Singularity Sky

This novel, Stross' first, is a space-operatic excursion into a universe of strangeness. Humanity has been scattered across the galaxy by an advanced intelligence from the future, the Eschaton, which may or may not be the ultimate development of humanity itself. In the five hundred years since that event, humanity has split into many different societies, many of which are in touch with distant Earth. Earth, meanwhile, has recovered from losing 90% of its population and concerns itself with trying to avoid further interventions by the Eschaton, which has warned humanity against trying to leverage the time paradoxes that faster-than-light travel can cause. This it takes a dim view of, and some populations been wiped out as a show more consequence.

This novel concentrates on one particular society, which brands itself the “New Republic” but which is actually a rigid monarchical state along the lines of the late Austro-Hungarian Empire. It has subjugated a number of other human colony worlds, and on one of them, Rochard's World, a neo-Marxist revolutionary group is close to seizing power from the New Republic when a trans-human polity, Festival, suddenly manifests itself and intervenes with a cargo cult-like ability to create advanced consumer goods in return for input – art, music, philosophy, entertainment or just plain stories. The New Republic gets wind of this and sends a space fleet to restore order. On that fleet are two people all the way from Earth: a space drive engineer on contract from Mikoyan i Gurevich and a United Nations weapons inspector on the lookout for people foolish enough to try to circumvent causality and with the mission of stopping them before they cause the Eschaton to descend on their civilization and descend on it hard. That's extinction-level event hard.

This is space opera in something of a steampunk mode. The New Republic's navy has a distinct Edwardian vibe to it; the ships are all mahogany panelling and gleaming brasswork inside, the uniforms are like something out of The Battleship Potemkin and some of the officers' attitudes are not much different. The forms of address used by lower ranked ratings are lifted straight out of Hasek's The Good Soldier Sjevk, though in truth it has to be said that unlike Hasek's story of the Dual Monarchy in World War I, the officers are, for the most part, competent but severely blinkered. (Though the Fleet Admi­ral is in his dotage, which doesn't help matters.) Which leads to the course of the fleet's mission going something like the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 (where, in case you weren't aware, a Tsarist Russian fleet left St.Petersberg to sail half-way round the world to attack Japan, encountered and sank a fleet of British fishing trawlers in the North Sea having mistaken them for Japanese torpedo boats, and eventually was defeated by the Japanese seven months later in the Battle of Tsushima.)

The engineer is assumed to be a spy (he is, but not for who anyone thinks); the UN inspector is worse, because she is - Shock! Horror! - a woman. (The New Republic's functionaries are nearly all very 19th Century in their attitudes.) Things are not helped by the presence of a member of the secret police, who is a recent recruit and seriously out of his depth.

Meanwhile, on Rochard's World, the neo-Bolshevik revolutionary cadres are coming into contact with some of the races that accompany Festival as it travels across the galaxy, contacting civilizations, and then seeding copies of itself to spread further. Things are getting distinctly strange.

The novel's style is quite distinct; it started out feeling like some of Stross' novellas from the early 2000s, packed full of ideas and throwing them off in all directions. Characterisation is competent: the naval officers, as I said, are out of Potemkin and Sjevk, the revolutionaries out of Eisenstein's October; whilst the engineer reminded me of Jonathan Harker, the protagonist in Bram Stoker's Dracula and the UN weapons inspector is reminiscent of no-one as much as Lola Montez, the femme fatale spy (based on a real person, though somewhat romanticised) in George Macdonald Fraser's Ruritanian Flashman novel Royal Flash.

I found this fun: other reviewers have not, mainly because they seem to have taken it too seriously and expected Military SF, a political story or a tale of first contact. It is at the same time all, and none, of these things.

This novel is the beginning a series of novels concerning the Eschaton and the universe it shaped. show less

Singularity Sky is where Stross gets it, chewing through the insulation of insufferable singulatarian techno-optimism to bite into the high voltage wire of Awesome that makes for a great and surprisingly deep space opera. The New Republic is a deliberate anachronism patterned after one of the Great Powers of the 19th century, and the bucolic colony of Rochard's World has fallen prey to The Festival, a self-replicating interstellar civilization that trades radical cyborg enhancements and nanotech cornucopias for folk tales. In response, the New Republic has dispatched it's proud battlefleet of heavily armed space cruisers on a course that threatens to trespass the Third Commandment. "I am the Eschaton. I am not your god. I am descended show more from you. Do not violate causality in my light cone. OR ELSE." It's up to a cynical warp-drive engineer and a UN diplomat to keep the hapless militarists of the New Republic from inviting a disaster from a god-like force they can't even begin to understanding. Great action, great characters, great cosmology, and a great book over all.

