack//SIGN. None of the characters ever quite realize what's going on, but elements - especially the soundtrack - seem to understand that everyone is on the precipice of something irrevocable.
Shine, bright morning light
Now in the air the spring is coming
Sweet blowing wind
Singing down the hills and valleys
Keep your eyes on me
Now we're on the edge of hell
Dear my love, sweet morning light
Wait for me, you've gone much farther, too far...
Not a book, but the new Marathon computer game might be the first non-indie title where you play as a disembodied posthuman entity. Very neat and unconventional aesthetic for a sci-fi future, too.
Apparently Counting Heads is currently a freebie for audible premium. Rainbows.. overrated IMHO.
Nexus series has a great story with great pacing, classic cyberpunk ambiance with genuinely fresh takes, but be warned.. fairly bad writing. Astonishing that there is no movie yet because it really seems like one of those things very much written with that in mind. As Hollywood continues to discourage original work and scramble for adaptations with an existing audience.. even more astonishing if it doesn't land in the next few years. Someone will realize they can get the ready-player audience and the cyberpunk 2077 audience without paying big royalties
The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran takes place in 2069 but was written in 1989 and the tech still holds up decently (to me at least). Sort of a Snow Crash vibe but less satire. AI's exist on the network (called the Crystal Wind) but haven't taken over or anything. Many Players (hackers) use "Image" software that are essentially AI agents.
Accelerando has prophecies that are coming true and it's scary. Spoiler warning in case you want to read it.
The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here
He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional, unable to do anything for himself, doesn't know where he is or why he's there. In a way, he lost his own agency. -> this is now called skills atrophy and I'm sure it'll become a much bigger issue within the next 10 years.
Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen
The entire solar system is on its way to ultimately turn into AI corporations "optimizing" for profit competing with other corporations to exhaust every little resource left in the entire system. Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity. And in the book, they find another intelligent species that succumbed to the same fate. This might just be that great filter everyone is theorizing. -> bleak and scary plausible outcome for what we're going through now.
(if I got some things wrong, I'm writing from memory. It's been years since I read this book)
Even more fitting is the part of the story where a collective of uploaded lobster minds are involved. I wonder if that was an inspiration for the "OpenClaw" name somehow or just pure coincidence.
> Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen
Woah, sounds dystopian, what gives you the impression that this is on track to happen, is there "AI lawyers" already, or what's going on?
The few times I've read about AI/LLMs being used by lawyers or others in relation to law, it's always about "Someone tried to use AI, AI hallucinated and now the lawyer lost his license" which sounds proper and the "right way" to me.
Yeah, I don't see that one. I don't see the legal system, the one that has people with guns to back it, giving up authority to an AI or a group of AIs.
I was turned on to this book by an HN commenter a few months ago. Since then, it’s become something between a goal and a fear that one day I’ll get to the point where I wonder how much of my consciousness is me versus how much has been pushed off to my agent.
It’s already a lot closer than I expected to ever experience.
Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.
I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.
Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.
The one thing that's often missing in fictions about the future is how half-arsed everything is. Seen how buggy, insecure and just plain wrong so many of the things we are using are, we kinda already live in a world where everything works but only half-works.
We're much close to a dystopian comedy like Brazil than we are to Black Mirror.
It always bothers me when people suggest that AI could be the "great filter" in the sense of Fermi's paradox. Yes, AI may well wipe out biological life, but all evidence suggests AI will have a much easier time with space travel compared to biological life, and it will emit much louder signals unless it is intentionally staying silent.
> He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional,
Is this new? I don't think I could function without everything that was available in the 1950. I live because I have access to electricity, super markets, running water, working sewage, etc.. Take them away and I would not be able to fend for myself, especially in any major city. Put me in a forest I don't know how to build shelter, what things I can eat, how to catch stuff, make tools, etc...
As someone who would consider himself in the same situation, I don't see dissonance, but pragmatism.
The scenario isn't a temporary crisis, it's total collapse, end of the world stuff. Why would I be so keen on surviving that? What for? Everyone and everything I enjoy in life would be gone anyway.
It's like the billionaires' apocalypse bunkers. What do they think they would be doing all day, and to what end? Even if they managed to secure enough clean air, clean food, and clean water, how many years are they planning to spend in their bunker pool, or watching their local movie library until the TV breaks? What's the end goal there?
I get that survivalists have a whole subculture, and it's an interest and hobby people enjoy doing, that's cool. But I think even they, if this happened and their skills allowed them to survive, would pretty soon start wondering why they would want to try to survive by all means possible in a barren, empty, dead world. If the survivalism is a fun hobby for someone, sure, but to force oneself to learn those skills for a potential apocalypse scenario doesn't seem to me like a reasonable thing to invest time in at all.
