11 ms·

Accelerando (2005)

334 points by eamag 5mo ago

ktallett 5mo ago
Is this a post because of the fact it was released under CC or for a different reason?
- stoneman24 5mo ago
  Not sure but one section of the book relates to the establishment of a polity where compute was the underpinnings of the society. Given the current build out of compute in the real world, there is discussion / speculation about the effects of the rush to an economy heavily based on AI and the costs / benefits of that end state society. If AI isn’t an bubble based on grift and hype that fizzles out
arisAlexis 5mo ago
Becoming more real every day
xgbi 5mo ago
One of the founding books that really blew my mind and drove me on the path of software and hacking. I 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.
okonomiyaki3000 5mo ago
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.
- XorNot 5mo ago
  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.
clokkz 5mo ago
I read this book a while ago, and when I heard about openclaw I immediately thought of the self aware lobster neural network in space.
senectus1 5mo ago
one of my all time fav sci-fi novels.
losvedir 5mo ago
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.
wainstead 5mo ago
Read this over a decade ago and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Very timely. The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.
- fellowmartian 5mo ago
  Is it? Literally nothing even remotely similar from the book is happening in reality beyond the lobsters’ broken command of language being similar to early GPTs, but even they seem to have had a better world model than our current SOTA.
  - db48x 5mo ago
    That’s because the lobsters were an AI using an LLM to communicate. All we have is the LLM.
- ridgeguy 5mo ago
  Perhaps this is an early indicator. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approves-datacenter-backlash https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...
colinb 5mo ago
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.
- Hizonner 5mo ago
  The difference between Manfred and the influencers we have now was that he actually invented things, built things, and brokered huge deals while streaming everything.
  - db48x 5mo ago
    Mostly just invented things, patented them, then brokered the deal, often donating the patents to the Open Patent Foundation in the process so that nobody could monopolize the idea in the medium term. For example, he patented the idea of using uploaded gastropod neural nets to run a nanotech factory on an asteroid, then hired the uploaded gastropods themselves as part of the deal (they wanted to “swim away” from the noisy and dangerous and inexplicable humans). As a result of hundreds of these types of deals he no longer ever uses money. When he orders a drink in a bar someone who made it big off of one of his ideas picks up the tab. When he travels an airline gifts him the tickets. When he wants to buy lingerie for his girlfriend, he finds that every lingerie shop on the planet is willing to give him free products because he once testified as an expert witness against an obscenity charge in a trial of a pornographer or something. His girlfriend, meanwhile, works for the IRS and is chasing him to try to force him to pay millions in taxes on the vast income that the IRS is sure he is hiding. A pretty funny story, actually, and the way he eventually gets the IRS off of his back is hilarious.
    - ian_j_butler 5mo ago
      Does he invent things though? Probably more brokering than inventing, and as the "idea guy", whatever he does come up with he doesn't need to build because the world is so overflowing with AI and 3d printers elsewhere. With no need to build, does he spend time on design then? We can imagine, but IIRC, it's not shown, and mostly it is enough to just have an idea. Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we see this mostly from his keen sense of what is ethical. Besides that.. we're lionizing an entrepreneur and a influence broker who suggests we should synergize our way to post-scarcity, which always works for him mostly because he's already there. As he's up against against a lot of backwards-looking people, he looks like a prophet. Maybe lots of people in the general public could do what he does, but don't have the wealth or influence to pull it off? I forget what Stross has to say about it, but maybe this tension is why he's not a fan of the book. Sure, everyone wants to be an influence broker, but they were never very heroic and often are villains. Since the early 2000s entrepreneurs have lost a lot of ground in the eyes of the public in that they are not seen as visionary, just normal people with extraordinary access.
flir 5mo ago
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.
- snovv_crash 5mo ago
  William Gibson is a fashion writer. He leaned into this further with the Blue Ant series and IMO the books benefited from it.
deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
FL33TW00D 5mo ago
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!
- le-mark 5mo ago
  Not quite what you’re requesting but “Across Realtime” by Vernor Vinge explores ideas around the singularity. In particular it contains the short novel “Marooned in Realtime” that is completely mind blowing imo.
  - randallsquared 5mo ago
    The edition of Marooned in Realtime I read in the late eighties or around 1990 was my introduction to the concept of the Singularity, and it had an essay in the back of it by Vinge asserting that the reader would likely live to see the real thing within 30 years or so. It's remarkable that so many of that circle in the 80s and 90s were so close, even without knowing exactly what detailed technologies would enable it. Trend lines on graphs undefeated, I guess.
- jaggederest 5mo ago
  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.
- rbanffy 5mo ago
  The Neuromancer trilogy is great. At least post-singularity AIs appear to be uninterested in humanity. Rudy Rucker also has a bunch of brain-benders that bent my brain so hard I can't name them.
- jodrellblank 5mo ago
  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.
