Accelerando
By Charles Stross
The permanent floating meatspace party Manfred is hooking up with is a strange attractor for some of the American exiles cluttering up the cities of Europe this decade – not trustafarians, but honest-to-God political dissidents, draft dodgers and terminal outsourcing victims. It’s where weird connections and crossed lines make new short circuits into the future, like the street cafes of Switzerland where the pre-Great War Russian exiles gathered. Right now, it’s located in the back of De Wildemann’s, a three-hundred-year-old brown cafe with a list of brews that runs to sixteen pages and wooden walls stained the colour of stale beer.
Manfred’s whole life is lived on the bleeding edge of strangeness, fifteen minutes into everyone else’s future, and he’s generally in complete control – but at times like this, he gets a frisson of fear, a sense that he might just have missed the correct turn on reality’s approach road.
“Uh, I’m not sure I got that. Let me get this straight: you claim to be some AI working for KGB dot RU, and you’re afraid of a copyright infringement lawsuit over your translator semiotics?” “Viral end-user license agreements have badly burned am. Have no desire to experiment with patent shell companies held by Chechen info terrorists. You are human, you must not worry about cereal companies repossessing your small intestine because digest unlicensed food with it, right? Manfred, you must help me-we. Am wishing to defect.”
Genre: Post-1930 | Science Fiction
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Charles Stross
Charles David George “Charlie” Stross (born 18 October 1964) is a British science fiction and fantasy writer.
Biography
Stross specializes in hard science fiction and space opera. Between 1994 and 2004, he was also an active writer for the magazine Computer Shopper and was responsible for its monthly Linux column. He stopped writing for the magazine to devote more time to novels. However, he continues to publish freelance articles on the Internet. Stross was born in Leeds, England. He showed an early interest in writing and wrote his first science fiction story at age 12. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in Pharmacy in 1986 and qualified as a pharmacist in 1987. In 1989, he enrolled at Bradford University for a post-graduate degree in computer science. In 1990, he went to work as a technical author and programmer.
In 2000, he began working full-time as a technical writer and became successful as a fiction writer. In the 1970s and 1980s, Stross published some role-playing game articles about Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in White Dwarf magazine. Some of his creatures, such as the death knight, githyanki (the name borrowed from George R. R. Martin’s 1977 novel, Dying of the Light), githzerai, and slaad (a chaotic race of frog-like humanoids) were later published in the Fiend Folio monster compendium. His first published short story, “The Boys”, appeared in Interzone in 1987. A collection of his short stories, Toast: And Other Rusted Futures, was released in 2002; subsequent short stories have been nominated for the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and other awards. His first novel, Singularity Sky, was published by Ace Books in 2003 and was also nominated for the Hugo Award.
His novella “The Concrete Jungle” (published in The Atrocity Archives) won the Hugo award for its category in 2005. His novel Accelerando won the 2006 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and was on the final ballot for the Hugo Award in the Best Novel category. Glasshouse won the 2007 Prometheus Award and was on the final ballot for the Hugo Award in the best novel category; the German translation Glashaus won the 2009 Kurd-Laßwitz-Preis. His novella “Missile Gap” won the 2007 Locus Award for best novella, and most recently, he was awarded the Edward E. Smith Memorial Award or Skylark at Boskone 2008.
Charles Stross
