From the first line, this book hooked me: "The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd." A post-Singularity descendant of humanity, the Festival, arrives in orbit around the backwater Rochard's World. The Festival's willingness to share anything in return for information results in economic and social upheaval as the repressed citizens of Rochard's World find they can have anything they want: technology, money, even power. As a result, the New Republic decides to launch a battle fleet to deal with the threat of the Festival.But their strategy calls for a causality violation gambit, which could be a problem. A capricious and unknowable artificial intelligence, the Eschaton, does not tolerate such time travel ventures, which could imperil its own existence. The Eschaton has been known to retaliate with excessive force—planet-crunching, supernova-type force—and so two human agents hope to intervene before it all goes apocalyptic.Charles Stross does a wonderful job at contrasting different styles of government and cultures influenced by how they embraced the upheaval of the technological Singularity. The New Republic is modelled after eighteenth-century Russia: technologically and socially conservative, with a strong government enforced by devastating mores and sinister secret police. Then there's Earth, homeworld of our protagonists Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansour. The only entity recognizable as a planetary government would be the United Nations, but as Springfield points out:It's not the government of Earth; it's just the only remaining relic of Earth's governments that [the New Republic:] can recognize. The bit that does the common-good jobs that everyone needs to subscribe to. World-wide vaccination programs, trade agreements with extrasolar governments, insurer of last resort for major disasters, that srot of thing. The point is, for the most part, the UN doesn't actually do anything; it doesn't have a foreign policy.... Sometimes somebody or another uses the UN as a front when they need to do something credible-looking, but trying to get a consensus vote out of the Security Council is like herding cats.The conflict of values between the New Republic's agents, specifically its naval officers and an inexperienced secret policeman, and Terrans, specifically Springfield and Mansour, fuels most of the conflict of the book. The rest of the conflict comes from the alien nature of the Festival; the New Republic insists on treating it like an ordinary human government with recognizable motivations and strategy. That turns out to be a costly mistake:The Festival isn't human, it isn't remotely human. You people are thinking in terms of people with people-type motivations.... You can no more declare war on the Festival than you can declare a war against sleep. It's a self-replicating information network.Stross also packs the book with the ramifications of technology on cultures: the Festival is an "upload society," where minds are stored in virtual worlds and physical forms are transitory. It's diverged so far from its common ancestry with humans that it's no longer human, as mentioned above, but something else, something that we can't really comprehend. In that way, it's even more alien than the Eschaton, a truly alien entity, but one that at least deigns to communicate with humans on a comprehensible level (once and a while). Unlike too much Singularity fiction, Singularity Sky mixes transhuman, posthuman, and human cultures in a way that makes for interesting but still understandable interaction.Similarly, while this book is packed to the brim with technobabble and discussions of relativity and quantum mechanics, it never feels too heavy. I love how the characters use entangled qubits for "acausal communication" and the Eschaton one day just decided to relocate 90% o the Earth's population to various planets via wormhole. Maybe that's just because I love theoretical physics more than is healthy; I can see how people less familiar with hard science fiction or physics in general might find the exposition in Singularity Sky daunting. On the other hand, maybe it'll be educational. And to Stross' credit, all of the exposition is relevant to the plot.As much as I must praise Stross' ideas, I can't in good conscience do the same for the story. The pacing is heavily tilted toward the end (as it should be), but the bulk of its ideas and themes reside in its beginning. As a result, Singularity Sky starts off strong—like I said, it pulled me in—but eventually that siren call of awesomeness asking me not to put down the book petered out. The sense of conflict and suspense just doesn't last, and after the New Republic fleet reaches Rochard's World, the protagonists' plot diverges from that of the fleet, and I never really feel like they're in real danger. With any sense of high stakes obviated, the story withers away into the background.Singularity Sky starts off strong but ultimately fails to deliver. It has the same great ideas of Alastair Reynolds' House of Suns or Richard K. Morgan's Altered Carbon but none of their pulse-pounding action and complex mystery subplots that make those books great. People like me, who breathe physics and ponder the possibilities of faster-than-light travel, will find Singularity Sky interesting but come away from the book feeling like it had so much more potential.
I found it really hard to decide between 3 and 4 stars for this book, I might go back and change this when I have had some more time to digest the book.***Here be mild spoilers***The story takes us to the far away multi planetary society of the New Republic, a place that has made the choice to shun all but the most basic technologies available to humanity (So they, for example, only use computers to a limited degree, except in their FTL ships and to oppress the populace) to avoid becoming hedonistic post humans. However, one of the planets in the New Republic suddenly receives a visit from a mysterious power, the festival, that wants to give humans literally whatever they want in exchange for information and entertainment. This does not sit too well with the oppressive New Republic who decide to use faster than light travel to drop in on the festival just as they appear in planetary orbits. the problem is that while the rest of humanity have ascended into a state of anarchy the one thing that is completely off the table is causality violation. Humanity has not come to the conclusion that they should avoid causality violation on their own, but have been prompted to uphold this rule by a god-like, deep future result of humanity, called The Eschaton who promises to thoroughly annihilate everything that is in the light cone of anyone who even considers violating causality. So hilarity ensues.We get to follow a hugely compelling UN operative, and a somewhat compelling secret agent (that's the spoiler) as they go along with the fleet from the New republic to try to make sure that they don't bring about the destruction of a sizeable chunk of interstellar real estate in their eagerness to enforce their own raving technophobia.I really enjoyed parts of this book. The idea of the fragile end result of humanity reaching back in time to ensure that the causal stream that produced it remains intact is quite compelling. And as always Stross' ideas about what a post singularity world would look like is interesting and worth thinking about. My two main complaints about the book is that first of all the New Republic is a hugely depressing place, and not in a, for me, very interesting way. It is gray, and boring, and paranoid and a bummer, but not in a way that motivates me to change my mind about anything, just in a way that makes me think "wow, that place sucks!". Secondly, the relativistic shenanigans are somewhat overwrought. When discussing the singularity drives at the heart of the star ship you can clearly see the frayed edges where Stross departs from our current understanding of science. And that is absolutely fine. The problem arises when he then spends quite a few pages discussing the different trajectories through space time that the ships take. Why is this a problem for me? Well, if I trust an author utterly to only feed me information that has a relationship to reality I will happily work through their maths in some instances, and in other instances, just enjoy their examples. The prerequisite for this is that I know that I can trust the author. If the author, however, has already shown that they do not operate within the realm of our current understanding of science, it would feel like a giant waste of time to follow their maths. Thus, all of Stoss' discussion on closed time like paths etc become nothing but noise to me. My gut feeling is that he has actually thought it through, and that the only thing he asks me to take on faith is the FTL-drive, but still, if he lied about the physics of the FTL-drive, why would I let him infect my brain with bad special relativity? This doesn't take away that much from the book, for me, but enough that I hesitate to give it four stars.
