The Guardian's accurate one liner commentary was 'Like being trapped in the middle of an exploding ideas factory without a helmet.'

An author Charles Eric Mains and Arthur Clarke would both have endorsed, Stross's authority in creating "suspension of disbelief" is through an embedded, yet hilarious appreciation of both economics and technology.

Born in Leeds, emigrated to Scotland he "managed to turn unemployment into an exciting full time career as a freelance journalist specialising in Linux and free software" (the adjective "exciting" applies as much to the freelance journalist relationship with their bank manager as to their career structure.)" He defines Accelerando as "a family saga that follows three generations of a dysfunctionally postmodern lineage."

"Welcome to the second decade of the twenty first century; the second decade in human history when the intelligence of the environment has shown signs of rising to match human demand."

The opening hero, Manfred Manx, (oh, yes, there's a robotic cat Aineko) is an ideas guru who he trades IP freely against payments in kind, such as accommodation and gifts. "He's promised to invent three new paradigm shift before breakfast every day, starting with a way to bring about the creation of Really Exisiting Communism by build a state central planing apparatus that interfaces perfectly with external market systems and somehow manages to algorithmically outperform the Monte Carlo free-for-all markets economics, solving the calculation problems. Just because he can, because hacking economics is fun and he wants to hear the screams from the Chicago school."

By mid book: "The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome,...the biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted in the Scottish highland, and in the American Midwest racoons have been caught programming microwave ovens, The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram."

"Here we are, sixty something human minds. We've been migrated right out of our heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping and we're running as software in a operating system designed to virtualze multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn't let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother's old Walkman."

Keep reading. You are unlikely to forget Stross !