| Category: | Books |
| Genre: | Science Fiction & Fantasy |
| Author: | Charles Stross |
There is a sort of band-aid theory among novel writers. Some believe in slowly exposing you the the setting and the gestalt of the book, letting you adjust your thinking to odd ideas or novel concepts being presented, while others believe in the 'rip it off quick' school, dunking you head first, full bodied, into a radically different reality. Charlie's novel "Singularity Sky" is an adherent to the "tear it off with joy, with prejudice, and a noogie on the side" school, which is a bit more extreme than your garden variety bandage ripper.
We are presented with an impoverished peasant boy, in a peasant village, on a primitive backwater planet in the distant future, who is suddenly presented, along with the rest of the inhabitants of his benighted world, with a technology and an entity so far outside their worldview that their culture can't help but self destruct in the ensuing local economic singularity.
This book is all about singularities. Not the gravity well, black hole variety, nor of the jump through to other planets variety, but the technological variety first posited by Vernor Vinge. He, along with SF luminaries like John Campbell have asserted for years that you can't write SF about beyond the singularity. Many an SF author has lamented this concept and cursed Vinges name. Stross proves them quite wrong here. It is quite possible to write about the posthuman future, just so long as you don't try to portray a truly transcendant entity face to face, because you will always come up short.
In Stross' novel, the truly transcendant entity is The Eschaton, who we never meet. The only evidence of its existence are the remnants it leaves of societies that try to screw around with technology that would alter the timeline, and the warnings it leaves etched in stone for future generations that never seem to learn the lesson. Sometimes these interventions are not so spectacular, sometimes nobody notices them at all, because they are performed by agents of "The Big E" behind the scenes.
Stross uses the 'rip it off' technique here to try to give the reader some idea of how truly shattering a "consensus reality incursion" can be. We've seen them before, when europeans met the native americans, etc. In this case, an entity called "The Festival" which operates as an interstellar cable guy visits this backward world, in the mistaken belief that the lack of interstellar network signals from this location need repairing. In order to get the local technology up to snuff, it engages in a campaign of dropping cellphones from orbit, by which anybody can "entertain" the Festival with original knowledge and receive technological goodies in return, including 'cornucopea machines', nanotechnological replicator machines. So long as you keep the Festival entertained, it will rain down upon you wonders that the former economy could never have presented even if it were allowed to by the government.
The only problem with this strategy is that this world is deliberately kept primitive by the neoluddite fascists of the New Republic government, which sees this 'consensus reality incursion' as an act of war, not as a mere issue of trade violation. To respond to this threat, it sends its primitive space navy, which is dependent upon the technological export castoffs of the anarchical transhuman economy of old Earth, to deal with this threat via a route which infringes upon the restrictions the Eschaton puts on humanity: No Screwing With The Time Line.
The resulting story is an entertaining object lesson in trying to outlaw the tide.
