Accelerando

Just started and finished Accelerando by Charles Stross on a flight from Seattle to Orlando. Great stuff. Can't say I was fond of the Pamela character, but that's the point. Hints of Egan (uploads in a can) and Wright (stuffy neo-Victorian transhumans), but definitely Stross' welcome character-driven SF.

Fun quotes - all within a few pages of each other:

"To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before."

This point in the novel captures my "contingency plan" paranoid thinking well - the last remnants of recognizable humanity are likely to be those that upload and surf the wave of the singularity away at near-c.

"We carry the seeds of a singularity with us wherever we go, and if we try and excise those seeds, we cease to be human."

Something I've tried to capture in this blog. Humanity's attractors are extinction and a singularity. We either embrace one or the other, sacrifice our humanity, or seek to remain chaotic for as long as we can.

"History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by constant travel."

That's just beautiful.