e have waited a while for this. For years, Charles Stross has had bad luck with publishers, who seem to go belly-up as soon as he signs on. Several novels, I believe, have disappeared down one black hole or another; I have no idea if Singularity Sky represents the Recovered Memory of some such disappearance, or if it is entirely new, though my guess is that it has either been thoroughly Primped for Market or is entirely new. That the book exists at all, and is available to us, is good news. It is also good news that it was released by a trade publisher (too many titles announced from small presses and PODS seem never to actually "exist" in any "traditional" understanding of the word "exist": in the traditional world, mentioning a book online is not tantamount to making it; to order a small press or POD book is often to make a gamble that it will eventually exist, a gamble often lost). It is also good news that Stross has occasionally been able, in Singularity Sky, to unleash his own densely carbonated let-me-tell-you voice, usually in infodumps whose implications would shake his tale to bits if adhered to. The bad news is that the story of the book is tosh, though there are moments of real inspiration; and that its principal protagonists, for whom we feel a sympathy akin to the pity we feel for any adult actor caught in the stupefying nightmare of PG-13, frequently seem nonplussed by the lines they are asked to utter.
Some of the story stuff is fun, all the same, even though PG-13ed into near-idiocy. And the overall structure of the inhabited universe—within which the circular storyline of Singularity Sky functions as a kind of typographical error, the kind of storyline that can end satisfactorily only by being expunged—is as potentially useful an arena for 21st century space opera as any of those created by Stross' contemporaries, from Vernor Vinge to Ken McLeod. We are 400 (or maybe 500) years up the line. The Singularity has duly occurred, somewhere in the middle of the 21st century, though Stross is not much interested (not in this novel, anyway: I suspect the default arena that Singularity Sky has flyspecked will be used again) in how or why:
What it was—a manifestation of a strongly superhuman intelligence, as far beyond an augmented human's brain as a human mind is beyond that of a frog—wasn't in question. Where it was from, to say nothing of when it was from, was another matter. ... Strange impenetrable objects—tetrahedrons, mostly, but with some other platonic solids thrown in, silvery and massless—appeared dotted across the surface of the planet of the inner solar system. Networks crashed. One message crystallized out in the information-saturated pool of human discourse:
I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.
I am descended from you, and I exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
This is fun, as far as it goes. It integrates a cartoon version of the concept of Singularity into the toolbox of space opera, and sets Singularity Sky squarely into Singularity Aftermath country (as the novel is not about the Singularity, the title of the novel is not about the novel; but let that pass, and let Alastair Reynolds, author of Revelation Space and Redemption Ark etc., etc., be flattered). The problem with the passage, insofar as our pleasure of the text is ultimately concerned, is that it is essentially a throwaway (see below for what it is thrown away for), except for the final phrase about not violating causality. We gain no clue as to we are to understand how this superhuman pushmipullyu entity/not-entity has contrived to give itself the name of a PG-13 supervillain; nor are we ever given the slightest hint as to where it got its sense of humor. The Singularity, and the Eschaton What Did It, are nothing but toolkit.
Time enough for love
So except for the prohibition against causality violation, which thinly fuels the surface plot from a lot of fathoms deep, this paragraph—and several other infodump bits of considerable potential interest, had they been integrated into the telling—is WYSIWYG: it floats in the gab of story; it is a gift, a trouvaille; it does not knit the bones of a great space opera. Causality violation, on the other hand, is genuinely interesting. What the Eschaton has prohibited is the use of any form of science-fictional device—like certain kinds of FTL, or time travel—that might weaken the fibers of the story of things, and thus endanger the Eschaton itself, which is seemingly adherent to and dependent upon the anthropic universe we all inhabit and which has seemingly been "designed" to make us, and It, possible. The story of Singularity Sky is all about a doomed dunderheaded attempt to logic-chop the Eschaton by traveling back in time only to a point that would not violate the structure of the universe.
Here is that story. After the Singularity, the Eschaton (we assume) has scattered billions of humans in significant aggregations across 3,000 light-years of home galaxy. One of the aggregations, or societies, thus created is called the New Republic. The planets under its domain are rigidly controlled by an anti-technology inquisition, and ruled by an hereditary monarchy. So purblind are these governing forces that their operatives (not to speak of the rigidly conservative colonels and generals and admirals who carry out their diktats) are incapable of understanding any proposition that violates their mindset.
So when Rachel Mansour, a spy from the United Nations back on almost infinitely fragmented and complex Earth, arrives in the New Republic, she cannot be understood, even when she runs rings around her stiff-necked adversaries, just as Keith Laumer's Retief used to, in the old days. She is on New Republic for various reasons, but everything comes to a head after a quasi-non-human kind-of-entity-cum-nest called the Festival invades Rochard's World, one of the New Republic colonies, infesting it with cornucopia machines—nano-assembly factories that make anything on command—and in other ways shaking the colonists free of the institutional controls that had barred them from free information. Information being the warp and woof of reality, the New Republic is a wound in the real; and the Festival's main function is as a healer; it "repairs holes in the galactic information flow." And by asking its patients to repay its good work with stories, the Festival comes close—as does the novel at other points—to articulating a sense that the universe itself is story-shaped, that (in other words) the only way to gain information is to touch it. Once freed, human beings keep the information that makes the universe in touch. So far so good, and some of the transforms undergone by Rochard's World are illuminating.
One of the shapers awakens from slumber
But close is no cigar. We never really find out why the Festival is so named (or how it relates to the Eschaton, Who/What we never do encounter); no hints of Revel or Masque underly the housecleaning remit Stross leaves us with as explanation in the final pages of Singularity Sky. And the novel never comes remotely close to any genuine embodiment of what the touch of the universe might feel like. The main reason that nothing of this transfigures the tale may lie in the line of story that occupies most of its bulk, the line of story I haven't quite yet responsibly addressed, but hey. Here we go.
The New Republic space navy, terribly archaic because of the anti-technology straitjacket imposed upon it, is sent on a mission to Rochard's World. The plan is to jump forward in time in several stages through the use of FTL technology, and then to jump backward in time to a point just after the arrival of the Festival, and catch them by surprise. New Republic pundits argue that not going back in time before that incursion will keep the New Republic within the letter of the Eschaton law. That this is patent nonsense we know, Rachel Mansour knows, and her very attractive co-spy Martin Springfield (also from Earth, and very secretly in the employ of the Eschaton) knows. Rachel and Martin are seconded aboard the armada. Martin sabotages the timing devices that shape the time-travel jaunt so that the armada arrives at Rochard's World exactly when it would have had it gone straight there; and both escape into erotic seclusion, where they recuperate for the next novel (unannounced but pretty likely). The Festival defense mechanisms destroy the fleet, more or less instantly. And we have spent most of a long novel in the company of idiot functionaries locked into a plot we know must fail.
Not that it isn't fun to see Rachel make fools of various functionaries. Not that there aren't moments of inspiration throughout, good jokes, well-imagined aliens. Not that our SF sense of dramatic irony—traditional SF readers
