Singularity Sky (Hardcover)

For me the last few were Richard Morgan, Alastair Reynolds and Neal Asher and if you know your British sci-fi, you know that I am placing Stross in august company.

Not that Singularity Sky is the perfect novel - its falls some way short - but it offers something else - potential. Stross will go on to write a scorcher, and the discovery of potential is a wonderful thing.

So what of the book itself?

The mainline: Weird alien culture arrives a human planet and wreaks havoc, but not intentionally.

The backdrop: Humanity has been dispersed across a few hundred light years in the singularity - a moment when a God-like entity, the Eschaton, intervened in Earth and moved 90% of the population off-planet.

The itch: time travel.

This is one of the few novels I have read involving time travel that does not have me despairing at all the paradoxes. Stross writes fluidly and confidently, and it is his confidence that makes him convincing.

The story cracks along after a slowish start, and is witty without being too clever. Not much is said about the backdrop, saving it for sequels to come, but what is said hangs together and leaves you with a hearty appetite for more of Stross' universe. The story loses its way several times, but never for long, and is all nicely wrapped-up at the end.

Singularity Sky is very similar to Iain Banks' novels, which is certainly a good thing, but Stross' displays a prodigious imagination and enough of his own style for it to be worth reading as a Charles Stross novel rather than worth reading for being like an Iain Banks novel.

I'm already looking forward to the release of Iron Sunrise in paperback.

Four stars

If you like SF in any form; you'll find something here for you. Stross cleverly combines hard sf with grand space-opera story lines and some clever futurist thoughts, on how humanity might turn out (and what we'll do when faced with the truly unknown). His ability to combine cutting edge technology (both based on viable science and 'just to the right of reality') completely immerses you into the universe of the Eschaton.

Be prepared for a little thinking; we've got some of Stross' trademark post-humanist alien types (and who knows what THEY want), a world about to rebel from its repressive governement, secret agents and creatures that aren't alien - but definatly aren't human.

The Eschaton is an Artifical Intelligence - so powerful we don't know where it is or exactly what it wants. It rarely meddles in the affairs of humanity - Once when it first gained sentience and since then, only when some one attempt to break the laws of time travel (and when that happens, the Eschaton stops them with a bang!).

And someones about to try it again - and if the big E wants to pop this group of casuality breakers...Earth might very well go with them!

The story combines slick mental visuals with enough mystery and "whats happening?" to keep any reader with a post cambrian IQ intregued for hours.

Bring on Iron Sunrise Charlie.