Singularity Sky

I'm so Old School, I know Charles Stross as "the guy who wrote the good monsters in the Fiend Folio" rather than a novelist. In fact, I've never read a novel of his before -- and I guess I still haven't, since I'm technically listening to this novel.

This was his first novel, from 2003 (though I didn't know that when I picked it out). I'm halfway done now and...well, at one point about a third of the way through I was ready to ditch the rest. I get what he's doing -- showing us that, even in a post-singularity world, people are still people -- they cuss, they think about sex, they kill each other over stupid stuff. It's just ...not much fun, or not the kind of fun I expect from science fiction.

Now, a lot of the other details are what I consider the "fun" in science fiction -- Stross is great at "tech jargon," or, putting super science into dialog form, whether it's short, familiar names for big hi-tech items, or mundane orders involving this big-tech that military technicians might spout off. When world-building, not every author thinks down to the tiny details like that.

There is a lot of backstory to absorb here, but I never felt like I was getting an info dump. A lot that is only eluded to in earlier chapters is never fully revealed until an interlude chapter almost halfway through.

I feel absorbed enough in the story now that I'll probably finish it. Our two main characters seem trapped in an impossible situation where they are somewhere between hours and weeks away from getting killed in a poorly planned military strike against a far more powerful alien force, and I haven't figured out myself how they can get out of it.

The narrator does a good job of differentiating voices, some better than others. Rachel has two distinct voices, which threw me for a short while, but since she began the book disguised, maybe it made sense to distinguish her like that.