Customer Reviews

Iron Sunrise (Singularity)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

The first volume in this series - Singularity Sky - read a bit unevenly, because Stross had a lot of explaining to do to get the reader in synch with his reality. After all, a possible future with has mankind spread throughout the galaxy not by his own ingenuity but by an irate being called the Eschaton, which was someone else's god, but took exception to the way we were learning how to abuse time travel in the process of learning how to exceed the speed of light. Since the Eschaton was not about to let itself be erased by the modification of history it seized the moment and moved nine tenths of the Earth elsewhere.

Since space travel is time travel, the far flung groups moved not just huge distances, but large amounts of time as well. Thus, just as the Earth was recovering from the mass exodus, humans from distant worlds made it back to the solar system, and the universe started to get smaller again. And stranger. There was a lot to explain, and Charles Stross does like to expound on the 'science' of his works.

With that work behind him, the stage is set for this volume, which is a lot more space opera and a lot less explanation. Once again a series of events points to an attack on the Eschaton, and Rachel Mansour and her husband Martin are recalled from their day jobs to investigate the destruction of one world and the immanent obliteration of another.

The the real star of the book is Wednesday Shadowmist, who first saw her entire world destroyed by an intentional supernova, and then her saw her family destroyed by agents from the ReMastered, a dangerous and effective cult intent on building an empire. Wednesday is erratically aided by an invisible friend - Herman, whom readers may remember from Singularity Sky, and Frank the Nose, a warblogger with his own issues with the ReMastered. If this is beginning to sound complicated, trust me, it gets worse. Wait until you get to meet the ReMastered.

This book is an excellent example of Stross's writing skill, moving forward with a steadily increasing pace. Stross thrives on detail, and can bring unnerving vista into perfect focus. He has a light touch with an ironic sense of humor. Characterization is equally deep, with the net result that the reader jogs along with considerable delight. I found this a strong entry, perhaps the best of his novels so far.

The type of science fiction that I enjoy the most shows a future society that is changed by technology in a way that illuminates our present society. I also enjoy a story about a future society that by its changes from our present society reveals the human condition and human behavior by showing us how people behave in the new society. If you add the hero on a quest who discovers himself because of the nature of the quest, I'm really happy. If all an author does is update an old genre, like cowboys and Indians to spacemen and aliens, the update better be clever and original. All of this is by way of saying that while I did not particularly care for Iron Sunrise, some readers might enjoy it.

The McGuffin (a word that Alfred Hitchcock used to describe a plot device that misleads the audience to believe that it is what the work is about) is the inducement of a super nova in a star that destroys one world and threatens the destruction of several others, directly or indirectly. But basically, this is a classic espionage novel. A craft travels from stop to stop and at each destination a diplomat is killed. A counterespionage agent, who becomes a guide to a non-professional, is assigned to catch the killers, and after a few missteps, the villains are caught. In the spy novels set in the 20th century the craft was a ship or train, but here it's a space ship. Instead of pistols the folks use various kinds of high-tech zappers. Otherwise the story is unchanged.

The civilian hero swept up into the story is a Goth girl, who sounds like the nightmare of most parents. Unfortunately, although she saves the day, she doesn't seem to be any further along the road to self discovery at the end of the novel than she was at the beginning.

The villains of the piece do everything but wear jackboots, and they are proud to call themselves "Ubermensch". I mean, come-on. Couldn't the author find some other word in Nietzsche than the old Nazi saw?

Given the generic nature of the story, something more was required to make this a good read. Unfortunately, none of the elements I look for were present. Certainly the characters were one dimensional and unchanged by events. The setting was not particularly innovative. If there had been some real elements of suspense here, it might have justified this exercise. But by the time the novel reached the denouement, I didn't care who the real villains were.

If you want an espionage story that is both suspenseful and provides real insights, I suggest almost anything by Eric Ambler. You can read this if your setting must be science fiction.

After reading Singularity Sky, I was really excited to pick up Iron Sunrise as quickly as possible. I was not disappointed. I enjoyed the book and its continuing adventures of Rachel Mansour. She is a great recurring character-- just the right combination of flaws and heroism to make her a compelling agent/detective.

