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I've been waiting for a book to do a satisfying job of getting really up close and personal with the Vingian Singularity. There have been some decent approaches: Amazon remembers my buying both "Bloom" and "Vacuum Flowers" back in 2000, before I got organized about writing down things about notable books (although I did mention them very briefly in the weblog). Vinge himself has played around the edges of the subject, using his Slow Zone to put the question off most of the time, but touching the issues enough in Fire Upon The Deep to leave us hoping he'll dive all the way in someday (he wrote me once that he wanted to do that sometime, as "the capstone on the whole thing", but that he expected it to be hard).
Charles Stross's "Accelerando" takes a running leap at the subject, and does a very respectable and even for-the-moment satisfying job of it. The novel starts out as wisecracking near-future tech SF, with Our Hero wearing fancy heads-up goggles and spinning off software agents to go look things up for him and report back, and dropping all sorts of in-group jargon and subtle jokes for us geeks, which is always fun. And then it stretches forward across the generations and decades, following Our Hero's extended family and later incarnations and stuff, as the inner solar system is dismantled to make computronium to house the vast virtual universes of the posthuman intelligences, and humanity fragments off into cities floating in balloons in Saturn's upper atmosphere, cylinders of diamond spinning in orbit around distant brown dwarfs, and so on.
We don't get to run up too close to the posthuman and transcendant; the humans that we follow are the people who elect not to upload themselves into the enormous mystery close in by the sun (at least party because doing so requires, for not quite sufficiently explained reasons, altering one's mind so much that it's not really human anymore). They stay out around Saturn at first, and then run even further away, out into the interstellar voids where the truly posthuman don't want to go (because there's so little bandwidth out there). So I still don't have my really meaty story of what it's like to live next to and interact with (and be?) transcendant posthumans (maybe I'll have to write that one myself); but this will do very nicely while I'm waiting.
If I were to pick nits here, they would probably be about the artificial cat that becomes a demigod (I'm not convinced by the accidentalness of the process), and about the never quite described threat from the inner system that the humans on Saturn discover (or come to suspect) and that further incents them to move onward and outward (I'm not sure why Stross never quite describes it). There's a bit of a fudge about why superhuman intelligences haven't overcome all visible limitations and taken over at the the galaxy (if they're so smart they could presumably avoid the dead-end that Stross suggests they almost always run into). And there's a little bit of the common "nothing significant ever happens to anyone (at least anyone human) besides the main characters" problem; but that's really tough to avoid.
Endings are always difficult, but Stross ends this one well, with a smile-inducing sense of completeness, with just about the right set of questions left unanswered, and with plenty still to think about. There are hooks on which one could hang a sequel; hanging another good book on those hooks would be difficult (but if done well it could be even better than this one).
So all told a very good book, that I would recommend strongly to anyone who likes thinking about this kind of thing, or who thinks that they might.
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