A world is murdered, but by whom?

This is a successor - not a sequel - to Singularity Sky. (I've got a review buried there under "5 Stars" circa September of 2011.) In this book, we are re-introduced to Rachel Mansour - an agent for the UN's "Black Chamber" - and her now-husband, Martin - formerly an agent for the mysterious entity known as the Eschaton - as they face yet another espionage/military crisis that involves the fates of worlds.

Stross sets his story in the world of "the Eschaton." It seems that in the late 21st Century, artificial intelligence simply happened, looked around, and decided to protect itself. It did so by instantaneously relocating most of the Earth's population onto planets scattered over a "light cone" consisting of thousands of light years - and time travel being related to Faster than Light travel - thousands of years of history. Along with the relocation came the edict that that the Eschaton would handle attempts to interfere with its development with severe prejudice.

Then the Eschaton simply stepped out of human history, apparently, except when it needs to destroy a solar system for playing with "causality violating" weapons.

Someone on the planet Moscow - settled by Midwesterners from Idaho, it seems - have been playing around with such weapons, and the result was the nova of the Moscow sun.

Victoria Strowger - aka Wednesday - is one of the refugees of Moscow who grew up on a Moscow space station removed from the disaster for a period. She has a not-so imaginary friend named "Herman" who seems to be teaching her to be a spy. She discovers something on her space station about the disaster during the relocation of the station's population to refugee locations on other star systems. Now, it seems, someone wants to kill her for something she may know.

Stross introduces us to richly imagined worlds and cultures, and bizarre but probably politics and diplomacy. One of those features is the "R-Bomb" - the "mutually assured destruction" weapon for the Age of the Singularity. "R-Bombs" are large asteroids that exist as a counterstrike at aggressors in the case of global annihilation. The idea is that these piloted weapons will take off at sub-light speed, travel for decades and then unstoppably impact with and destroy planets.

The Moscow R-Bombs are on their way to New Dresden, the most likely murderer of Moscow.

There are recall codes, but they have to be given by Moscow diplomats, and someone is murdering those diplomats.

Stross also introduces us to U. Portia Hoechst - "U" stands for "ubermenschen" - director for a noxious government/movement known as the ReMastered. Their goal is to replace the Eschaton with their own future AI - the "unborn God" - that will have at its disposal the memories of its followers. They are crazy, and sick, and evil, but very effective. There are some hints that maybe their ultimate plan has been successful, but who knows.

The story follows through the different threads - and a few others - as we pursue the mysteries of who is killing the Moscow diplomats, who killed Moscow, what role does the ReMastered play in these events. The threads are satisfyingly tied up by the end. There are chills and thrills and derring do.

I found the story to be a real page turner. I particularly like Stross's techno-jargon. Often I had no idea what a character was saying in the jargony techno/spy/military terminology that Stross uses. In many ways it is like his "The Laundry" story - it's nonsense, but delightful nonsense.

I enjoyed the story. I liked the big ideas and the galactic scope of the story. It kept me engaged as I put the pieces together from the hints that the various threads were dropping. It seems to me that Stross is setting up future stories involving the ReMastered. I look forward to reading those when and if they come out.

This is a classic, even better than the earlier "Singularity Sky". "Iron Sunrise" starts by introducing the teenage protagonist, Wednesday, moves in time-jumps to discover her home star, that's been artificially induced into a nova, and an 'artist', visited by the plutonium-fairy, threatening an explosive performance on Old Earth. The story accelerates from there...becoming extremely difficult to put down. I'd love to see more in this series. This may have been the last of the Rachel Mansour novels, as Mr. Stross moved on to develop the Hidden Family and Laundry series. "Iron Sunrise" comes at the reader fast and furious, with amazing social/government concepts and hyper-advanced physics rendered into believable scenarios, warped by human motivations. Stross could easily take on Asimov as an imaginative teacher of high-level concepts, if he weren't having so much fun with the Eschaton Universe. Highly recommended.

Iron Sunrise places Charles Stross firmly in the dignified set of hard science fiction writers like Gregory Benford and Larry Niven. They are master story tellers and they know their physics and chemistry. Iron Sunrise is saturated with hard science and it is also wonderfully entertaining. It never lets up. The descriptions of the spaceship hardware and systems operations here are just as creative and thorough as Banks' writing about the space craft in the beginning of Consider Phlebas. The hot sci-fi writers like Banks and Hamilton and Stross are all out there cleaning out the cobwebs of science fiction and building new bridges to the near distant future. Stross works especially well with what we now know about artificial Intel and fusion reactors and the future weaponry. He has an extraordinary range of experience and it shows. His characters are convincing as galaxy diplomats/operatives . I believe Iron Sunrise is one of his best and it delivers. The language used to describe things is rich and masculine and yet his central characters are capable and extremely complex women.
Imaginative plot, great ships, and women who rock. You can' t go wrong.

I enjoy Charles Stross' books. This one follows on the heels of Singularity Sky, set in the same universe. It's more of a political / spy novel that just happens to be set in an amazingly crafted future. I particularly enjoyed the description of the titular Iron Sunrise destruction of the planet. I found it bogged down at the beginning, but by the time the plot really got going, I couldn't put it down. Lots of factions to keep track of, and lots of cool gadgets and tech. I recommend it.