“The Festival isn’t human, it isn’t remotely human. You people are thinking in terms of people with people-type motivations; that’s wrong, and it’s been clear that it’s wrong from the start. You can no more declare war on the Festival than you can declare a war against sleep. It’s a self-replicating information network. Probe enters a system: probe builds a self-extending communications network and yanks the inhabited worlds of that system into it. Drains all the information it can get out of th...

The opening of Singularity Sky is as gripping as they come: one day, on the backwater planet of Rochard's World, telephones begin raining down from the sky. Everybody who picks one up is given a simple order: Entertain us, and we will grant your wish. And just like that, money, bicycles and replicator machines begin falling from orbit, and Rochard's World falls into chaos.Soon, the New Republic, a strict dictatorship, dispatches a fleet to deal with the enemies 'attacking' their colony. But in s...

Thousands of phones start falling from the sky all over your town, scarred and melted from entry into the atmosphere. They litter the streets, sit on roofs and leave dents in parked cars. You pick one up – an old Nokia 3210 - and a strange voice answers - "Entertain us, and we will give you what you want.”Tell the voice a story, a scientific theory or a joke and it will grant you your every material wish, giving you food, weapons, cybernetic augmentations, a house, or even a cornucopia - a machi...

2020 reread notes: A great debut, better than I remembered. Lots of cool details: Nuclear-powered steam locomotives! MiG battle cruisers! The looming threat of the Eschaton.... Rachel Mansour, Special Agent for Earth's UN-SIG: "If the Big E decided to pop the primary here, we'd need to evacuate 50 star systems!" “I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.I am descended from you, and exist in your future.Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.”This is a first novel, wi...

Some years ago, the term space opera was used only pejoratively to describe overblown tales of cosmic conflict, full of space navies and deep space battles. Maybe it was Star Trek that first changed that perception, but these days space opera is a more legitimate subgenre - although still not exactly where you would look for an award-nominated stand-alone novel. But Singularity Sky takes space opera to a new level. Yes, there are space navies and deep space battles, but Stross does it with tongu...

From the first line, this book hooked me: "The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd." A post-Singularity descendant of humanity, the Festival, arrives in orbit around the backwater Rochard's World. The Festival's willingness to share anything in return for information results in economic and social upheaval as the repressed citizens of Rochard's World find they can have anything they want: technology, money, even power...

4.5 stars. Wonderfully crafted hard sci-fi that's fun and engaging.Stross creates a fascinating far future world filled with some very cool visions of post-Singularity civilization among the stars. The story is essentially a crazy clash of civilizations "space opera", with battle scenes and suspense aplenty, plus frequent doses of wit and levity and occasional wackiness that make this a pleasure to read.It's got many of the same ingredients that I love from Iain M. Banks' Culture series, though

Okay, so the opening of this book is really damn solid: telephones raining down from the sky on a repressed backwater colony world, all of which say, "Entertain us." And from there it's all a bit...standard. And dull.I get this feeling from Stross every time I read him, which is that he has great ideas in isolation, but no way to string them together to form an interesting and novel setting, culture, world, universe. Or plot. So what you get is a very standard book with some extremely shiny frip...

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)I recently had the chance to acquire every single book ever written by trippy sci-fi author Charles Stross, and so have decided to spend the year actually reading and reviewing them here for the blog; and I've decided to read them in chronological order, too (or, the general books by chronological order, t...

Charles Stross's first novel is a very good first novel. Packed full of crazy ideas. Espionage. Space battles. Post-Singularity humanity with all its craziness. Just a crazy book in general.I'm doing a poor job of reviewing this.There are quite a few POV characters in this book, and while they're all distinct, I developed some favorites early on and was not usually pleased when I had to spend a chapter or two with other, less interesting characters. So, I suppose it was a bit unwieldy at times.T...

