[Originally part of one post discussing the 2004 Hugo Nominees for Novel, broken up for MT import; see that post for comments]
The book I’m voting above third, above “No Award” but below the other two, is Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky. As the title suggests, this is directly concerned with the effects of different kinds of Singularities. The backstory’s Singularity was when nine-tenths of humanity vanished and humanity was told:
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.
Turns out the populations were dispersed across time and space, into colonies of sorts. One of those colonies was populated by “a mixed bag of East European technorejectionists and royalists, hankering for the comforting certainties of an earlier century,” which set up a highly conservative social order complete with bureaucracy, Emperors, and secret police. They are, to say the least, deeply unprepared when the Festival shows up, drops cell phones everywhere, and offers those who pick them up anything they want in return for entertainment.
On this opening, I had pretty low expectations—oh, we’re going to make fun of these people, didn’t we fight this wars already and win them? It was actually better than I expected, though, as the book shows the chaos caused by this economic Singularity and its real cost. The New Republic is not a nice place, and I didn’t root for it, but I did have a fair bit of sympathy for it and its denizens.
The book doesn’t fully work for other reasons, however. I’m not convinced by the central romance; frankly, I’m given no reason to be convinced. There’s a horribly book-stopping “information wants to be free” speech. The main reason, though, is that the tone and plot are a mismatch. A character complains at the end that there wasn’t anybody without a covert agenda, which is true, and the plot’s more than a little farcical as a result—except the tone’s too serious for farce, and so the book just ends up feeling like a mess.
There are definitely good things to Singularity Sky. The characters are largely sympathetic, there are amusing turns of phrase, and the backstory is fascinating. As a work, though, it doesn’t really gel.