This is nothing new though; industrialization and specialization have already caused basic survival skills to atrophy in most of the population. Take the case of a massive EMP taking out all computer systems. Gaps in supply chains and power failures would lead to millions (or billions) dying of starvation, dehydration, or exposure because they don’t know how to provide for themselves. People who’ve studied and practiced survival skills (or who retained that knowledge in physical media like a book) would survive. Drop someone from humanity’s hunter-gatherer days into the same situation and they’d have a better chance of surviving than most contemporary humans.
> let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here
If you squint really hard, arguably maybe sort of in the future perhaps.
Openclaw seems to mostly end in dead end (but interesting) experiments and/or people losing weeks of work. That’s like saying “hoverboards” are basically flying cars.
He also predicted smart contracts and DAOs (in accelerando) as well as crypto games and the associated heists (in "Halting State"). Unlike the AI, those predictions are eerily accurate and describe the real mechanics pretty well.
> Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"
> "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."
No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became the opening of the novel published in 2005.
I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.
And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
> And don't ever let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI
As an avid reader of your blog I would never presume such a thing lightly, even when thinking about your old work. Also really enjoyed what I read of Laundry Files :)
"It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast --- a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, ..."
Charles Stross' various SF, especially the space opera-adjacent stuff. (He has an large range. Merchant Princes and Laundry series are good, but not at all along the lines of Banks.)
Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga.
Vernor Vinge's three Zones of Though books.
David Brin's Uplift series.
Perhaps Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series.
Max Gladstone's Emperess of Forever shares a similar setting, but is much lighter.
The writing of Gene Wolfe and Tamayn Muir has, I think, much in common with Banks in terms of depth and character, but even though SF they have a very different feel and focus to their works.
And, of course, if you want the original space opera, it might be worth tracking down E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. Galactic Patrol and Grey Lensman are the heart of it and ought to be read first. Second Stage Lensman and Children of the Lens are worthy sequels that complete the story. They're pretty breezy reads and very different from Banks in everything but the setting of a galaxy filled with different species, and likely seem somewhat hackneyed now, but they're also the source of most space opera archetypes. (If you think of a space opera trope, it probably came from Lensman. Star Wars is largely a Lensman/Flash Gordon mashup.)
Echoing others, Reynolds (House of Suns, Pushing Ice, the Revelation Space series), Stross (Accelerando, Glasshouse, and Saturn's Children/Neptune's Brood are my favorites), and Rajaniemi (the Quantum Thief trilogy) scratch roughly the same itch for me.
Dennis E. Taylor’s “Bobiverse” series is goofy, yet hard, SF about a guy (Bob) whose uploaded mind gets sold when the cryogenic hosting company goes out of business. Given a job piloting a deep space probe, he starts replicating and exploring the galaxy.
I first read this on an HTC Typhoon smartphone on my daily commute to my first job out of university. I must have felt pretty smug and futuristic at the time.
Accelerando and The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi (and that series as a whole) are the best examples of how weird the future is going to get I’ve read.
Other series like The Culture are amazing too, but the aforementioned feel possible in a way that others don’t. For me, I can see the causal chains leading from here to there vividly in a way that you don’t get with a lot of other sci-fi.
That combination of plausible weirdness is unique and I’d highly recommend The Quantum Thief to anyone who enjoyed Accelerando or Stross’ other writing.
I'm reading Accelerando at the moment and I kept thinking about The Quantum Thief. I enjoyed the Quantum Thief more, but Accelerando feels more relevant to the current times.
Appreciate the recommendation for the quantum thief. I really enjoyed accelerando which was a recommendation from a friend so I look forward to checking this one out. If it's good I'll share it with the same friend who taught me about accelerando.
Not the first time I've come across great recommendations in the comments of HN!
Tried it because of Goodreads recommendations, couldn't get past the first 30 pages or so. First book ever I rage quitted. The main character is so unlikeable and the weird sex stuff was too repulsive.
Accelerando is a true masterpiece. Crypto and endless speculation, AI and lobsters, space exploration - all in all just "this is our near future". TBH, I know of just handful of Sci-Fi novels as fundamental and as let's say prophetic as this one. The others to my taste in the same category is Nexus trilogy by Ramez Naam (even if a bit farfetched by now), The Diamond Age (="The Illustrated Primer" is peak AI) by Neil Stephenson and Daemon+Freedom by Daniel Suarez (=AI + crypto DAOs).
