lucasw's Journal: Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

Charlie Stross is another author I discovered by reading a Year's Best Science Fiction collection from a few years back (I should just subscribe to Asimov's or Interzone instead of waiting a year between editions...). There were two excellent stories, A Colder War with its a Lovecraftian alternate history, and another (Antibodies) about minor gods arising from AI and attempting to prevent gods from coming into existence in parallel universes.

Check out Free Speculative Fiction Online for some of his short stories. Some of them are really good, and many others pretty weak.

Considering the strength of the best of his short stories, Singularity Sky is underwhelming. Also, I didn't care much for the tagline 'In the future, information wants to be free'.

The plot concerns the collision between two alien cultures a few centuries after a technological singularity in the 22nd century- typically this is the point where immortality, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology all arrive and wreck havoc on the scarcity based economic systems and everything else. Stross throws in some time travel to complicate the traditional singularity.

There's a lot of interesting material in the book, but most of the characters and the major groups (U.N., New Republic, and Festival) weren't that compelling. Burya and his comrades were more interesting, and fortunately occupy a sizable portion of the book.

(spoilers)

The time travel - casual discussion of closed timelike paths and the prohibitions issued by the Eschaton are very interesting. The flight of the New Republic fleet would have been more cool if there were more explanation- a good analogy at least to show how traveling far into the future and whipping back allows an eventual arrival at a certain point slightly in the past. There was a lot else that seemed arbitrary and underdeveloped.

The Eschaton on the other hand has a lack of information about it's origin and purpose that generates a lot of mystery, and perhaps this is hinting at further novels that will expand upon what little is here.

The picture that emerged for the origin of galactic culture was that the Eschaton seeded the galaxy in a time-reversed light cone using Earth as the starting point- ergo the nearby New Republic having only a few centuries history, and the Festival from far off many thousands of years.