Accelerando

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:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/
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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
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


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 attention, bickering and rudely
waving in front of the scenery. A couple of punks - maybe local, but more likely drifters
lured to Amsterdam by the magnetic field of tolerance the Dutch beam across Europe like
a pulsar - are laughing and chatting by a couple of battered mopeds in the far corner. A
tourist boat putters by in the canal; the sails of the huge windmill overhead cast long, cool
shadows across the road. The windmill is a machine for lifting water, turning wind power
into dry land: trading energy for space, sixteenth-century style. Manfred is waiting for