Review: Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

My rating: 0 of 5 stars



This book, like many sci-fi books, has an interesting idea and tries to do too much by building a book around it. The central plot is that an alien intelligence comes to a world which is deliberately trapped in an arrested state where the aristocracy rules over a land of peasants and the economy is mostly agrarian. The aliens drop devices on the planet that can basically grant anyone's wishes, with predictable results on the order and structure of this world.

The other plotline revolves around an agent who is attempting to keep the imperial power from going back in time to defeat what the empire considers an invading enemy. The two plots finally meet at the end, but for the vast majority of the book have very little to do with each other.

While I enjoyed Stross' writing for the most part, the book suffers from the common failing of trying to build a story around an interesting idea. The characters are not truly memorable, although they're serviceable for hanging the plot on. The other problem is that the plot that the author chooses to spend most of his time on (the one about the agents trying to stop the imperial fleet from time travelling) is a lot less interesting than what's happening on the planet. The entire story is driven by the changes happening on the planet, but aside from maybe a total of 40 or 50 pages we don't see what's happening there at all!

The author, in the name of realism, uses a lot of descriptions of the fleet ships, detailing their hulls, weapons, and crew. It honestly gets quite burdensome, even for those of us who read plenty of military fiction. I think he overdoes it. In comparison, David Drake is much more readable in terms of his description both of his military technology and the battles fought. Less is more, as they say.

All in all, I would recommend this book for the average sci-fi reader looking for something to read, but this is another one I would not lead someone into the genre with. I liked it, but it failed to capitalize on its most interesting component, instead choosing to focus on the much less interesting story of the two agents.



View all my reviews