Accelerando

Manfred Macx spends the twenty-first century giving away ideas for free, funded by nothing but the goodwill it generates, a habit that puts him in contact with a group of uploaded, self-aware lobster intelligences looking for someone to broker their legal freedom from human ownership. What starts as a negotiation, tangled up with Manfred's divorce and a plan to build self-replicating spacecraft from comet material, becomes the first thread in a story spanning three generations as the changes he set in motion accelerate past what one human can track. Charles Stross's novel unfolds in nine linked stories charting the road to a technological singularity.