When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It's the 27th century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees' personalities and target historians. The civil war is over and Robin has been demobilized, but someone wants him out of the picture because of something his earlier self knew. On the run from a ruthless pursuer, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity, the Glasshouse, constructed to simulate a pre-accelerated culture. Participants are assigned anonymized identities: it looks like the ideal hiding place for a posthuman on the run. But in this escape-proof environment, Robin will undergo an even more radical change, placing him at the mercy of the experimenters--and the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche.--From publisher description
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The technological singularity, speculative economics, and bureaucratic horror form the bedrock of contemporary hard science fiction, and few works explore these concepts as rigorously as Accelerando. Charles Stross established his reputation in modern speculative fiction by combining cutting-edge computer science, post-human philosophy, and fast-paced space opera.
Born in Leeds, England, in 1964, Stross pursued a varied professional career before becoming a full-time fiction author. He earned a bachelor's degree in pharmacy in 1986 and qualified as a pharmacist in 1987 before changing fields to study computer science at Bradford University from 1989 to 1990. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, he worked as a technical writer, software developer, and freelance journalist for technology publications, even writing the technical book The Web Architect's Handbook in 1996.
Stross sold his first short fiction to Interzone in the late 1980s after having written for role-playing game magazines in his youth. Around 2000, he shifted his primary focus to writing fiction full-time. He relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he continues to write novels and short stories that have earned three Hugo Awards for Best Novella alongside multiple Locus Awards and nominations for the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.
Stross is recognized for his detail-dense prose and sharp focus on systemic complexity, incorporating real-world computer networking, financial systems, and organizational politics into his speculative worlds. His space opera and hard science fiction stories frequently interrogate how rapid technological evolution reframes human identity, economics, and governance. Alongside his hard science fiction, Stross frequently merges cosmic horror with mundane administrative absurdities, examining how formal hierarchies respond to incomprehensible threats.
