Singularity Sky (original 2003; edition 2005)

It's a sci-fi novel, with various different planets, and lots of interesting machinery, and even some interesting races. I liked it a lot better than Accelerando, and understood pretty much all of it, which is a good sign. I think it's still more of an idea-novel than a novel about people, but the characters managed to be interesting and in most cases, not horribly alien.

Definitely going to read the sequel, Iron Sunrise, since I have it already, but I'm not entirely sure I'll ever read more of this guy's stuff in future. ( )

Singularity Sky was Charlie Stross' debut novel, and for those who embrace "hard" science fiction, it's a good read. Big fun, lots of ideas, and a singular take on humanity. At times, Stross writes his characters a little one-dimensional, but overall, this novel deserves the buzz it generated for Stross.

( )

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)

I recently had the chance to acquire every single book ever written by trippy sci-fi author Charles Stross, and so have decided to spend the year actually reading and reviewing them here for the blog; and I've decided to read them in chronological order, too (or, the general books by chronological order, then take on the themed series one at a time), which means that first up is his 2003 novel debut Singularity Sky, which along with his other early classic Accelerando are the ones that really first established him as a major genre force, and that helped cement the cliche of the SF "British Invasion" of the early 2000s. And so that's what makes it an even bigger shock than normal to find out that the novel is not a serious-minded brainteaser, like I think of whenever I think of the other Stross novels I've already read, but rather a very funny absurdist comedy along the lines of late-period Robert Heinlein. Not actually a story about Ray Kurzweil's famous theory of the "Singularity" (that is, the moment in the future that computers gain sentience, and thus usher in a new blazingly fast era for humanity where the mechanical and the biological blur into unrecognizable forms), the novel instead takes this Singularity moment as its historical start, and the fact that humans quickly figure out how to time-travel, at which point a mysterious alien force known as the Eschaton literally create a human diaspora to stop such development, by taking 90 percent of Earth's population and magically scattering them on various inhabitable worlds across the cosmos, these people now free to develop whatever kinds of societies they want but with "the big E" stepping in again whenever a "law of causality" is about to be broken, doing things like wiping out entire star systems to ensure that these stupid hairless apes don't accidentally erase the universe's existence.

Our actual tale, then, takes place hundreds of years after the events just described, when this scattered humanity have formed an endless series of different governments, tech capabilities, and even corporeal forms; to be specific, it's the story of a race of post-human creatures known as "The Festival" who exist mostly as forms of pure information as they travel the cosmos, who literally create new fantastical bodies whenever they stop at a new star system, then proceed to create a kind of benevolent chaos in that new system for awhile (the actual "Singularity Sky" of the book's title), swapping unheard-of technology for new info about the universe from that new system before finally getting their fill, dumping their temporary bodies, and taking off again for yet another century-long flight to the next habitable system, in this case the recipients being a militaristic quasi-fascist colonial dictatorship who shun technology and who clearly resemble the Bush administration that was in power when this novel was first published in the US.

As always with Stross, this is a lot of infodump to take in at once, with the above recap only scratching the surface of this expansive storyline, and with my promise that the whole thing becomes much clearer once you read the actual book; but like I said, the biggest surprise is that Stross plays all this mostly for laughs, a sort of ridiculous adventure tale about a backwards military that purposely builds outdated tech into their warships for the purpose of "tradition," and who then tries to fight a conventional war against a group that can barely fathom what the concept of "war" even is, and who are so technologically advanced over their opponents that they see the traditional battles as little more than you or I swatting at a pesky fly on a hot summer day. I know this all sounds a bit disjointed in a small write-up like this, but trust me when I say that the whole story when written out is a comic masterpiece; and it's easy to see why this made such a big splash when it first came out, after a 1990s that saw perhaps the lowest point of SF in its entire history. It comes highly recommended, and needless to say that I'm looking forward to the next book on the list, 2004's Iron Sunrise which just happens to be a direct sequel to this volume. ( )

Meh. Far from Stross's best work. The plot doesn't really work - which given that it's a time travel parody isn't that surprising - but the intersection between the steampunk colony and the more nanotech based rest of the universe is also rather poor. In attempting to parody or at least highlight the shortcomings of a socialist style society, Stross spends far too long belabouring the point, telling instead of showing. When he does show us things he too frequently descends into farce, which doesn't help an SF book get taken seriously.

Two main storylines are interwoven. Michael is an outside engineer on contract to the steampunk age Republic, fixing thier starships when word arrives that one of their colonies has been "attacked". Rachel is a diplomat on board with him - from the UN of all places - overseeing the causality laws.Everything follows pretty much as you'd expect. The second plotline follows the fate of the colony world, it's imperial rulers and a cell of counterrevolutionaries, as the attackers - a distant human offshoot called the Festival unpack from their microships and transform matter upon request in exchange for any information.

Too little information is ever given about the set-up of the universe, which doesnt help explain it all, however Stross goes into quite excrutiating imaginary details about the different technologies at various points. This can work as a style but Stross fails to manage to do so, focusing on the outlandish bits rather than elegant summaries of possabiltiies. Likewise he dweels far too long on the vectors and g-forces of various in-system objects. No reader will be able to keep track of htese - unless they're modeling the system in realtime on a PC. Hence the book would be much easier to read if all the numbers weer ditched, and reported as "heading towards us really fast captain!". Similarly the various political ideologies get forced onto us in some detail, and whilst I'm sure these likewise contained various errors, they were too dull to read, so I skipped them. For no readily explainable reason many of the tropes created by the Festival end up resembling fairy tale characters. Maybe the story would have worked better if the reason for this had been laid out more clearly. The ending though does resolve most of hte plot points and neatly sets up a sequel - something I doubt I'll bother with.

Readable. Probably enjoyable for rightwing timetravel steampunk fans, but he's written a lot better. ( )

I can only imagine that there were huge piles of backstory when Stross sat down to write this book. There are some very interesting bits and pieces that aren't actually flushed out because they aren't part of this story. I really wanted to find out more about all of those things.

That aside, the story itself was interesting and charming. Some seriously odd imaginings going on too. Made me think he should do some short stories with Lisa Snellings.

Liked it. ( )