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Accelerando
I recently finished reading "Accelerando" by Charles Stross. I give it a solid 9 out of 10. The beginning was wonderful, the middle was comparatively less interesting, and the end was pretty damn good (although I do dislike books that leave as much unresolved as this one does). The book is all about future shock and does its best to give you a healthy dose of it. Naturally, I'm pretty much immune as there weren't a lot of ideas in there that were new to me, but he certainly managed to cram a lot of memes onto every single page.
If he was trying to make one viscerally feel the ever-increasing rate of progress, then he succeeded immensely. It did make for very poor bed-time reading though, as the book's ever-increasing rates of change had me shaking from adrenaline overload by the time I put the book down to sleep. Not bad for a book with relatively little action.
I do admit though, that as jaded as I am by visions of the future, he did get me to blink at one point. Its when he's mentioning a data stream running at billions of avabytes per second, and then explains that an avabyte is an Avogadro's number worth of bytes. They'd actually gotten to the point that they wanted to measure their data in moles! *shudder*
If he was trying to make one viscerally feel the ever-increasing rate of progress, then he succeeded immensely. It did make for very poor bed-time reading though, as the book's ever-increasing rates of change had me shaking from adrenaline overload by the time I put the book down to sleep. Not bad for a book with relatively little action.
I do admit though, that as jaded as I am by visions of the future, he did get me to blink at one point. Its when he's mentioning a data stream running at billions of avabytes per second, and then explains that an avabyte is an Avogadro's number worth of bytes. They'd actually gotten to the point that they wanted to measure their data in moles! *shudder*