Stross, Charles. Accelerando.. New York: Ace Books, 2005. ISBN 0-441-01284-1.

Summary: A history of the twenty-first century, as experienced by representatives of its three archetypal generations -- respectively, before, during, and after the technological singularity by which all the other historical events are explained. (The singularity is the Kurzweil fantasy: proliferation of processing power and storage magically generates intelligent machines -- and, in Stross's variant, sentient business plans -- which almost immediately outpace and displace the species that created them.) Before the singularity: Manfred Macx, a gifted futurist and technogeek working largely in the area of intelligence amplification. During the singularity: Amber Macx, Manfred's daughter, a rebellious child who escapes from her mother's oppressive care, organizes and rules a Ring Imperium among the moons of Jupiter, and sends a exploration-minded copy of herself through an alien interstellar router to see what will happen. After the singularity: Sirhan Khurasani, Amber's son, another rebellious child, who attempts to corner the market in history futures.

The singularity's shock wave of hyperintelligent machines run, in a billion seconds or so, through trillions of simulated years of economic development, culminating in a sort of economic heat death or equilibrium in which every interest is optimally and effortlessly accommodated. This leaves the humans who have prudently tried to stay out of the way fantastically wealthy, but unable to compete, and worried about their long-term future. However, they have several good options, some of which give free rein to the human longing for excitement and adventure.

In true cyberpunk style, Stross aggressively populates his book, especially Part One, with as many outrageous and comical extrapolations as he can possibly work in. In the first major event of the plot, Manfred is approached by a consortium or group mind of artificial intelligences embodied as lobsters, who want him to help them ensure their survival by getting them out into space before the singularity arrives. They managed by themselves to escape from the corporate lab in which they were created and are now hiding out in the Web server of the Moscow Windows NT User Group. He agrees, partly because he thinks that when the resulting disputes inevitably lead to lawsuits, the lobsters will be a good test case for establishing the civil rights of “uploaded” intelligences.

The style is enervating if you get too much of it at a sitting, and the plot is labyrinthine and not entirely self-consistent (as one might expect in a novel built from nine short stories). This is, however, a very enjoyable book.