Love The Daemon and FreedomTM! They are very different from most of the AI singularity novels. I wish the Daemon was real and I could move to a holon...
I've read a number of the comments here about Accelerando and other books of the same ilk. I'm thinking a couple of things, a question and the feeling:
What SciFi books are describing what is now thought to be impossibilities all together in spite of the potentials of singularity?
I feel like everyday there are new, very real discoveries in science as a result of AI and otherwise that reading about that stuff is just as good as reading about any possibilities that may be described in any science fiction book.
We are living in or moving very quickly towards an era where everything around us seems quite fantastical compared to the life I lived some 50 years ago.
Oh, cool, I didn't finish it at the time I first read it, linked from HN.
But it did seem pretty well-written, the human relationships portrayed (divorced/separated main character iirc?) appeared a bit off to me, but much less than in many, many other SF stories.
Reminded me of a hybrid between Philip K. Dick and some other, more "conventional", SF authors such as Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 115 ms ] threadI was 17 in 2005 and discovered it by chance, and I’ve been binging on hard sf since then. Matrix and this were really transformative for me.
Also, for the longest of times I thought lobste.rs was a reference to this book :-)
Charles has very interesting takes on the modern world on his blog. I still read it with great passion.
The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.
I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.
Some of those throwaway ideas seem quaint now (there's some stuff about body modems I think?), but one of the interesting things about the book, to me, is the further away from "the present" it gets, the more like traditional SF it becomes: it slows down, gets more spaceopera-y. But those first three shorts were something special, and for me might be the best thing cstross has ever done. Right place right time I guess, like that album you first heard when you were fourteen.
My own list is:
But I'm always on the look out for more! The more predictive the better!Rudy Rucker also has a bunch of brain-benders that bent my brain so hard I can't name them.
For one example, if people are in debt, a debt collector is allowed to force their brain implants to take over their body at random to shout advertising jingles at strangers, to pay off the debt with advertising money.
Rampant consumerism, a United States so dominated by corporations that there is a senator from Cocoa-Cola, and advertising so aggressive you might even prefer the world we live in... published in 1953.
Pantheon/the stories it's based on by Ken Liu (though I really do recommend the animated series).
Maybe more conventional/dated, but I always recommend it for "getting" the emotional, person-to-person side in a particular way that few others do: .hack//SIGN. None of the characters ever quite realize what's going on, but elements - especially the soundtrack - seem to understand that everyone is on the precipice of something irrevocable.
Nexus series has a great story with great pacing, classic cyberpunk ambiance with genuinely fresh takes, but be warned.. fairly bad writing. Astonishing that there is no movie yet because it really seems like one of those things very much written with that in mind. As Hollywood continues to discourage original work and scramble for adaptations with an existing audience.. even more astonishing if it doesn't land in the next few years. Someone will realize they can get the ready-player audience and the cyberpunk 2077 audience without paying big royalties
The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here
He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional, unable to do anything for himself, doesn't know where he is or why he's there. In a way, he lost his own agency. -> this is now called skills atrophy and I'm sure it'll become a much bigger issue within the next 10 years.
Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen
The entire solar system is on its way to ultimately turn into AI corporations "optimizing" for profit competing with other corporations to exhaust every little resource left in the entire system. Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity. And in the book, they find another intelligent species that succumbed to the same fate. This might just be that great filter everyone is theorizing. -> bleak and scary plausible outcome for what we're going through now.
(if I got some things wrong, I'm writing from memory. It's been years since I read this book)
Woah, sounds dystopian, what gives you the impression that this is on track to happen, is there "AI lawyers" already, or what's going on?
The few times I've read about AI/LLMs being used by lawyers or others in relation to law, it's always about "Someone tried to use AI, AI hallucinated and now the lawyer lost his license" which sounds proper and the "right way" to me.
Yeah, I don't see that one. I don't see the legal system, the one that has people with guns to back it, giving up authority to an AI or a group of AIs.
In which way is this on-track to happen?
It’s already a lot closer than I expected to ever experience.
This is a book of ideas!
Aside: That was my favorite section of the book as well. Just the notion that a person could have had so much of "themselves" embedded in their agents that when disconnected from them they are basically in shock.
I remember at the time I was noticing how all my friends were completely loosing the ability to use paper maps. And there was a big discussion among us about whether needing to physically rotate the map in order to make sense of it was an example of us loosing spatial reasoning. It reminded me of how little I understood the actual space (landmarks, distance, etc) from A to B until I started driving myself at 16. Previous to that, your parents drove you, and it just seem like two places were magically connected by a wormhole. Anyway, we thought it was interesting that we might be the last generation to have used actual written maps to navigate to places. We had learned to do so, but we would also loose the ability with time.
