Book Review: Science Fiction of Charles Stross

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English science fiction (SF) author Charles Stross has got me hooked after reading the three novels mentioned below. I first heard of him from a list of nominees and winners of the Prometheus Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society, always a good recommendation. These novels are hard SF, and Stross has an understated dark sense of humor that sneaks up on you and that I like.
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The two novels making up the “Eschaton” series are Singularity Sky (2003) and its sequel Iron Sunrise (2004). After a “technological singularity” occurs in our near future, suddenly the people of Earth find that 90% of the human population has disappeared overnight. After the humans left on Earth finally recover their economic and scientific strength, they venture out and discover that the missing humans are scattered throughout the galaxy on various worlds.
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The cause of all this is that an apparently super-strong Artificial Intelligence, calling itself “the Eschaton,” had developed yet farther into the future, and after developing faster-than-light travel and time-travel, it/they came back and intervened in human affairs for the sole reason of preventing human use of time-travel. If humans acquire the ability to travel in time (“violating causality”) they may interfere in earlier history and cancel out the conditions that originally gave rise to the Eschaton’s very existence, deleting it from history and the future.
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After dispersing humanity, the Eschaton has left everyone alone, except for leaving one message (in monumental letters) wherever humanity lives:
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“I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and I live in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.”
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Any of the scattered human civilizations who try to time-travel are hammered. Hard.
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Two of the main characters in the series are Martin Springfield and Rachel Mansur. They are from Earth, which is described by the more totalitarian human civilizations elsewhere as “old anarchist Earth.” (p.3). These two characters are tasked with trying to keep stupid human civilizations from violating causality.
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Rachel is a real heroine, a tough combatant and a weary idealist. She is an agent for the Earth’s UN – but this future UN is expressly a “non-government,” a “talking shop” more descended from the Internet Engineering Task Force of today than from today’s UN that was viewed as a “quasi-fascist world government” by “fringe anarchists” of the 20th and 21st centuries, “when strong governments were in fashion….” (p.281). [Am I a fringe anarchist?]
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When asked if she had ever done prison time on Earth, Rachel replies: “Yeah. Spent eight months inside, once, banged up for industrial espionage by an agricultural cartel. Amnesty Multinational made me a prisoner of commerce and started up a trade embargo: that got me sprung pretty quick.” (pp.122-3). This is the type of humor one finds occasionally in Stross’s work. Rachel remembers an evolved form of Islam on Earth, a murderous fundamentalist sect of Algerian Latter-Day Saints, who kill cosmologists for blasphemy against the prophet Yusuf Smith and who thoroughly suppressed the “Tiplerite heresy.” (p.115).
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An agent from the totalitarian and conservative New Republic considers Rachel, who is an openly individualistic woman, to be “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” (which of course is the description Lady Caroline Lamb used for Lord Byron).
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Although Stross does not consider himself to be a “libertarian,” there are enough strains of that worldview in his work to attract libertarians. For instance, Martin Springfield gets in trouble with the repressive New Republic government for telling people in a bar that “the concept of tax is no different from extortion” (p.113) and “a social contract enforced by compulsion is not a valid contract.” When hauled in before an official for this, he is asked, for dossier purposes, what governmental jurisdiction on Earth he is subject to, and he tries to explain to them that he is not a subject of any government. When they cannot comprehend this, he states: “I am a sovereign individual; I’m not owned by any government” (p.114). (This is in the true spirit of “Freeborn” John Lilburne, the great 17th century English Leveler.) Rachel later mentions a “home-grown libertarian underground” on New Republic.
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The sequel, Iron Sunrise (2004), introduces us to a teenage girl nicknamed Wednesday. She is a rebel, and her story adds to and continues that of Singularity Sky. Both were very enjoyable reads.
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Stross’ novel Saturn’s Children (2008) is the first of a proposed series, with a sequel in the works with a 2013 publishing (working title: Neptune’s Brood). In this far future, all humans have become extinct, but their technology and their androids of various kinds survive and have created a kind of feudal society with aristocrats and workers. Our heroine, Freya, is a female android courtesan of the type originally designed to sexually service human men. There is also a Jeeves Corporation providing a courier service, and every representative office is managed by an android Jeeves. (I envision Stephen Fry in this role.) The ending is nice, and I look forward to the proposed sequel.
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Read any Charles Stross’s novels that are in a series in their proper order. His stand-alone novel, Glasshouse (2006), won a Prometheus Award from the LFS, but I have not found a copy yet. Another stand-alone novel, Accelerando (2005), I have just acquired but not yet read. I intend to search out anything he wrote, as I am a real fan.
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-Zenwind.
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