Singularity Sky

Another quick delve into "the pile", Singularity Sky by the British writer Charles Stross. One of the last books I read - but haven't blogged - had a quote from him on its cover and, one quick Wikipedia trawl later, I latched onto this one because of its intriguing set-up ...

---

After triggering a technological singularity, humanity is suddenly the recipient of an unexpected and undesired diaspora. Relocated by the inscrutable actions of the Eschaton, the godlike AI created by the event, humans find themselves spread across distant worlds throughout the galaxy. Gradually, the dispersed shards of humanity find their feet and begin to re-establish contact, but the Eschaton also spread humans across a few hundred years of time, resulting in a range of societies at different developmental stages. This baroque galactic landscape includes recognisable futures, but also a diverse range of imperial, communist and anarchist offshoots, united only by a warning - engraved in large letters on mountains - from the AI ...

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.

Against this backdrop, the novel is centred on a conflict between the New Republic, a totalitarian empire, and one of its outlying provincial colonies, Rochard's World, which has accidentally seceded after a run-in with the Festival, a post-human shard with an interest in performance art. Completely failing to grasp the nature of the "rebellion", the New Republic flies off the handle and immediately dispatches a powerful task force to restore its hegemony. Intent on nipping the Festival's seditious activities in the bud, the fleet is sent into the past with the aim to arrive at Rochard's World just ahead of the Festival. To achieve this, an engineer specialising in the necessary FTL travel, Martin Springfield, is recruited to outfit the task force, only to himself unwillingly dragooned into service. But the New Republic's bold plan violates the Eschaton's warning, and a secret agent from Earth, Rachel Mansour, is infiltrated into the fleet with the mission to prevent such a misstep and to avoid the AI's wrath. Stars have been induced to go supernova for less after all ...

---

What a disappointment.

As I hope I've succeeded in conveying above, the novel has this brilliant premise of a future humanity dispersed by a mysterious AI for mysterious reasons, and then fractionating into disparate societies. But in focusing on a narrow, local conflict - and doing so almost to the exclusion of this wider backdrop - it leaves its promise completely unfulfilled. Infuriatingly the Eschaton barely makes an appearance, and when it does, it's solely through intermediaries (as far as one can judge). Worse, Singularity Sky is written from the perspectives of a series of easily interchangeable characters - they shouldn't be, but they are. With the result that it's too easy to get lost as the novel messily jumps between a succession of confusing strands.

In its defence, the novel is unusually humorous. Britishly so, in fact. There are frequently amusing lines, and the set-up contains a number of what are actually quite good gags - for example, the Festival is chased by the Fringe, a ragtag collection of appreciators of its work. It also has the amiable Asher-esque quality of letting likeable characters survive amidst violence. But all of this actually works against it, since it acts to erode both the seriousness of the situation in which the characters find themselves - potential supernova, anyone? - and makes it difficult to get concerned about characters you know will survive. And, again, it all just serves to overshadow the neat central mystery of what the Eschaton is up to.

So a big thumbs-down for this one. True, it's not terrible (and certainly isn't a disaster), but it's rare to read a novel that so comprehensively fails to live up to its initial promise. It may be that a sequel (of which, there's one) does the business, but it seems unlikely, and even if it did, it would just jar with this novel. Why completely sidestep a pivotal, galaxy-scale mystery in one novel only to completely resolve it in the next? That would be dumb - though that might be exactly what Stross does. I think I might just read the summary on Wikipedia and be done with it ...