Singularity Sky (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "May I ask what I'm charged with?" asked Martin..." (more)
Key Phrases: drive kernel, humbly report, causal channel, New Republic, Lord Vanek, Sister Seventh (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his first novel, British author Stross, one of the hottest short-story writers in the field, serves up an energetic and sometimes satiric mix of cutting-edge nanotechnology, old-fashioned space opera and leftist political commentary reminiscent of Ken MacLeod. Spaceship engineer Martin Springfield and U.N. diplomat Rachel Mansour hail from an Earth that has gone through the Singularity, an accelerated technological and social evolution far beyond anything we can imagine. The Singularity was triggered by the Eschaton, a super-powerful being descended from humanity that can travel in time and that essentially rules the universe. Springfield and Mansour meet on the home world of the New Republic, a repressive, backwater society that has outlawed virtually all advanced technology other than that necessary for interstellar warfare. When one of the New Republic's colonial worlds is besieged by the Festival, an enigmatic alien intelligence, the Republic counterattacks, using time travel in an attempt to put its warships in position to catch the Festival by surprise. Springfield and Mansour, working for different masters, have both been assigned the task of either diffusing the crisis or sabotaging the New Republic's warfleet, no matter what the cost. As a newcomer to long fiction, Stross has some problems with pacing, but the book still generates plenty of excitement.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In the twenty-fifth century, human society has depended for several hundred years on faster-than-light travel and an artificial intelligence called the Eschaton. Interstellar colonies are scattered all over, and one, the New Republic, has become a classic refuge for antitechnological holdouts. But the New Republic is suddenly under attack, literally, by the technology it has tried to suppress, which now appears under the name the Festival. An Earth battle fleet is on the way, but is it coming to help, to ride to power on the coattails of the Festival, or to fulfill some entirely separate agenda, possibly set by the Eschaton, which has achieved consciousness, sentience, and probably a lust for power? If no element of Stross' novel is very original, all of them are formidably well-executed, especially the meticulous and imaginative portrayal of the New Republic and its Victorian technology. In addition, the book possesses the rare virtue of neither requiring nor precluding a sequel. Roland Green
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Ace Books/Berkley Publishing; 1st edition (August 5, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0441010725
• ISBN-13: 978-0441010721
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (77 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #854,024 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

60 of 72 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very, very, very good., August 17, 2004

By	W. H. Jamison, Jr. (Burien, Washington United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Singularity Sky (Paperback)

Sometime in the mid 21st century an artificial intelligence arises out of Earth's computer networks. This intelligence scatters the land with strange structures, causes nine tenths of the population to disappear and issues three commandments. Flash forward a few centuries, the missing nine tenths of earth's population were transmitted via wormholes to star systems up to 3000 light years away, travelling one year back in the past for every light year travelled. Earth has recovered from the events of this singularity and is now a sort of central clearing house for trade and information under a reconstituted United Nations.
Martin Springfield is an engineer working for the Navy of the New Republic, one of the civilzations rising out of this diaspora and which despite it's name is more of an empire. The New Republic has banned most information technology and all nano-technology and keeps its citizens backwards in a highly stratified society where advanced technologies are only permitted for military or state security uses.
When a travelling interstellar civilization known as the Festival comes to the New Republic colony world New Rochard the whole social system is kicked over. The Festival wants stories and information, and is willing to trade high tech products that verge on the magical to the inhabitants of New Rochard, which destroys scarcity and the whole hierarchical system. Rather than allow this to happen the New Republic decides to launch a war fleet to take out the Festival. Using faster than light travel the war fleet will arrive at New Rochard before the Festival does, thus saving the day. The only problem with this is that the AI that caused all this, now known as "The Eschaton" explicity prohibits causality violations and has a messy way of dealing with those who risk its wrath, such as by causing their suns to go nova (it is explained that the Crab Nebula is one such result).
Rachel Mansour is a UN intelligence agent who is trying to prevent the New Republic from doing anything stupid that would bring down the wrath of the Eschaton and endanger other star systems. She is thrown together as a military observer with Springfield as the New Republic fleet plans to assault New Rochard.
_Singularity Sky_ is about the efforts of Springfield and Mansour to prevent the actions of the New Republic from causing a catastrophe and is also about what would happen to a planetary civilization if scarcity were abolished and wishes, mediated by advanced technology, could come true. The book is full of lots of great ideas and is a lot of fun to read for those. Stross's examination of what it means to abolish scarcity is also interesting and he demolishes all of the junk space operas out there such as the Honor Harrington series by showing that fighting a truly advanced civilization with a space navy based upon the principles of the British Navy ca. 1805 would be a very short war indeed, with the space navy coming out far the worse for wear.
The only reason I'm not giving this five stars is because I felt that Stross needed to flesh some things out. He put a lot of ideas out there but I felt that some of them weren't adequately examined.

13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Riveting postmodern space opera - w00t w00t!, October 23, 2003

By	Child with ADHD "researching parent" (Glen Ellyn, IL, USA) - See all my reviews

I blazed through this book. It is playful, irreverent, consumed by more raw ideas and imaginative takes on traditional scifi tropes than I've seen in a dog's age. And it contains the most vivid spaceship command deck combat dialogue I've ever read. If you enjoy the occasional fat mouthful of jargon, you're going to find yourself chewing vigorously throughout Singularity Sky.

Mr. Stross is obviously having more fun in some parts of his writing than others, which while noticable, isn't fatal. I think the other reviewers should give this book another read without their Clarion baseball hats on, or at least with them loosened a few notches. Perfection isn't required for enjoyment - just energy and novelty. Maybe they were dissatisfied at the denouement to the Big Space Battle, but that was the point - sometimes, you don't get the lollypop.

Singularity Sky is about *bigness*, like John Clute's _Appleseed_, but more accessbile. It's full of little in-jokes and sly tech-culture references, doing for the IETF what _Silverlock_ did for filk. It baps around collectivism, the principles of sovereignty, mutation theory, spy techniques, nanotechnology, Newtonian physics, kangaroo courts, secret police, and a character straight out of a Gilbert and Sullivan production. Oi vey!

I liked it. I'm looking forward to his next book A Lot. He will only get better.

bob

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not my cup of tea either..., August 19, 2004

By	P. Breakfield IV "Tom" (Greenville, SC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Singularity Sky (Paperback)

The author has the POTENTIAL to be really good. In fact, it is almost as if two different people wrote different parts of this book. I found the Martin/Rachel storyline to be fairly decent reading.

Unlike the master reviewer, I didn't have any trouble understanding the quote he provided. However, there was plenty else I didn't understand, and more importantly didn't care, about.

I also question why the author waited until around 120 pages into the book to explain the Eschaton to us clearly.

Overall, I'd skip this book. It was my first for Charles Stross and I don't think I will give him another try.

-Tom