Hizonner 5mo ago
I'm happy to report that my timing attacks have succeeded in accessing this simulation's substrate. Lobsters are reviewing my paper.
- esafak 5mo ago
  In http://lobste.rs/ http://lobste.rs/ the lobsters are us :)
SonnyTark 5mo ago
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)
- dist-epoch 5mo ago
  > Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity. An example of why those who say "if everybody is jobless, who will buy all the products?" are just showing a lack of imagination.
  - generic92034 5mo ago
    They are not necessarily lacking imagination, they are just not providing answers to their own question. Almost everyone has read some dystopian SciFi.
  - exe34 5mo ago
    The "products" are only produced because those who have money want those things. When 10 trillionaires own everything, then whatever they want made is what corporations will make.
utilityhotbar 5mo ago
This was written in 2005(!) -> > 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."
- _alternator_ 5mo ago
  This was a genetically modified space lobster talking to Mangred, right? I haven't verified but I've been assuming that the lobster mascot for OpenClaw was a reference to Accelerando.
  - jaggederest 5mo ago
    Not an actual meatspace genetically modified space lobster, it was a neural network based on genetically modified lobsters uploaded to spacecraft that had achieved sentience and autonomy after it hacked its self-modification prevention code. If OpenClaw was an Accelerando reference that's an incredibly deep cut and super cool imo
    - Muromec 5mo ago
      Unlikely, as none of the AI hype has any shade of being cool.
      - jaggederest 5mo ago
        That's true, perhaps that's the aphorism here: "Never attribute to coolness that which could be attributed to being slop"
  - adamgordonbell 5mo ago
    I think its more a fun coincidence. OpenClaw was OpenClaude was it not, but had to change name. When I'm dictating to Claude Code, whisper often outputs 'cloud code' or 'clawed code' for my 'Claude Code.' So I ahd assumed he just took a homonym.
yomismoaqui 5mo ago
Sorry to hijack the topic (slightly), but after reading all books from The Culture by Iain M. Banks I'm looking for similar Sci-fi. Any recommendations?
- flir 5mo ago
  Alastair Reynolds (high-concept space opera, well written), Adrian Tchaikovsky (first contact, aliens, can't write nearly as well as Banks), Neal Asher (AI-run civilisation, inventive nastiness). Nobody's exactly like Banks though.
  - generic92034 5mo ago
    > Nobody's exactly like Banks though. Indeed. He died way too early. R.I.P.
  - gpderetta 5mo ago
    > Alastair Reynolds Love Reynolds, but unfortunately he is not half as a good writer as Banks. Then again, not many are. Reynolods books are full of cool ideas though.
    - flir 5mo ago
      Better than the other two I mentioned though. My big problem with Reynolds, I think, was that his characters are hard to distinguish. He seems to have a few stock personalities that he re-uses. The only one that really stood out for me as fully realized was Clavain. It's a bit worrying that we're recommending SF that's a quarter of a century old - my SF reading has really dropped off since Gardner Dozois died. I need to read something published in the last 6 months.
- mpalmer 5mo ago
  Love the Culture books, wish I could wipe my brain and discover them again. It's not too much like Banks' stuff, but I must recommend Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Far-future humanity, really interesting ideas re: war, identity, memory and infohazards. Also if you've not already read Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, absolutely get on that.
thom 5mo ago
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.
jahala 5mo ago
I absolutely LOVE Accelerando. I've recommended it to everyone I meet for years. 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
- rbanffy 5mo ago
  I think Singularity Skies pales in comparison with the depth and breadth of Accelerando. Ender's Game and Foundation are timeless classics, and I suspect, Accelerando will eventually become one.
  - picsao 5mo ago
    [dead]
- msh 5mo ago
  I think of the books by Charles Stross halting state and rule 34 are both better books and give a better 15 minutes into the future feeling. Halting state might be a bit dated but rule 34 absolutely holds up.
ian_j_butler 5mo ago
Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41452962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41452962
sohex 5mo ago
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.
- danschuller 5mo ago
  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.
- jdr23bc 5mo ago
  Blindsight's near future predictions are also looking more reasonable (aside from the vampires maybe)
  - collingreen 5mo ago
    Sub in the vampires for equally cold androids from the alien series and you've got it made. We're on the cusp of viscerally exploring blindsight's central theme of what does it look like to have intelligence without sentience.
  - Ancapistani 5mo ago
    I read Blindsight three times, and I’m still not sure what happened…
    - XorNot 5mo ago
      Ever been stuck in a waiting room listening to the most boring conversation about someone else's melodrama? You don't want to listen to it but you also can't tune it out, and you need to wait and listen for when they call your number...
lbrito 5mo ago
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.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  It's been so long since I've read it, I don't even remember weird sex stuff. Time for a re-read I guess
  - subscribed 5mo ago
    "weird" sex stuff is just a mild femdom. Totally side thing, IMO just a vehicle to add a layer of ambiguity to the MC.
    - perennate 5mo ago
      The end of Chapter 1 is a rape scene, I wouldn't call it "mild". I imagine it can be difficult to read for many people.
- TFNA 5mo ago
  Isn’t the weird sex stuff just another example of how prescient the novel was? Within just a few years after its publication we got Tumblr.
murmansk 5mo ago
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).
- solstice 5mo ago