Singularity Sky had a lot of little flaws, and was occasionally uneven. Iron Sunrise fixes most of these issues. I wish that I could say that I enjoyed it more because it is much more smooth. Unfortunately, I found it just a little bit more forgettable with a little more polish applied. One of the thing that I liked best about Singularity Sky was the clear glee that Stross took in setting up his universe. We hear less of that here, and while it may make it more professional it also made it just a little bit less fun.

This said, Iron Sunrise is still a pretty great read. I still want to run out and read Acccelerando and the Merchant Prince books as quickly as possible. I would recommend it highly to anyone with an interest in smart speculative fiction. You may miss some background if you begin here and not with Singularity Sky, but the plots are different enough that the book stands largely on its own.

Instead of just posting my own opinion, I will present a summary of discussion that took place in a reading group I am a part of.

The human angle

One reader liked that this book drives a point home that you can't assume anything about people's motivations. Especially when the people in question are very alien, living in a society that's very dissimilar to your own. He thinks this novel is a lot about how much the human mind projects order and organization where there is none. How much of it is about ascribing motivation where none exists. And the novel teaches you not to do it.

For example, Herman is supposedly Wednesday's friend, but he is a direct representative of Eschaton, so he does not necessarily have any human motivations, and Wednesday's well-being is probably not a high priority for him. Then again, as somebody pointed out, if Herman's gonna work with humans, he has to have some sort of understanding, empathy...

Another reader found the multiplying plot twists tiresome. It was hard to keep up with so many twists, he said. Oh, we're in favor of these people! Oh, wait, watch out for those people. Oh, we knew those people were really bad. But they're really bad for a different reason than we thought. Etc.

Some readers took to heart the warning Stross sends out to the humankind in the form of the ReMastered. They argued it wouldn't be difficult for our society to degenerate into something like the ReMastered dictatorship with its mind control. It would start slowly: we might like to prevent rapists from raping, murderers from murdering, and then it would creep up on humanity. One discussion participant said: the ability to manipulate motivations, either consciously or unconsciously, is an incredibly scary concept, and yet there is every evidence that somebody is trying to do it, in the form of neural marketing. He could see the ReMastered as a logical extension of technology that was capable of manipulating us for the sake of getting us to buy things, or to preclude antisocial tendencies in people's brains (rape, murder, etc.). He thinks it wasn't necessarily a fundamental evilness that got them to that evil point. It could have just crept into their system.

On writing style / language

A few people were amused by the bomb squad scene at the beginning of the book. Someone said it had some of the best language in the book. "Your basic landlord-tenant fracas with a [radioactive fallout] plume!" Overall, Stross' writing style in this book was compared to the sizzling, flashy language of Bill Gibson at his best, though the same person thought the plot and the treatment of ideas was mediocre.

Everybody agreed that the scene in the beginning where a supernova explodes and a solar system is destroyed was very impressive, from both scientific and humanitarian angle. And the title, Iron Sunrise, is a beautiful metaphor.

Science / technology angle

"Iron Sunrise" provoked a long discussion about how time and causality work. Somebody remarked that the idea of causality violation is not well explored in the book: "He opens so many doors, but he only explores a couple of them". How does timeline modification work? The common paradoxes of time travel were left unaddressed in this book. When Eschaton goes back and changes the past, or takes some action to prevent an unpleasant future from happening, how does he know he's got to take that action, because it's not gonna happen now? If causality can be violated, then there's no causality, then it would follow that there's no need for the Eschaton to try to change the past.

Several people agreed Eschaton didn't really know the future. He had blind spots. Some reader remembered that Herman said at some point that there might be an Eschaton-equivalent superhuman intelligence working through the ReMastered, but it was a throwaway thought that was not followed up on in the book.

Another reader thought the author's view of time travel involves multiple branching timelines, which would resolve the standar time-travel paradoxes. Eschaton just tries to make sure that each of the possible existing time branches would lead to the same ultimate result at some point in the future, but he doesn't care which of those branches actually ends up being "real".

A discussion ensued as to whether Charles Stross really meant there were branching timelines, until somebody said there is a statement in the book "in this timeline", which gives you the impression that Eschaton is monitoring more than one timeline.

