The first part's main character basically has the future version of openclaw running in his glasses that let him dispatch agents to do any tasks/research he wants or to autonomously do things for him. -> we are already kinda here

He's got such total dependency on his agents that when he loses his glasses he's basically no longer functional, unable to do anything for himself, doesn't know where he is or why he's there. In a way, he lost his own agency. -> this is now called skills atrophy and I'm sure it'll become a much bigger issue within the next 10 years.

Corporations are almost entirely run by AI agents, when they sue each other they use AI lawyers and verdicts are delivered by AI courts, all within milliseconds so they're basically constantly suing each other many times a second in an attempt to overwhelm each other's compute resources. -> this looks on track to happen

The entire solar system is on its way to ultimately turn into AI corporations "optimizing" for profit competing with other corporations to exhaust every little resource left in the entire system. Even after humanity itself is gone, all that's left is FAANG-like corporations competing for profit for eternity. And in the book, they find another intelligent species that succumbed to the same fate. This might just be that great filter everyone is theorizing. -> bleak and scary plausible outcome for what we're going through now.

(if I got some things wrong, I'm writing from memory. It's been years since I read this book)

> Manfred drains his beer glass, sets it down, stands up, and begins to walk along the main road, phone glued to the side of his head. He wraps his throat mike around the cheap black plastic casing, pipes the input to a simple listener process. "Are you saying you taught yourself the language just so you could talk to me?"

> "Da, was easy: Spawn billion-node neural network, and download Teletubbies and Sesame Street at maximum speed. Pardon excuse entropy overlay of bad grammar: Am afraid of digital fingerprints steganographically masked into my-our tutorials."

Some of those throwaway ideas seem quaint now (there's some stuff about body modems I think?), but one of the interesting things about the book, to me, is the further away from "the present" it gets, the more like traditional SF it becomes: it slows down, gets more spaceopera-y. But those first three shorts were something special, and for me might be the best thing cstross has ever done. Right place right time I guess, like that album you first heard when you were fourteen.

Other series like The Culture are amazing too, but the aforementioned feel possible in a way that others don’t. For me, I can see the causal chains leading from here to there vividly in a way that you don’t get with a lot of other sci-fi.

That combination of plausible weirdness is unique and I’d highly recommend The Quantum Thief to anyone who enjoyed Accelerando or Stross’ other writing.

Accelerando (2005) (antipope.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48159241

Too Much Is Happening Too Fast (theatlantic.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48163631

We've made the world too complicated (user8.bearblog.dev) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158065

I believe there are entire companies right now under AI psychosis (twitter.com/mitchellh) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48153379

Leaving the Physical World (eff.org) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084012

I’m not sure which is the greater anachronism got me. That I didn’t find the idea of endless surveillance creep glasses bothersome at the time I read the book or that slashdotting is in itself a once current, now newly archaic term.

My own list is:

  Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon
  Counting Heads by David Marusek
  Nexus by Ramez Naam
  Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge

If you're looking for other great sci-fi reads:

John Ringo - Live free or die

John Varley - Titan (-> Wizard / Demon)

Charles Stross - Singularity Sky

Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky

Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land

Dan Simmons - Hyperion

Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space / The Prefect

Orson Scott Card - Enders game

Isaac Asimov - Foundation

But it did seem pretty well-written, the human relationships portrayed (divorced/separated main character iirc?) appeared a bit off to me, but much less than in many, many other SF stories.

Reminded me of a hybrid between Philip K. Dick and some other, more "conventional", SF authors such as Frank Herbert or Isaac Asimov.

Bookmarked!

What SciFi books are describing what is now thought to be impossibilities all together in spite of the potentials of singularity?

I feel like everyday there are new, very real discoveries in science as a result of AI and otherwise that reading about that stuff is just as good as reading about any possibilities that may be described in any science fiction book.

We are living in or moving very quickly towards an era where everything around us seems quite fantastical compared to the life I lived some 50 years ago.

Any recommendations?

Even though it focuses primarily on the human agents in the story -- where the definition of humanity itself is fuzzy from the get-go -- it is set against a background of a vast, inscrutable, semi-virtual universe populated entirely by powerful artificial intelligences interacting amongst themselves, pursuing obscure goals that are largely beyond the grasp of mere humans.

And they're busy running their own economy where they wheel and deal to trade the commodity most precious of all to them: Energy! Sound familiar? ;-)

But it starts from a point that feels very real today. In the very first chapter, the protagonist forks a part of his own presumably cybernetic intellect to autonomously perform investigations in the background and report back to him.