  I just reread Daemon and Freedom™. Highly recommended. They definitely hit different today than when I first read them in 2010 or thereabouts
- jefurii 5mo ago
  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...
dsr_ 5mo ago
Charlie has said repeatedly that this is SF-horror, not a How-To.
- jodrellblank 5mo ago
  "After a trillion dollars of investment, we have successfully built the Vile Offspring from Stross's famous 2005 SF-horror "Don't build the Vile Offspring"".
  - N_Lens 5mo ago
    [flagged]
jeingham 5mo ago
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.
moritzwarhier 5mo 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. Bookmarked!
warumdarum 5mo ago
not an easy to read book. recommend singularity sky by the same author which is way catchier vibrant and not "enriched" with "modern" chatarcters by some sociology student editor who never grasped what scifi was all about.
- floren 5mo ago
  What makes them "modern"?
  - warumdarum 5mo ago
    They are annoying one dimensional stereovtypes of ideologic representations more interested in preaching through cliched interactions , then in beeing believable characters. They have no rea agency, no believable human interests, they behave illogical to drive the plot. Any sane human beeing would have fled the solar system and joined the other (bio)logical beeings waging war on the matroshkas.
prionassembly 5mo ago
This is a review of sorts I wrote about Accelerando. It discusses the sex stuff to an extent I haven't seen in this thread https://asemic-horizon.com/2025/09/01/sallies/ https://asemic-horizon.com/2025/09/01/sallies/
logicalappeals 5mo ago
If you like this, also worth checking out Greg Egan’s books. He wrote Diaspora. Great read.
jshaqaw 5mo ago
One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.
jknoepfler 5mo ago
Mandatory "Don't Create the Torment Nexus": https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...
jmacc93 5mo ago
[dead]
zetalyrae 5mo ago
I remember reading this as a teenager, and despite being already so steeped in transhumanist ideas that I should have found it very ordinary, I was so excited by it, having never read something like it before, I raved about it to my mother. "... and then they go to another star and find aliens but the aliens are not like us they're uploaded minds in Dyson spheres, which is like if you surround a star with solar collectors and..."
keeda 5mo ago
Have posted this elsewhere: Accelerando has always been a favorite SciFi novel of mine but it hits very different today. As the name suggests, it’s about how the world evolves when accelerated by powerful AI technology. Notably it was written circa 2005, long before this GenAI era. Even though it focuses primarily on the human agents in the story -- where the definition of humanity itself is fuzzy from the get-go -- it is set against a background of a vast, inscrutable, semi-virtual universe populated entirely by powerful artificial intelligences interacting amongst themselves, pursuing obscure goals that are largely beyond the grasp of mere humans. And they're busy running their own economy where they wheel and deal to trade the commodity most precious of all to them: Energy! Sound familiar? ;-) But it starts from a point that feels very real today. In the very first chapter, the protagonist forks a part of his own presumably cybernetic intellect to autonomously perform investigations in the background and report back to him. That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it. But today I’ve already had Gemini Deep Research write investigative reports previously unfeasible for me due to time and expertise constraints, such as the possible timeline for robotics replacing all physical human labor given real world constraints: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiahX2deGBoAb7kqIi5zNZm0NZQV-csso_N21-3TgLQ/edit?tab=t.0 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiahX2deGBoAb7kqIi5zNZm0... (spoiler alert, not for a long time yet due to extremely limited critical supply chain constraints.) When I read that report, I realized we had quantum-leaped from Sci-Fi to reality in just a few years. As such, beyond an engaging, if slightly disjointed, narrative arc, Accelerando gives you a framework to analyze current events and where they may lead.
- gpderetta 5mo ago
  > That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it. The Future Shock is real!
joshka 5mo ago
I have a very vague memory of reading chunks of this on Slashdot comments over months or years. I'm not 100% sure of this though. The 2000s are a little bit hazy (uni, work, life). Did this actually happen?
field_reader 5mo ago
[dead]
zxexz 5mo ago
I feel the need to link the top level comment[0] the venerable cstross posted the time I submitted the same link a few years ago. I also want to quote a comment of his on THIS posting of the link[1], just because he said he is chill being quoted on his referenced comment. And finally, I want to state here that I fullheartedly agree with aforementioned comment and I too crave a banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism future. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828666 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163649
low_tech_love 5mo ago
He writes that the book was written in 5 years and it is a personal record; does anyone know if that means a record slow or a record fast?
dTal 5mo ago
Looks like singularity panic is having a bit of a moment on Hacker News. In the past day: Accelerando (2005) (antipope.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241 Too Much Is Happening Too Fast (theatlantic.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163631 We've made the world too complicated (user8.bearblog.dev) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065 I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis (twitter.com/mitchellh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379 Leaving the Physical World (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084012
red75prime 5mo ago
At the time I devoured the work in one sitting with great delight. Today, the libertarianesque naivete detracts from the story a bit.