Another scientific theme discussion participants had doubts about was the ReMastered mind wipe technology. Some readers found its various aspects inconsistent with one another. But it was a pretty minor quibble.

Overall, most people (including a reader who has very high standards for such things) agreed that Stross used science/technology in this story very skillfully. The reader with extra-high standards was impressed with how Stross explored the economical implications of quantum entanglement-driven communication. This technology is very expensive because you have to ship the entangled quantum dots to different places at a slower-than-light speed in order to use them later for instantaneous communication.

I thought that for all the marvelous technological achievements of the future in which "Iron Sunrise" is set, its world still looked surprisingly similar to ours. Technology had not transformed the novel's world as much as it should have. For example, there is "smart" matter, that can take on properties user wants, or configure itself into shapes and structures user wants, but the characters of "Iron Sunrise" don't use it for much more than to modify their clothes (even then, only Wednesday does that). A related idea -- a nanofabricator, or cornucopia -- was used spectacularly by Rachel in "Singularity Sky", but she or any other character did not have a chance to play with it much in the "Iron Sunrise". I personally believe that smart, configurable matter has such revolutionary implications that the world where it was prevalent would not look anything like the one we recognize. From that perspective, the world of "Iron Sunrise" looks kinda mundane and too familiar. Essentially its inhabitants live like us except that they have some neat gadgets and are able to read e-mail in their retinas. :-)

Other book group members pointed out that if a writer wrote a book so removed from our everyday experience, we wouldn't know how to read it. If you write something that is really wild like the future might be, how do you interact or engage with that if nothing that you're reading makes any sense to you? Or, as somebody put it, the problem with the aliens is that they're alien.

"Iron Sunrise" is a sort of sequel to "Singularity Sky," in that Rachel Mansour and her partner Martin make a return appearance, and that both books are set in the same milieu. However, in most other respects the two novels are very different. "Singularity Sky" is a wildly speculative SF novel that centers on a technological singularity on a backward Eastern European planet, with a small helping of left-libertarian politics but not so much as to be distracting or didactic. In contrast, "Iron Sunrise" is a James Bond movie, complete with a Blofeld joke, space nazis, and espionage. It's a lighter, fast-moving romp that stays interesting throughout. If you enjoyed "Singularity Sky" or "Accelerando," you will probably enjoy this novel.

I first read Charles Stross when a friend pointed me to where he had made "Accellerando" available online for free. I enjoyed it, although I often had trouble following the more technical aspects of the story. So I tried Iron Sunrise, and I couldn't put it down. There are sections that were a little hard to follow, probably because I don't have the technical knowledge to really understand what he's saying. But in Iron Sunrise more than Accellerando, this didn't really take away from my enjoyment of the book.

It's a good story, with likeable and interesting characters.

To give you some perspective, I'm pretty well-read, but only recently have I started to read sci-fi. I'm a software engineer, so I probably understand more of the technical aspects than your average person.

So, if you have no technical background, and no sci-fi experience, this book is probably not going to be that much fun for you. You'll probably get caught up in the technical parts that don't make sense. But if you're a geek like me, I think you'll enjoy it a lot.

Ok, I am a bit biased. I have been reading sci-fi voraciously for 30 years now - so I am well-prepared to and accept the laws of an author's universe and hold them as the framework within which the plot executes. I can see how a new-ish SciFi fan could get overwhelmed by this book - since there's some heavy stuff here.

With that said, I found myself really getting into Stross' universe. I love the idea of light cones, causal channels/pairs for instant communications, the coupling of these ideas to economics and corporate motives and the all-around coolness of the gadgets (I want a Cornucopia!). Less so than in Singularity Sky, all of this stuff is in your face without too much reasoning behind the science - but the ideas are credible enough for me to rate this as "hard sf".

The social context of the book was fascinating to me as well - I think Stross did a great job of getting inside a disaffected and unusual teenager's head and sharing her motivations with the reader (I want to know what happens next?). The Eschaton is still sort of deus-ex-machina yet had realistic and believable weaknesses. The ReMastered were perfectly villainous - with a blend of fascism, ruthlessness and logic reminiscent of Nazis.

