I Read Books: Singularity Sky

Still on a space opera kick (for obvious reasons) I went back to Singularity Sky by Charles Stross, a quite large influence on my stuff. The Eschaton, a god-like artificial intelligence, scattered people across maybe a thousand light years, where they formed various wacky sci-fi polities, many of which make no sense. One of these is the New Republic, loosely based on Tsarist Russia and repudiating technology except for military.

One of their colony planets is attacked, or perhaps not, by a rain of telephones that offers to grant wishes in exchange for information, the arriving organisation known as the Festival. The New Republic send an expeditionary force, and attempt to cheat by cutting slightly back in time, which is forbidden by the Eschaton. Fortunately on board are engineer Martin Springfield here to upgrade the engines and diplomat Rachel Mansour to observe; both are trying to save the integrity of the timeline before the Eschaton does something drastic to preserve it.

Space opera often takes historical incidents and sci-fis them, especially battles; the expedition is of course based on the epic voyage of the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5. The festival meanwhile is a satirical look at the month-long Edinburgh Festival that rearranges the city every August, crossed with post-scarcity economics and revolution, crossed (again) with east European fairy tales and tales of wishes gone wrong.

Read This: For some funny and clever SF thrills.
Don’t Read This: If you don’t want adventure fiction with satirical bite, or if you over analyse the background and figure out the flaws.
There Is A Sequel: Iron Sunrise, which I will get to, but unfortunately this breaks the universe and Stross abandoned it.

(Crossposted at GoodReads)