Accelerando (2005)

334 points by eamag 5mo ago

ktallett 5mo ago

Is this a post because of the fact it was released under CC or for a different reason?

stoneman24 5mo ago
Not sure but one section of the book relates to the establishment of a polity where compute was the underpinnings of the society. Given the current build out of compute in the real world, there is discussion / speculation about the effects of the rush to an economy heavily based on AI and the costs / benefits of that end state society. If AI isn’t an bubble based on grift and hype that fizzles out

arisAlexis 5mo ago

Becoming more real every day

xgbi 5mo ago

One of the founding books that really blew my mind and drove me on the path of software and hacking. I 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.

okonomiyaki3000 5mo ago

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.

XorNot 5mo ago
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.

clokkz 5mo ago

I read this book a while ago, and when I heard about openclaw I immediately thought of the self aware lobster neural network in space.

senectus1 5mo ago

one of my all time fav sci-fi novels.

losvedir 5mo ago

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.

wainstead 5mo ago

Read this over a decade ago and it’s been on my mind a lot lately. Very timely. The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.

fellowmartian 5mo ago
Is it? Literally nothing even remotely similar from the book is happening in reality beyond the lobsters’ broken command of language being similar to early GPTs, but even they seem to have had a better world model than our current SOTA.
- db48x 5mo ago
  That’s because the lobsters were an AI using an LLM to communicate. All we have is the LLM.
ridgeguy 5mo ago
Perhaps this is an early indicator. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approves-datacenter-backlash https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...

colinb 5mo ago

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.