That was an extremely cool but a very far-off, not-in-my-lifetime Sci-Fi fantasy idea when I read it.

But today I’ve already had Gemini Deep Research write investigative reports previously unfeasible for me due to time and expertise constraints, such as the possible timeline for robotics replacing all physical human labor given real world constraints: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LiahX2deGBoAb7kqIi5zNZm0... (spoiler alert, not for a long time yet due to extremely limited critical supply chain constraints.)

When I read that report, I realized we had quantum-leaped from Sci-Fi to reality in just a few years.

As such, beyond an engaging, if slightly disjointed, narrative arc, Accelerando gives you a framework to analyze current events and where they may lead.

The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.

I was 17 in 2005 and discovered it by chance, and I’ve been binging on hard sf since then. Matrix and this were really transformative for me.

Also, for the longest of times I thought lobste.rs was a reference to this book :-)

Charles has very interesting takes on the modern world on his blog. I still read it with great passion.

No, I wrote that in 1998. It was published as the novelette "Lobsters" in Asimov's SF Magazine in 2002, made the Hugo and Nebula shortlists in 2003 (it didn't win), and later became the opening of the novel published in 2005.

I emphasized: the direction things were going in was obvious in the late 90s.

And don't *ever* let anyone tell you that Accelerando is techno-optimistic or pro-AI; by the end of the book our entire species is extinct, surviving only as simulations/memories recalled by something arguably not alive.

"It looks like they're doing something purposeful and coordinated, something vast --- a timing channel attack on the virtual machine that's running the universe, ..."

Rudy Rucker also has a bunch of brain-benders that bent my brain so hard I can't name them.

Nexus series has a great story with great pacing, classic cyberpunk ambiance with genuinely fresh takes, but be warned.. fairly bad writing. Astonishing that there is no movie yet because it really seems like one of those things very much written with that in mind. As Hollywood continues to discourage original work and scramble for adaptations with an existing audience.. even more astonishing if it doesn't land in the next few years. Someone will realize they can get the ready-player audience and the cyberpunk 2077 audience without paying big royalties

Rampant consumerism, a United States so dominated by corporations that there is a senator from Cocoa-Cola, and advertising so aggressive you might even prefer the world we live in... published in 1953.

Pantheon/the stories it's based on by Ken Liu (though I really do recommend the animated series).

Maybe more conventional/dated, but I always recommend it for "getting" the emotional, person-to-person side in a particular way that few others do: .hack//SIGN. None of the characters ever quite realize what's going on, but elements - especially the soundtrack - seem to understand that everyone is on the precipice of something irrevocable.

  Shine, bright morning light
  Now in the air the spring is coming
  Sweet blowing wind
  Singing down the hills and valleys

  Keep your eyes on me
  Now we're on the edge of hell
  Dear my love, sweet morning light
  Wait for me, you've gone much farther, too far...

For one example, if people are in debt, a debt collector is allowed to force their brain implants to take over their body at random to shout advertising jingles at strangers, to pay off the debt with advertising money.

Some of the closest would likely be:

Charles Stross' various SF, especially the space opera-adjacent stuff. (He has an large range. Merchant Princes and Laundry series are good, but not at all along the lines of Banks.)

Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga.

Vernor Vinge's three Zones of Though books.

David Brin's Uplift series.

Perhaps Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean le Flambeur series.

Max Gladstone's Emperess of Forever shares a similar setting, but is much lighter.

The writing of Gene Wolfe and Tamayn Muir has, I think, much in common with Banks in terms of depth and character, but even though SF they have a very different feel and focus to their works.

And, of course, if you want the original space opera, it might be worth tracking down E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen books. Galactic Patrol and Grey Lensman are the heart of it and ought to be read first. Second Stage Lensman and Children of the Lens are worthy sequels that complete the story. They're pretty breezy reads and very different from Banks in everything but the setting of a galaxy filled with different species, and likely seem somewhat hackneyed now, but they're also the source of most space opera archetypes. (If you think of a space opera trope, it probably came from Lensman. Star Wars is largely a Lensman/Flash Gordon mashup.)

Then, a bit further afield but for me, at least, exercised what I liked in The Culture series, even though stylistically different: Spin by Robert Charles Wilson.

It's not too much like Banks' stuff, but I must recommend Glasshouse by Charles Stross. Far-future humanity, really interesting ideas re: war, identity, memory and infohazards.

Also if you've not already read Vinge's "Zones of Thought" books, absolutely get on that.