6.0 stars. On my list of "All Time Favorite" novels. This is one of those novels (like some of Neil Gaiman's and Neal Stephenson's books) where I kept finding myself saying "WOW, how did he come up with such a cool concept." This is a great novel full of big, mind-blowing ideas and concepts. It is space opera for the 21st century. HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION!! Nominee: Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2004)Nominee: Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel (2004)

Three stars, really, but allowing for the fact that it's his first, and rounding up for the many interesting ideas. Too many ideas. And I read several suggestions that Stross doesn't do rewrites, which I have no trouble believing after reading this. I had already read Iron Sunrise, but no real harm done. I was going to say that Stross never did decide whether this would be a space opera, a social satire, on a treatise on macroeconomics. It's all that and a bag of chips, and I think it could ha...

Seems to me sci-fi has come to embrace the absurd. The logic goes like this: when describing a future for humanity, a writer of necessity designs that future in terms of its technology. Near-future stories are almost never absurd. They are frequently focused on issues arising from the technology we have now. There's nothing absurd about surrendering our rights to privacy, for instance. Or how the internet makes possible virtual worlds in which we can live our lives a second time.Far-future stori...

This is a funny little sci-fi book.On the one hand, it bears many of the hallmarks of your typical "hard sci-fi" yarn. There is exotic physics aplenty, interstellar faster-than-light travel, the eponymous technological singularity (several of them in fact), a diaspora of humanity civilizations across the galaxy. The characters that inhabit this world are more difficult to label. There are two Earthlings, one male engineer and one female operative, which the reader is clearly meant to identify wi...

My first attempt at reading a Stross novel was Accelerando. I abandoned it after about 50 pages, we just did not get along. I had some problems with the prose style, the characters and the confusing plot. Still, I have always intended to give this author another try as I have been reading his blog for a while and I like them, no problem with the writing style there. Also, he is one of the most respected sf authors of the newer generation working today. He comes highly recommended by David Brin a...

Storyline: 4/5Characters: 3/5Writing Style: 3/5World: 5/5Far future military space opera with dazzling technological advances engendering far-reaching social and political transformations - this is science fiction I like. Stross's Singularity Sky fits right between Ian M. Banks (author of what is my favorite science fiction series) and Ken MacLeod (techno-heavy political revolution sci fi that never quite worked for me). These three all engage with radical politics as it would look in the future...

Stross seems to absolutely refuse to reign his ideas in...which means we may have a good long term relationship as reader and writer. This has some flaws(first novel)it drags after spectacular start(telephone rain) before getting its legs and exploding into mixture of Catch-22 in space, bizarre fairy tale, a revolution designed Heironymous Bosch and Lewis Carroll, a lesson in economics and Russian history. Loses points for having a boring protagonist(though Rachel is awesome... a female James Bo...

I am hovering around the 3.879435 out of 5 for this book. No quiet a 4 but way better than a 3.Stross is ....... well, he is....... you see he write like.........That sums up Stross. He is just out there on his own little planet, one minute writing hi tech scifi, where causality effects are detailed in a Stephen Hawking kind of way, then slams you back to earth when a talking rabbit toting a shotgun and a belt of farmers scalps asks you what you think are staring at.If you have read any Stross y...

Charles Stross has a penchant for thinking big and then bringing that to the level of the average reader by the aid of pulp. That is why he is often discussing philosophical questions like what the world will be after millennia and what the consequences of time travel are or what if the Old Gods and magic were actually real in the context of a particularly handy tech guy who falls very easily in love and then spends the rest of the book saving the world and serving the one he loves. He is also a...

I honestly don't understand why some novels are praised so highly. Take Singularity Sky, for example. It was nominated for both Hugo and Locus awards. And what does it offer? A boring plot that goes nowhere, flat uninteresting characters, pages full of irrelevant jargon about physics, a cringeworthy love interest, random POV switches, and absurd technologies, strung together with cliches and stereotypes. I found myself skimming the last 100 pages because the writing was unbearable. And then I th...