My only criticisms of Iron Sunrise are the sometime too-quick tying off of loose threads. For example - ***SPOILER ALERT*** the Military Grade Cornucopia in introduced and praised by the characters at such a high value - produces interesting items for one of the characters but left me feeling flat about what it ended up being used for and what it REALLY could have produced.

Also - what happened to Wednesday afterwards?? There are a couple other examples of this - but hey, I will take too many cool ideas thrown out by an author over too few any day! :)

It's clear that Stross has a lot going on in his head - and Iron Sunrise was one of those books that sucks you in completely - Stross' ideas are big, his gritty characters have depth and the storyline moves along at a good pace. It's my favorite premise since Dan Simmons' incredible Hyperion series. Read it!

Stross seems to be able to start books off really well and introduce some very intriguing concepts, but doesn't go too far with them. My criticisms of this book are the same I had for Singularity Sky - extremely slow middle portion of the book, characters are a bit 2-dimensional, especially the villains. Stross does have an occasionally witty style of writing, but he seems to be trying too hard to cram in as many dry puns as he can and I found it a bit forced after a while. And he really, really needs to use his imagination better at what kind of technical terms and words people a few centuries hence would be using - this book is far too obviously written "now" from the contemporary slang and nerdy lingo he uses to narrate and the characters speak, and I 'd dock this book at least 1/2 a star for calling a chapter "Somebody set us up the bomb".

Positives include the first few chapters which are very good, and his description of the nova which destroys the Moscow system is very well written, but after that it fizzles until the last few pages of the Epilogue, which are actually much more exciting than the putative resolution of the book a few pages earlier. At least the Eschaton was expanded a bit in this one, and the idea of the ReMastered's unborn god, while never fully explored, is intriguing, even though a little derivative of the Ultimate Intelligence from the Hyperion books. Still, I'll probably be back for the next one and give Stross one more chance to show his potential.

I'd really give it a 3.5 like I gave Singularity Sky, but since I gave that one a 4 I'll give this one a 3 to balance out the numbers.

I'm not in the habit of writing reviews of books I'm still reading but Iron Sunrise appeared on my "plog" so I decided to wade in with a "Wow!".

Stross has more going on in the 98 pages I have read than many authors manage in an entire book (or two...). I'd previously read Singularity Sky and loved it. This book is in the same universe but feels a bit different. Stross seems more deft and comfortable with his characters or maybe I thought Singularity Sky was just a bit on the silly side.

I have the feeling that after Iron Sunrise we'll be waiting anxiously for the next Stross volume.

Stross is in my mind a first class member of the UK SF luminaries that includes Asher, Morgan Reynolds, and Banks.

I got the feeling this sequel would be a lot easier to follow if I had read Stross's well-received debut, "Singularity Sky." Nevertheless, the quirky, believable characters - particularly adolescent Wednesday with her moods and her talented invisible friend - the immediate suspense, and the imaginatively diverse cultures of backwater McWorlds, rogue planets and luxury starships, kept me going until I could piece together the complex plot.

It begins with murder and secret orders, which Wednesday happens to stumble on, thanks to the clever voice in her head, as she and her family escape their doomed world ahead of the cosmic storm caused by the exploding star that annihilated the planet Moscow. The prime suspect in the destruction of Moscow is a trade rival, New Dresden, which vehemently denies the charge. Unfortunately, Moscow's response ships are already enroute to retaliate and only a handful of diplomats can countermand the order.

Enter Old Earth Agent Rachel Mansour, first introduced in "Singularity Sky." The Moscow diplomats are being murdered one by one and it's up to her to find out who and why and save New Dresden. There's also the Eschaton, the godlike artificial intelligence (from "Singularity Sky"), who keeps humanity within certain strict limits. Why didn't it save Moscow?

The narrative moves from view to view, giving the reader a bigger picture than any of the characters. The ReMastered, a Nazi-type cult culture, are responsible for considerable murder and mayhem, for unknown motives; Frank the Nose, a cantankerous roving journalist, comes to Wednesday's aid; Rachel jumps from the frying pan into the fire and the Eschaton is maybe not the omniscient arbiter humanity thinks it is.

Stross' writing is evocative and colorful; his sense of humor is dry and sly; and the plot lines converge actively for a satisfying, nail-biting conclusion.