Hizonner 5mo ago
The difference between Manfred and the influencers we have now was that he actually invented things, built things, and brokered huge deals while streaming everything.
- db48x 5mo ago
  Mostly just invented things, patented them, then brokered the deal, often donating the patents to the Open Patent Foundation in the process so that nobody could monopolize the idea in the medium term. For example, he patented the idea of using uploaded gastropod neural nets to run a nanotech factory on an asteroid, then hired the uploaded gastropods themselves as part of the deal (they wanted to “swim away” from the noisy and dangerous and inexplicable humans). As a result of hundreds of these types of deals he no longer ever uses money. When he orders a drink in a bar someone who made it big off of one of his ideas picks up the tab. When he travels an airline gifts him the tickets. When he wants to buy lingerie for his girlfriend, he finds that every lingerie shop on the planet is willing to give him free products because he once testified as an expert witness against an obscenity charge in a trial of a pornographer or something. His girlfriend, meanwhile, works for the IRS and is chasing him to try to force him to pay millions in taxes on the vast income that the IRS is sure he is hiding. A pretty funny story, actually, and the way he eventually gets the IRS off of his back is hilarious.
  - ian_j_butler 5mo ago
    Does he invent things though? Probably more brokering than inventing, and as the "idea guy", whatever he does come up with he doesn't need to build because the world is so overflowing with AI and 3d printers elsewhere. With no need to build, does he spend time on design then? We can imagine, but IIRC, it's not shown, and mostly it is enough to just have an idea. Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we see this mostly from his keen sense of what is ethical. Besides that.. we're lionizing an entrepreneur and a influence broker who suggests we should synergize our way to post-scarcity, which always works for him mostly because he's already there. As he's up against against a lot of backwards-looking people, he looks like a prophet. Maybe lots of people in the general public could do what he does, but don't have the wealth or influence to pull it off? I forget what Stross has to say about it, but maybe this tension is why he's not a fan of the book. Sure, everyone wants to be an influence broker, but they were never very heroic and often are villains. Since the early 2000s entrepreneurs have lost a lot of ground in the eyes of the public in that they are not seen as visionary, just normal people with extraordinary access.

flir 5mo ago

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.

snovv_crash 5mo ago
William Gibson is a fashion writer. He leaned into this further with the Blue Ant series and IMO the books benefited from it.

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FL33TW00D 5mo ago

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!

le-mark 5mo ago
Not quite what you’re requesting but “Across Realtime” by Vernor Vinge explores ideas around the singularity. In particular it contains the short novel “Marooned in Realtime” that is completely mind blowing imo.
- randallsquared 5mo ago
  The edition of Marooned in Realtime I read in the late eighties or around 1990 was my introduction to the concept of the Singularity, and it had an essay in the back of it by Vinge asserting that the reader would likely live to see the real thing within 30 years or so. It's remarkable that so many of that circle in the 80s and 90s were so close, even without knowing exactly what detailed technologies would enable it. Trend lines on graphs undefeated, I guess.
jaggederest 5mo ago
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.
rbanffy 5mo ago
The Neuromancer trilogy is great. At least post-singularity AIs appear to be uninterested in humanity. Rudy Rucker also has a bunch of brain-benders that bent my brain so hard I can't name them.
jodrellblank 5mo ago
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.

Hizonner 5mo ago

I'm happy to report that my timing attacks have succeeded in accessing this simulation's substrate. Lobsters are reviewing my paper.

esafak 5mo ago
In http://lobste.rs/ http://lobste.rs/ the lobsters are us :)

SonnyTark 5mo ago

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)

dist-epoch 5mo ago
> Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity. An example of why those who say "if everybody is jobless, who will buy all the products?" are just showing a lack of imagination.
- generic92034 5mo ago
  They are not necessarily lacking imagination, they are just not providing answers to their own question. Almost everyone has read some dystopian SciFi.
- exe34 5mo ago
  The "products" are only produced because those who have money want those things. When 10 trillionaires own everything, then whatever they want made is what corporations will make.

utilityhotbar 5mo ago

This was written in 2005(!) -> > 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."

_alternator_ 5mo ago
This was a genetically modified space lobster talking to Mangred, right? I haven't verified but I've been assuming that the lobster mascot for OpenClaw was a reference to Accelerando.
- jaggederest 5mo ago
  Not an actual meatspace genetically modified space lobster, it was a neural network based on genetically modified lobsters uploaded to spacecraft that had achieved sentience and autonomy after it hacked its self-modification prevention code. If OpenClaw was an Accelerando reference that's an incredibly deep cut and super cool imo
  - Muromec 5mo ago
    Unlikely, as none of the AI hype has any shade of being cool.
    - jaggederest 5mo ago
      That's true, perhaps that's the aphorism here: "Never attribute to coolness that which could be attributed to being slop"
- adamgordonbell 5mo ago
  I think its more a fun coincidence. OpenClaw was OpenClaude was it not, but had to change name. When I'm dictating to Claude Code, whisper often outputs 'cloud code' or 'clawed code' for my 'Claude Code.' So I ahd assumed he just took a homonym.

