Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Accelerando
A novel by Charles Stross
Copyright (c) Charles Stross, 2005
Published by
Ace Books, New York, July 2005, ISBN 0441012841
Orbit Books, London, August 2005, ISBN 1841493902
License
Creative Commons License Copyright (c) Charles Stross, 2005. This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. Full terms and conditions at:
Accelerando 1
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/
Summary:
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* Attribution. You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor. *
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If you are in doubt about any proposed reuse, you should contact the author via: http://www.accelerando.org/
Dedication
For Feorag, with love
Acknowledgements
This book took me five years to write - a personal record - and would not exist without the support and
encouragement of a host of friends, and several friendly editors. Among the many people who read and
commented on the early drafts are: Andrew J. Wilson, Stef Pearson, Gav Inglis, Andrew Ferguson, Jack
Deighton, Jane McKie, Hannu Rajaniemi, Martin Page, Stephen Christian, Simon Bisson, Paul Fraser, Dave
Clements, Ken MacLeod, Damien Broderick, Damon Sicore, Cory Doctorow, Emmet O'Brien, Andrew
Ducker, Warren Ellis, and Peter Hollo. (If your name isn't on this list, blame my memory - my neural
prostheses are off-line.)
I mentioned several friendly editors earlier: I relied on the talented midwifery of Gardner Dozois, who edited
Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine at the time, and Sheila Williams, who quietly and diligently kept the
wheels rolling. My agent Caitlin Blasdell had a hand in it too, and I'd like to thank my editors Ginjer
Buchanan at Ace and Tim Holman at Orbit for their helpful comments and advice.
Finally, I'd like to thank everyone who e-mailed me to ask when the book was coming, or who voted for the
stories that were shortlisted for awards. You did a great job of keeping me focused, even during the periods
when the whole project was too daunting to contemplate.
Publication History
Portions of this book originally appeared in Asimov's SF Magazine as follows: "Lobsters" (June 2001),
"Troubadour" (Oct/Nov 2001), "Tourist" (Feb 2002), "Halo" (June 2002), "Router" (Sept 2002), "Nightfall"
(April 2003), "Curator" (Dec 2003), "Elector" (Oct/Nov 2004), "Survivor" (Dec 2004).
Contents
Part 1: Slow Takeoff
+ Lobsters + Troubadour + Tourist
Part 2: Point of Inflection
+ Halo + Router + Nightfall
A novel by Charles Stross 2
Part 3: Singularity
+ Curator + Elector + Survivor
PART 1: Slow Takeoff
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a
submarine can swim."
- Edsger W. Dijkstra
A novel by Charles Stross 3
Chapter 1
: Lobsters
Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich.
It's a hot summer Tuesday, and he's standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs
powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and
tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust
fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He
glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he's arrived. The bandwidth
is good here, he realizes; and it's not just the bandwidth, it's the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel
wanted already, even though he's fresh off the train from Schiphol: He's infected with the dynamic optimism
of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.
He wonders who it's going to be.
* * *
Manfred sits on a stool out in the car park at the Brouwerij 't IJ, watching the articulated buses go by and
drinking a third of a liter of lip-curlingly sour gueuze. His channels are jabbering away in a corner of his
head-up display, throwing compressed infobursts of filtered press releases at him. They compete for his