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.)
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.)