Sure enough, these days, I have a hard time imagining using a map compared to just having maps route the path on my phone. The skill has atrophied from disuse. I imagine this is what "loosing your agents" felt like to that character.
We're much close to a dystopian comedy like Brazil than we are to Black Mirror.
Is this new? I don't think I could function without everything that was available in the 1950. I live because I have access to electricity, super markets, running water, working sewage, etc.. Take them away and I would not be able to fend for myself, especially in any major city. Put me in a forest I don't know how to build shelter, what things I can eat, how to catch stuff, make tools, etc...
Help me understand the cognitive dissonance and how you deal with it
The scenario isn't a temporary crisis, it's total collapse, end of the world stuff. Why would I be so keen on surviving that? What for? Everyone and everything I enjoy in life would be gone anyway.
It's like the billionaires' apocalypse bunkers. What do they think they would be doing all day, and to what end? Even if they managed to secure enough clean air, clean food, and clean water, how many years are they planning to spend in their bunker pool, or watching their local movie library until the TV breaks? What's the end goal there?
I get that survivalists have a whole subculture, and it's an interest and hobby people enjoy doing, that's cool. But I think even they, if this happened and their skills allowed them to survive, would pretty soon start wondering why they would want to try to survive by all means possible in a barren, empty, dead world. If the survivalism is a fun hobby for someone, sure, but to force oneself to learn those skills for a potential apocalypse scenario doesn't seem to me like a reasonable thing to invest time in at all.
If you squint really hard, arguably maybe sort of in the future perhaps.
Openclaw seems to mostly end in dead end (but interesting) experiments and/or people losing weeks of work. That’s like saying “hoverboards” are basically flying cars.
It’s been written about since writing was available and with increasingly resolution ever since.
> Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"
> "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."
No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became the opening of the novel published in 2005.
I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.
And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.
[big fan of all your writings here!]
As an avid reader of your blog I would never presume such a thing lightly, even when thinking about your old work. Also really enjoyed what I read of Laundry Files :)
"It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast --- a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, ..."
Any recommendations?
Some of the closest would likely be:
Charles Stross' various SF, especially the space opera-adjacent stuff. (He has an large range. Merchant Princes and Laundry series are good, but not at all along the lines of Banks.)
Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga.
Vernor Vinge's three Zones of Though books.
David Brin's Uplift series.
Perhaps Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series.
Max Gladstone's Emperess of Forever shares a similar setting, but is much lighter.
The writing of Gene Wolfe and Tamayn Muir has, I think, much in common with Banks in terms of depth and character, but even though SF they have a very different feel and focus to their works.
And, of course, if you want the original space opera, it might be worth tracking down E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. Galactic Patrol and Grey Lensman are the heart of it and ought to be read first. Second Stage Lensman and Children of the Lens are worthy sequels that complete the story. They're pretty breezy reads and very different from Banks in everything but the setting of a galaxy filled with different species, and likely seem somewhat hackneyed now, but they're also the source of most space opera archetypes. (If you think of a space opera trope, it probably came from Lensman. Star Wars is largely a Lensman/Flash Gordon mashup.)
If you're looking for other great sci-fi reads:
John Ringo - Live free or die
John Varley - Titan (-> Wizard / Demon)
Charles Stross - Singularity Sky
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space / The Prefect
Orson Scott Card - Enders game
Isaac Asimov - Foundation
Ender's Game and Foundation are timeless classics, and I suspect, Accelerando will eventually become one.
Halting state might be a bit dated but rule 34 absolutely holds up.
Other series like The Culture are amazing too, but the aforementioned feel possible in a way that others don’t. For me, I can see the causal chains leading from here to there vividly in a way that you don’t get with a lot of other sci-fi.
That combination of plausible weirdness is unique and I’d highly recommend The Quantum Thief to anyone who enjoyed Accelerando or Stross’ other writing.
Not the first time I've come across great recommendations in the comments of HN!
What SciFi books are describing what is now thought to be impossibilities all together in spite of the potentials of singularity?
I feel like everyday there are new, very real discoveries in science as a result of AI and otherwise that reading about that stuff is just as good as reading about any possibilities that may be described in any science fiction book.
We are living in or moving very quickly towards an era where everything around us seems quite fantastical compared to the life I lived some 50 years ago.
But it did seem pretty well-written, the human relationships portrayed (divorced/separated main character iirc?) appeared a bit off to me, but much less than in many, many other SF stories.
Reminded me of a hybrid between Philip K. Dick and some other, more "conventional", SF authors such as Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov.
Bookmarked!