ne little Singularity can ruin your whole day! One minute, Earth is a bustling planet of 10 billion souls. The next minute, a godlike AI has bootstrapped itself into existence out of the world's computer systems, arbitrarily teleported 9 billion people to various worlds scattered across the galaxy and throughout time, and left the Earth in shambles. In the wake of its departure for points unknown, the deity—Eschaton—has left cornucopia machines, immortality drugs and a host of other technological gifts. Also a stern injunction: Don't mess with time travel. Apparently, Eschaton is nervous about humanity editing its birth out of history. And Eschaton has a way of enforcing its rules with things like planet-busting asteroids.
But many decades after all this turmoil, humanity has settled down to a fairly upbeat and fulfilling existence. Dozens of planets offer a range of vibrant cultures, among which Earth is still preeminent. Divided into hundreds of small polities, the homeworld still features a United Nations that serves as a kind of intergalactic cop. Rachel Monsour is one of the UN troubleshooters. Her husband, Martin Springfield, is a covert agent for Eschaton. In Singularity Sky (2003), they had to deal with the world of the New Republic, which wanted to use time travel to get a jump on an enemy, the Festival. In their new adventure, Rachel and Martin take a bit of a back seat to some new characters.
The world of Moscow has just been evaporated in an artificial supernova, producing the "iron sunrise" of the title. Scattered around the galaxy are a few surviving Muscovites, including the teenage Victoria Strowger, aka Wednesday Shadowmist. Wednesday has the misfortune of stumbling upon some secret documents relating to the death of Moscow. It appears that the ReMastered—a kind of Aryan engineered super-race—was somehow responsible. Now Wednesday becomes one of their targets. But Wednesday—a rebellious loner—has had an "invisible friend" since birth—a friend who turns out to be Eschaton himself. With the deity's help, Wednesday will seek to outrun her pursuers on a cruise across the galaxy on the luxury spaceliner Romanov. Staying one step ahead of the ReMastered killers, Wednesday falls in love with a cantankerous, muckraking warblogger, Frank the Nose Johnson, and is befriended by a crew member, Steffi Grace.
Meanwhile, Rachel and Martin are working on another problem. Before they died, the Muscovites set in motion a revenge plan, aiming slower-than-light warships against their innocent commercial rival, New Dresden. The STL ships can be recalled by any three surviving Muscovite ambassadors—but someone is murdering the diplomats one at a time. Unless Rachel and Martin can solve these murders, millions will die. Their investigations eventually bring them aboard the Romanov and interlock with Wednesday's dilemma. But the cruel ReMastered leader, U. Portia Hoechst, is also present, and has her own bloody ideas about how to clean up the mess in favor of the ReMastered.
Best of the old and new SF
Since the early '90s, U.K. native Charles Stross has been building a reputation in the short-story field as a writer of startling talents. His recent "Accelerando" stories in Asimov's have been the quintessence of info-dense, ideation-rich, total-immersion SF. But to those who form their impression of the genre solely through book-buying, Stross has been practically invisible until just recently. His first book, a story collection titled Toast, became available only in 2002. Then Singularity Sky last year, followed this year by The Atrocity Archives and Iron Sunrise. Finally, Stross may be reaching a critical mass of work that will attract the attention he so richly deserves.
Stross can be compared to Greg Egan, Stephen Baxter and Vernor Vinge for the depth of his speculations. He deals with massive, cutting-edge changes and themes, embodying them in vivid characters, weird situations and panoramic settings. In terms of tone and prose stylings, he aligns with Bruce Sterling and Cory Doctorow, favoring jazzy metaphors and similes and a wry, sometimes deadpan narrative voice. Like these two writers, he also exhibits the blackest of comic perspectives, full of irony and caustic jibes at some of mankind's dumber aspects.
But in these two books, he also exhibits a surprising affection for a more retro brand of SF. The basic plot and premise of these books—intergalactic troubleshooters—have been seen in the classic work of a dozen writers. Poul Anderson, with his Flandry series; Keith Laumer, with his Retief tales; James Schmitz and his Telzey stories; and individual offerings from H. Beam Piper, H.B. Fyfe, Randall Garrett, Christopher Anvil and others. All of this grand tradition feeds into Stross' work, and very consciously so, I believe. (After all, this is a writer who put a direct allusion to van Vogt's "Weapon Makers" tales into Singularity Sky.) Other little homages to past SF abound. I'd say that Wednesday's living ticket is straight out of Sheckley, for instance, while Wednesday's name itself might be intended to evoke Heinlein's heroine Friday.
It's this respect for the past traditions of SF, combined with his absolute contemporariness and zeitgeist awareness, that makes Stross such an emblematic writer of what's eternally hopeful about SF. It always manages to renew itself while retaining the best of its past.
I'm ranking Iron Sunrise as a hair less than perfect only in comparison to its predecessor. The villains of the new book are far less interesting than the non-human Festival portrayed in the first. And while Wednesday and Frank are OK as romantic leads, they hardly compare to Rachel and Martin, who are onstage much less here. But all in all, the novel offers thrills, brain food and a sense of wonder. Of his future, Stross says, "It was, in short, a time of optimism and expansion," and the same sentiment should apply to his career.