** 2022 Reread **
Yeah, Singularity Sky still slaps. Just one of my favorite books. Everything I've said above remains true. show less

"What will you give us?"
"Mmm. How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-replicating means of production?"

Actual text from this novel. From page 5.

Now I don't mind a book with a political message, but this one continues on in the same vein ad infinitum. A decent political novel won't tell you what it wants you to think, but will tell a story that illustrates its point. This one just shoves it in your face, right from the outset. Amateur, at best. Learn some subtlety, man.

The science is just as bad. show more Possibly worse. Good science-fiction, if it's going to rely on science at all, needs to have some foundation in reality. Stross's pseudo-scientific writing is so ludicrous, so contrived, that I couldn't continue reading. I couldn't tell whether he'd pulled it all entirely out of his ass, or tried (and failed) to read an advanced physics textbook. Whichever the case, it was clear that he didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I kept trying to read this book - I was on vacation and had a limited number of books with me - but ultimately I couldn't force myself to go on. Just awful. show less

If ever there was a book for which I am the target demographic, it's this one. The main themes of causality, cosmology, and singularity are my primary interests, and are dealt with better than just about anywhere else. Other authors tend to treat each subject in isolation, here they are treated holistically, and taken to the logical conclusion of how socio-economic and military-political systems are impacted by rapid technological advancement. The creativity and insight are off the charts.

That said, Stross's writing can be a bit rough around the edges. Scenes break unceremoniously, jumping POV without warning between paragraphs in the same chapter. There is a lot of exposition to explain the science and provide context, which is show more intensely interesting but probably not the best way to tell a story. He references many things, both real and fictional, and doesn't condescend to explicate much of it; for instance he assumes that his readers know what Hawking radiation is, how fission and fusion reactors work, know the difference between Radar and Lidar, etc.

He also can't seem to help but carried away with insanely imaginative ideas that quickly devolve into the surreal, such as fantastical appearances by Baba Yaga's walking hut and a person-sized sapient well-armed rabbit, that IMO detract from the otherwise well-grounded narrative. show less

This is one of the better pieces of singularity fiction I have encountered, despite the fact it dodges the hard problem of describing a post-singularity world by telling a tale from the point of view of the people the singularity left behind. The post-singularity intelligence(s) in the universe Stross built in Singularity Sky suppresses any ability of the pre-singularity entities in the universe to advance to a level where they may challenge it, or to perform any act that may threaten the events that led to the singularity-induced apotheosis of existing post-singularity intelligence(s). The post-singularity intelligence phenomenon influencing others is referred to as the Eschaton, and plays a significant role in how this tale unfolds, show more manipulating events from the shadows through the expedient of merely human agents in the thick of things.

In this particular story, a traveling pleasure palace civilization of sorts known as the Festival seems stuck forever in a peri-singularity state, never quite advancing to any level that may rival the Eschaton, and the actions of the Festival threatens the cultural control a backward, inconsistently anti-technology interstellar state exerts over its subject worlds. In response, the backward state seeks to undo the damage by employing causality-violating tactics to deal forcibly with the Festival, and agents of the Eschaton and of a more "enlightened" pseudo-anarchistic interstellar Earth-centric confederacy find themselves racing to save the lives of incredible numbers of people who will, if the backward state cannot be stopped, be wiped out by the Eschaton in its efforts to protect itself. It's a plotline made for people with an interest in the possibilities that face us in the future along an exponential technological advancement acceleration curve, and excellently executed. For that reason, I find it easily Stross' best book, of all of them that I have read.

If there is any flaw at all, it is that the Eschaton is too easily and blandly presented in a sympathetic light from time to time. show less

A low mark for a good book. Why? On the plus side there are a lot of ideas floating around here from the effects of technology on societies, to the fall of political systems and the rise of Transhumanism. Unfortunately it suffers from a lack of editing resulting in very long and very boring passages minutely detailing day-to-day operations of a battle cruiser, revolutionary musings, and a whole lot of navel-gazing. I eventually gave up on the last few chapters (I kept falling asleep) and just read the synopsis on Wikipedia.

I've read seven of Stross' novels before I read this one, and that was a serious mistake. One reason is because this is a very entertaining read, as an isolated post-disaster civilization that's a farcical, steam-punk, take on the Russian Empire is steam-rollered by a super-technology force that is beyond the comprehension of the autocrats. However, I would also have had a better understanding of the basic themes and tropisms that pop up in the following stories that Stross has written. There's the low-key hero who is simply trying to do the right thing. There's the put-upon woman of action, seething under the pressure of stupid gender expectations. There's the fascination with espionage and secret operatives. And, of course, there is show more then the whole matter of coping when your world is turned upside down, and you had better have an intellectual break-though, or else. I really have nothing critical to say about the book, though I can see where the many info dumps could put off some readers. show less