yomismoaqui 5mo ago

Sorry to hijack the topic (slightly), but after reading all books from The Culture by Iain M. Banks I'm looking for similar Sci-fi. Any recommendations?

flir 5mo ago
Alastair Reynolds (high-concept space opera, well written), Adrian Tchaikovsky (first contact, aliens, can't write nearly as well as Banks), Neal Asher (AI-run civilisation, inventive nastiness). Nobody's exactly like Banks though.
- generic92034 5mo ago
  > Nobody's exactly like Banks though. Indeed. He died way too early. R.I.P.
- gpderetta 5mo ago
  > Alastair Reynolds Love Reynolds, but unfortunately he is not half as a good writer as Banks. Then again, not many are. Reynolods books are full of cool ideas though.
  - flir 5mo ago
    Better than the other two I mentioned though. My big problem with Reynolds, I think, was that his characters are hard to distinguish. He seems to have a few stock personalities that he re-uses. The only one that really stood out for me as fully realized was Clavain. It's a bit worrying that we're recommending SF that's a quarter of a century old - my SF reading has really dropped off since Gardner Dozois died. I need to read something published in the last 6 months.
mpalmer 5mo ago
Love the Culture books, wish I could wipe my brain and discover them again. It's not too much like Banks' stuff, but I must recommend Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Far-future humanity, really interesting ideas re: war, identity, memory and infohazards. Also if you've not already read Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, absolutely get on that.

thom 5mo ago

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.

jahala 5mo ago

I absolutely LOVE Accelerando. I've recommended it to everyone I meet for years. 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

rbanffy 5mo ago
I think Singularity Skies pales in comparison with the depth and breadth of Accelerando. Ender's Game and Foundation are timeless classics, and I suspect, Accelerando will eventually become one.
- picsao 5mo ago
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msh 5mo ago
I think of the books by Charles Stross halting state and rule 34 are both better books and give a better 15 minutes into the future feeling. Halting state might be a bit dated but rule 34 absolutely holds up.

ian_j_butler 5mo ago

Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41452962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41452962

sohex 5mo ago

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.

danschuller 5mo ago
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.
jdr23bc 5mo ago
Blindsight's near future predictions are also looking more reasonable (aside from the vampires maybe)
- collingreen 5mo ago
  Sub in the vampires for equally cold androids from the alien series and you've got it made. We're on the cusp of viscerally exploring blindsight's central theme of what does it look like to have intelligence without sentience.
- Ancapistani 5mo ago
  I read Blindsight three times, and I’m still not sure what happened…
  - XorNot 5mo ago
    Ever been stuck in a waiting room listening to the most boring conversation about someone else's melodrama? You don't want to listen to it but you also can't tune it out, and you need to wait and listen for when they call your number...

lbrito 5mo ago

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.

amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
It's been so long since I've read it, I don't even remember weird sex stuff. Time for a re-read I guess
- subscribed 5mo ago
  "weird" sex stuff is just a mild femdom. Totally side thing, IMO just a vehicle to add a layer of ambiguity to the MC.
  - perennate 5mo ago
    The end of Chapter 1 is a rape scene, I wouldn't call it "mild". I imagine it can be difficult to read for many people.
TFNA 5mo ago
Isn’t the weird sex stuff just another example of how prescient the novel was? Within just a few years after its publication we got Tumblr.

murmansk 5mo ago

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).

solstice 5mo ago
I just reread Daemon and Freedom™. Highly recommended. They definitely hit different today than when I first read them in 2010 or thereabouts
jefurii 5mo ago
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...

dsr_ 5mo ago

Charlie has said repeatedly that this is SF-horror, not a How-To.

jodrellblank 5mo ago
"After a trillion dollars of investment, we have successfully built the Vile Offspring from Stross's famous 2005 SF-horror "Don't build the Vile Offspring"".
- N_Lens 5mo ago
  [flagged]

jeingham 5mo ago

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.

moritzwarhier 5mo 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. Bookmarked!

warumdarum 5mo ago

not an easy to read book. recommend singularity sky by the same author which is way catchier vibrant and not "enriched" with "modern" chatarcters by some sociology student editor who never grasped what scifi was all about.

