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)
An example of why those who say "if everybody is jobless, who will buy all the products?" are just showing a lack of imagination.
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.
> 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."
If OpenClaw was an Accelerando reference that's an incredibly deep cut and super cool imo
When I'm dictating to Claude Code, whisper often outputs 'cloud code' or 'clawed code' for my 'Claude Code.' So I ahd assumed he just took a homonym.
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.
My own list is:
Starmaker by Olaf Stapledon
Counting Heads by David Marusek
Nexus by Ramez Naam
Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge
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.
As a result of hundreds of these types of deals he no longer ever uses money. When he orders a drink in a bar someone who made it big off of one of his ideas picks up the tab. When he travels an airline gifts him the tickets. When he wants to buy lingerie for his girlfriend, he finds that every lingerie shop on the planet is willing to give him free products because he once testified as an expert witness against an obscenity charge in a trial of a pornographer or something. His girlfriend, meanwhile, works for the IRS and is chasing him to try to force him to pay millions in taxes on the vast income that the IRS is sure he is hiding.
A pretty funny story, actually, and the way he eventually gets the IRS off of his back is hilarious.
Manfred's a smart guy and a worthy hero, but I think we see this mostly from his keen sense of what is ethical. Besides that.. we're lionizing an entrepreneur and a influence broker who suggests we should synergize our way to post-scarcity, which always works for him mostly because he's already there. As he's up against against a lot of backwards-looking people, he looks like a prophet. Maybe lots of people in the general public could do what he does, but don't have the wealth or influence to pull it off?
I forget what Stross has to say about it, but maybe this tension is why he's not a fan of the book. Sure, everyone wants to be an influence broker, but they were never very heroic and often are villains. Since the early 2000s entrepreneurs have lost a lot of ground in the eyes of the public in that they are not seen as visionary, just normal people with extraordinary access.
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
The notion of the inner solar system being converted into computronium sounds less and less far-fetched with each passing month.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/may/13/utah-approve...
Any recommendations?
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.
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.
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.
Given the current build out of compute in the real world, there is discussion / speculation about the effects of the rush to an economy heavily based on AI and the costs / benefits of that end state society.
If AI isn’t an bubble based on grift and hype that fizzles out