What do You think about Singularity Sky (2012)?
Stross & The Festival have arrived: Rachel Mansour is a UN diplomat based incognito in an interplanetary Russian-ethnic society based on a historical model of class-structure and aristocratic inherited privilege. Martin Greenfield is also working undercover within the society for a mysterious paymaster called Herman. At the outset of the novel a presence arrives in orbit around one of these Russian worlds and showers the planet with mobile phones. The bemused natives are told on the phones that The Festival has arrived and that they will grant requests for anything if they can only be entertained. Soon, the Victorian-industrial world is thrown into chaos, revolution and worse by a plethora of advanced technological items given to the inhabitants. On the homeworld, the Emperor decides to send his fleet to destroy the Festival and quell the insurrection. Martin, who has been waiting for his papers to be processed so that he can work in the flagship's engine room, is suddenly summoned aboard, as is Rachel, who has abandoned her disguise and announced herself as a UN observer to claim a place on the flagship, ostensibly to ensure that that the military of the New Republic do not contravene any of the Eschaton's laws. It is only gradually that we realise that the Eschaton is not the ruling body of this interstellar multi-cultural society, but is something else entirely. Stross succeeds admirably in blending satire, drama, political intrigue and outrageous science fiction concepts in a cleverly constructed novel. One's understanding of the history of Humanity's interstellar cultures is revealed piece by piece and the jigsaw Stross puts together for us is weird, funny, fast paced and politically astute. As a debut novel it's not the explosive start one might have expected from Stross who has made a reputation for himself through his short fiction. It is, however, an original and refreshing piece of work, which works well on every level. Most importantly it's intelligently written, peppered with wit and the occasional post-modern reference.
—Peter
Seems to me sci-fi has come to embrace the absurd. The logic goes like this: when describing a future for humanity, a writer of necessity designs that future in terms of its technology. Near-future stories are almost never absurd. They are frequently focused on issues arising from the technology we have now. There's nothing absurd about surrendering our rights to privacy, for instance. Or how the internet makes possible virtual worlds in which we can live our lives a second time.Far-future stories benefit from branching possibilities. The farther out you go, the less likely it is the technologies augmenting humanity look anything at all like the ones we have now. Essentially, a clever and imaginary writer can write his or her own rules -- who's to say an imagined world is any more or less likely than any other? And since absurdities are more entertaining (and, in theory, make better stories) than dull, realistic ones... well, it's easy to see why writers venture down the absurd path when writing about the far future. On the surface, it's more fun.But absurdity in sci-fi can also be a bit daunting for me. Here, in Singularity Sky, we have an otherworldly entity called The Festival that rains cell phones from orbit on a planet ruled by a technophobic government. The government representatives include a blabbering and senile Admiral along with dozens of caricatured military men drawn from British naval lore. We have a talking rabbit-man, among other things, and an entire society of tuber-eating ground dwellers whose sole function is to criticize. Oh, and we see time travel used as a military strategy. That, too.All of these things (and much, much more) serve to propel a story of subterfuge at various levels: familial, societal, governmental, ideological -- even a godlike entity (the Eschaton, an all-knowing AI that inexplicably and overnight dispersed 90% of the Earth's population to star systems elsewhere) gets in on the action.No question about it: this is as dense and far out as science fiction gets. And, provided you can get your head around all of it, it's reasonably entertaining. It's only getting three stars here, though, because I frequently found myself lost in long passages dedicated to arcane (but impressively crafted) military jargon describing strategic and tactical decision-making that ultimately did not serve the story well. I also had a bit of a hard time reconciling all the weirdness.Still... when I reached the end of the book I saw the promo page for Stross's follow-up to Singularity Sky (Iron Sunrise) and decided I'd have to read it. So it couldn't have been that daunting.
—Bill Purdy
This is the first book by this author that I have read. I believe this was also his debut novel so this could be the start of something good.This book is a story about the possible effects of the technological singularity, a subject that has always interested me, so I was interested in seeing what he was going to do with it. And he surprised me because, as the story has an interstellar setting, he showed characters from societies pre-singularity, post-singularity and experiencing the singularity, all in the same book. And yes, time travel could have done this and time travel was involved in the story, but not how you might think. There were a few things I didn't like about the story. Things that had a comic aspect on the surface which didn't work for me as I believe the author intended. The problem for me was that I felt these comedic elements played too much to the contemporary reading audience and didn't make as much sense when considered as part of the story world. Your mileage may vary on this.Definitely liked the representation of technology in the book and especially the differences in technology and attitudes pre- and post-singularity.Well worth the read if you like books about the technological singularity or space military technology.
—Phillip Berrie