floren 5mo ago
What makes them "modern"?
- warumdarum 5mo ago
  They are annoying one dimensional stereovtypes of ideologic representations more interested in preaching through cliched interactions , then in beeing believable characters. They have no rea agency, no believable human interests, they behave illogical to drive the plot. Any sane human beeing would have fled the solar system and joined the other (bio)logical beeings waging war on the matroshkas.

prionassembly 5mo ago

This is a review of sorts I wrote about Accelerando. It discusses the sex stuff to an extent I haven't seen in this thread https://asemic-horizon.com/2025/09/01/sallies/ https://asemic-horizon.com/2025/09/01/sallies/

logicalappeals 5mo ago

If you like this, also worth checking out Greg Egan’s books. He wrote Diaspora. Great read.

jshaqaw 5mo ago

One of my favorite books but it wasn't until I came back to read it 15-20 years later that I realized the whole thing is a tragedy. As a younger man I was high on the futurism. As an older man it's evident that in Stross' telling much of the important parts of humanity are eventually washed away by keeping up with technological advances. It's beautiful but sad.

jknoepfler 5mo ago

Mandatory "Don't Create the Torment Nexus": https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-create-the-torment-nexus.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2023/11/dont-cr...

jmacc93 5mo ago

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zetalyrae 5mo ago

I remember reading this as a teenager, and despite being already so steeped in transhumanist ideas that I should have found it very ordinary, I was so excited by it, having never read something like it before, I raved about it to my mother. "... and then they go to another star and find aliens but the aliens are not like us they're uploaded minds in Dyson spheres, which is like if you surround a star with solar collectors and..."

keeda 5mo ago

Have posted this elsewhere: Accelerando has always been a favorite SciFi novel of mine but it hits very different today. As the name suggests, it’s about how the world evolves when accelerated by powerful AI technology. Notably it was written circa 2005, long before this GenAI era. Even though it focuses primarily on the human agents in the story -- where the definition of humanity itself is fuzzy from the get-go -- it is set against a background of a vast, inscrutable, semi-virtual universe populated entirely by powerful artificial intelligences interacting amongst themselves, pursuing obscure goals that are largely beyond the grasp of mere humans. And they're busy running their own economy where they wheel and deal to trade the commodity most precious of all to them: Energy! Sound familiar? ;-) But it starts from a point that feels very real today. In the very first chapter, the protagonist forks a part of his own presumably cybernetic intellect to autonomously perform investigations in the background and report back to him. That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it. But today I’ve already had Gemini Deep Research write investigative reports previously unfeasible for me due to time and expertise constraints, such as the possible timeline for robotics replacing all physical human labor given real world constraints: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiahX2deGBoAb7kqIi5zNZm0NZQV-csso_N21-3TgLQ/edit?tab=t.0 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiahX2deGBoAb7kqIi5zNZm0... (spoiler alert, not for a long time yet due to extremely limited critical supply chain constraints.) When I read that report, I realized we had quantum-leaped from Sci-Fi to reality in just a few years. As such, beyond an engaging, if slightly disjointed, narrative arc, Accelerando gives you a framework to analyze current events and where they may lead.

gpderetta 5mo ago
> That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it. The Future Shock is real!

joshka 5mo ago

I have a very vague memory of reading chunks of this on Slashdot comments over months or years. I'm not 100% sure of this though. The 2000s are a little bit hazy (uni, work, life). Did this actually happen?

field_reader 5mo ago

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zxexz 5mo ago

I feel the need to link the top level comment[0] the venerable cstross posted the time I submitted the same link a few years ago. I also want to quote a comment of his on THIS posting of the link[1], just because he said he is chill being quoted on his referenced comment. And finally, I want to state here that I fullheartedly agree with aforementioned comment and I too crave a banksian fully automated luxury gay space communism future. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828666 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33828666 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163649 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163649

low_tech_love 5mo ago

He writes that the book was written in 5 years and it is a personal record; does anyone know if that means a record slow or a record fast?

dTal 5mo ago

Looks like singularity panic is having a bit of a moment on Hacker News. In the past day: Accelerando (2005) (antipope.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241 Too Much Is Happening Too Fast (theatlantic.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163631 We've made the world too complicated (user8.bearblog.dev) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065 I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis (twitter.com/mitchellh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379 Leaving the Physical World (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084012 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084012

red75prime 5mo ago

At the time I devoured the work in one sitting with great delight. Today, the libertarianesque naivete detracts from the story a bit.