Accelerando is a multi-generational saga following a brilliant clan of 21st-century posthumans. The year is some time between 2010 and 2015. The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake. He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much. And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world - and the world of his descendants - is turned on its head.

A worldwide diaspora has left a quarter of a million people at the foot of a space station. Cultures collide in real life and virtual reality. The city is literally a weed, its growth left unchecked. Life is cheap, and data is cheaper. When Boris Chong returns to Tel Aviv from Mars, much has changed. Boris' ex-lover is raising a strangely familiar child who can tap into the datastream of a mind with the touch of a finger. His cousin is infatuated with a robotnik--a damaged cyborg soldier who might as well be begging for parts. His father is terminally-ill with a multigenerational mind-plague. And a hunted data-vampire has followed Boris to where she is forbidden to return. Rising above them is Central Station, the interplanetary hub between all things: the constantly shifting Tel Aviv; a powerful virtual arena, and the space colonies where humanity has gone to escape the ravages of poverty and war. Everything is connected by the Others, powerful alien entities who, through the Conversation--a shifting, flowing stream of consciousness--are just the beginning of irrevocable change. At Central Station, humans and machines continue to adapt, thrive ... and even evolve.

"This future history of the next thirty years, imagined by bestselling author Thomas Harding, is surprising, compelling and disturbingly believable. In 2020, a researcher is shocked to find a set of notebooks detailing the history of the next thirty years. Is this a hoax? Or could it be real? The notebooks, written in the year 2050, contain interview transcripts between teenage Billy and Gran Nancy. We learn about the great climate SHOCK, when global temperatures rise much faster than anticipated, resulting in catastrophic consequences for humanity. We learn about a shift away from democracy, toward unelected "ethnarchs" -- heads of corporations who use their access to our personal data to competently run the world. We learn about the giant city towers where most people live, work and play inside -- where it's safe from natural disasters and viral outbreaks. And between these interviews, we learn more about Billy, whose interest in the history that has been erased from the official record is causing trouble in 2050. Is it too late to change the past to save the future?"--Publisher's description.

"MERGE Raleigh Redman loved Nicci Charbon until she left him heartbroken. Then he hit the lotto for $26 million, quit his minimum wage job and set his sights on one goal: reading the entire collection of lectures in the Popular Educator Library, the only thing his father left behind after he died. As Raleigh is trudging through the eighth volume, he notices something in his apartment that at first seems ordinary but quickly reveals itself to be from a world very different from our own. This entity shows Raleigh joy beyond the comforts of $26 million dollars....and merges our world with those that live beyond. DISCIPLE Hogarth "Trent" Tryman is a forty-two year old man working a dead-end data entry job. Though he lives alone and has no real friends besides his mother, he's grown quite content in his quiet life, burning away time with television, the internet, and video games. That all changes the night he receives a bizarre instant message on his computer from a man who calls himself Bron. At first he thinks it's a joke, but in just a matter of days Hogarth Tryman goes from a data entry clerk to the head of a corporation. His fate is now in very powerful hands as he realizes he has become a pawn in a much larger game with unimaginable stakes--a battle that threatens the prime life force on Earth. "--