I tried reading it some months ago but quit after some chapters. At a certain point, it gave me the impression of randomly throwing in some technical terms (not related to CS, there's also other stuff) just to sound smart. I can have got the wrong impression of course, but it didn't meet my taste.
I can see that. Having read several of Stross's works, this is one of the ones that's less "gelled." I'd call it, structurally, an outlier relative to his other stuff; it's going a lot of places very fast and not leaving much time for the reader to get on the same page as the author.
Very compelling for the concepts it raises and plays with, but his other works do a better job of telling a story.
The publication dates of the short stories spans a bit over three years.
https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?91976 and https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?99386 and so on... each published separately. Consistent characters (possibly with some editing when brought into a single collection) but they appear to be written as short stories that are slices of the life of clan Macx and Aineko. As short stories, there's less opportunity for lasting character development.
My perception when I tried to read it was that it was just getting off it's own word soup, like I caught the author in a feverish and very private session with himself. Being somewhat traumatized, I haven't tried anything else by Stross since then. I like density but at some point, you gotta tell a story. It was obviously a secondary objective in that case.
That's a deliberate technique in prose pacing, especially common in cyberpunk and allied sf subgenres.
The basic insight is that prose which reads faster with less complexity feels faster, as if the events it describes occur at like pace. That's why a skillful writer rarely brings an adverb to a gunfight. It's also why clubs don't play melody-heavy stuff at 60 BPM, or even the liveliest among Mozart's string quartets.
The variation here discussed modifies that approach by increasing the pace and not reducing the complexity. The intended effect is more or less as you describe: to dislocate the reader among ideas and concepts that seem to flow too fast to grasp. Given what the text seeks to express in this way, the technique fits perfectly. (The novel's not called Accelerando for nothing! If you aren't familiar with that word, now may be an unusually enlightening time to become so.)
Granted, it doesn't sit the same with every reader. But it is very much the product of deliberate design, not mania, and deserves to be understood as such.
(To be clear, I don't like Accelerando; with one exception I judge it the weakest of Stross's work, and it's very unreflective of his later work with a more practiced hand. But that I don't appreciate the work isn't the same as saying no respect is due the skill and artifice that went into its making - it's a piece I don't enjoy, but not a piece that's bad.)
what were the terms and examples that feel like word soup? it has been quite a while since i read it, but i remember the ideas being quite self consistent (with some serious sci-fi conceit of course)
I don't remember a specific word or sentence being problematic, just a general torrent-of-consciousness from someone else that prevented my own brain from forming images and putting things together as I read. I felt the author was really trying too hard being edgy while at the same time not giving a fuck about the intended reader. "Look how many novel concepts per paragraph I can fit!" Huh, ok bro. Might as well just write a list...
