Author | Charles Stross |
---|---|
Cover artist | Rita Frangie |
Country | United Kingdom & United States |
Language | English |
Genre | Science fiction, short stories |
Publisher | Orbit (UK), Ace (US) |
Publication date
|
5 July 2005 |
Media type | Print (hardcover), Ebook |
Pages | 400 pp |
Awards | Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2006) |
ISBN | |
OCLC | 57682282 |
813/.6 22 | |
LC Class | PR6119.T79 A63 2005 |
Accelerando is a 2005 science fiction novel consisting of a series of interconnected short stories written by British author Charles Stross. As well as normal hardback and paperback editions, it was released as a free e-book under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license. Accelerando won the Locus Award in 2006, and was nominated for several other awards in 2005 and 2006, including the Hugo, Campbell, Clarke, and British Science Fiction Association Awards.
In Italian, accelerando means "speeding up" and is used as a tempo marking in musical notation. In Stross' novel, it refers to the accelerating rate at which humanity in general, and/or the novel's characters, head towards the technological singularity. The term was earlier used in this way by Kim Stanley Robinson in his 1985 novel The Memory of Whiteness and his 1992–96 Mars trilogy.
The book is a collection of nine short stories telling the tale of three generations of a family before, during, and after a technological singularity. It was originally written as a series of novelettes and novellas, all published in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine in the period 2001 to 2004. According to Stross, the initial inspiration for the stories was his experience working as a programmer for a high-growth company during the dot-com boom of the 1990s.