Charles Stross is an author I discovered falling trails of ‘if you liked this novel…’ on Amazon.com – which is how I’ve discovered a number of new authors recently. His novel Singularity Sky was highly rated and recommended, so the next time I was at a book store I picked it up.

The premise of the setting of Singularity Sky is one of the more original I’ve encountered. In the 21st century the first AI, Eschaton, was created and faster than light travel is developed. Shortly after this event, a version of Eschaton from the far future scattered most of humanity throughout a few thousand light year volume of space around Earth. The ensuing future has been humanity re-establishing contact with the various colonies.

Interestingly, Eschaton, grouped the people according to their philosophies, which resulted in wild variances in the various colonies. The New Republic, for example, is composed of what we would call social conservatives. The government is a monarchy, the military very traditional, and so on.

What happens when the hidebound, and thus technologically backwards, society encounters the Festival, an almost entirely information based society? They prepare to fight a very traditional war against a foe who doesn’t barely acknowledges the conflict, but is more than able to fend off the brute force attacts of the New Republic, and is really only passing through in order to bribe the locals with advanced technology for entertainment and information.

Through in a pair of espionage agents, who are not incidentally working for the same side per se, from Earth who are trying to prevent causality violations (faster-than-light travel will let you do that) and learn about the Festival. They are especially keen to avoid the causality violations because those are strongly frowned upon by Eschaton who tends to just annihilate the area of space involved, presumably to protect itself as well as the integrity of the universe.

The novel is quite innovative on other levels that I won’t spoil by telling you hear. Pacing is good and there is a hefty bit of action, character development and tension on multiple levels.

As was the case with Iain M. Banks in the review immediately previous to this one, this is my first Stross novel, and I was not at all disappointed. Another author I plan to read more. I’ll be reading forever, at least I hope so!

Add some Stross to your to be read pile soon.