re:mote voices

Title: Singularity Sky
Editor: Charles Stross
Publisher: Orbit

Trying to explain the career of Charles Stross to date seems to be a tricky thing to do. He has something like 8 novels written, with different ones being published in different places. Singularity Sky is his first novel to be published in the UK, coming out in paper back in the UK at the start of 2005, with the sequel Iron Sunrise just out in hardback.

With Singularity Sky, Stross teases his background detail out across the course of the book, so that it takes a little time before things start to come together. Though this does mean that he isn’t bludgeoning the reader with masses of background before they are even into the narrative. Though, the basic idea is that something called the Eschaton intervened in human history at a key point. They informed the human race that reality was a fragile thing, and that they would take steps to prevent humans from messing with that. Part of which was to split the human race up, scattering them across a number of planets.

The New Republic have established a feudal system across a number of planets. Establishing an emperor and a strict anti-technology stance. This has existed for some time as a brutal regime, crushing any hint of resistance. But that is all upset on one of the planets in the system when something called the Festival arrives. Hyper technologically advanced, and entirely alien to the New Republic the festival are an instant revolution, which the authorities feel required to fight.

Stross tries to do a lot with Singularity Sky, which at times feels cluttered, so that certain threads don’t seem to have the depth and sustenance they should have. From that a couple of characters emerge, particularly Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansour. Both are external characters, from Earth, and working for different forces against the status quo of the New Republic. Topically Mansour is a UN weapons inspector and peace keeper - assigned to intervene against the regime if they get out of hand, and to ensure that no one is using inappropriate weapons of mass destruction. Springfield on the other hand is a specialist engineer who is under suspicion for a spy, but his cover is much deeper than that. These two characters really propel the novel, and without this as a thread of substance it is likely the novel would have floundered.

Stross has been publishing some of the most striking and memorable short form fiction of the last few years. Which creates a certain expectation from his first long form work to be published in his native UK. Undoubtedly Singularity Sky is densely filled with ideas, much of which is interesting and is what we want to see. The novel itself forms as a whole a work of Space Opera, which seems to be a little surprising given the type of material that he has done in the past. The result is that there is more space battles and nature of the universe text than I would necessarily like to be reading. For some writers this works particularly well, but for me, this is now where Stross’s strengths lie.

Singularity Sky has strong parallels with Iain M. Banks Culture novels. The tendency to wax lyrical about the nature of space and planetary systems is there, and is exactly the kind of thing that puts me off those Culture novels. On the other hand, Mansour strongly remind of Banks’s special circumstances characters, which is exactly the kind of thing that I do like about those Culture novels. In terms of the set up of the New Republic we have a setting which recalls the outer worlds of Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn Trilogy - a fiefdom remotely located from Earth and with less technology because of that. There are some political references to the Earth, which perhaps suggest comparison to Ken MacLeod’s work, but those are very token gestures. With a sequel already available in hardback, perhaps it will cover more of the Earth based society in this set up.

Singularity Sky has promise and hopefully Stross will live up to his potential as he gets more practice with this form. But there certainly seem to be some problems with the expansion from short fiction to long, not least a sense of occasional padding and repetition.