Charles Stross - "Iron Sunrise"
More than anything else Stross has written, "Iron Sunrise" is a pure genre novel: a sprawling, post-Singularity space opera epic. Convention doesn't serve Stross well, though: he's best when he jams so many out-there ideas onto the page that the reader can barely keep up. Stross's plotting and characterization have always been decent by SF standards, but they're clearly a vehicle for his mind-blowingly weird and strangely plausible visions of future society.
"Iron Sunrise" follows a standard space opera template. Page 1-100: introduce your characters and set up three or four plot threads. In the second hundred pages, start to hint at a deep mystery, preferably of cosmological or eschatological significance. Third, start weaving the plot threads and hint at a final confrontation, while leaving the central mystery unexplained. In the last segment, wrap everything up in a really long passage of expository dialogue. Recently, Stross admitted on his blog that he wanted to write such a novel: a reasonable goal, given that he was a new author and wanted to establish himself in the genre. The problem is that space opera generally presents an inconsistent future: it's tough to imagine a society with all the trappings of the Singularity (nanotech, strong AI, biological modifications, maybe FTL travel, etc) but with mostly unaltered human characters (and token aliens that act like humans anyway).
Stross gets around this with the device of the Eschaton, the practically godlike AI from "Singularity Sky." Without spoiling the details, it's a logically consistent way to bring conventional humanity to a space opera setting. Unfortunately, it always felt like kind of a hack. The details are glossed over in both "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise," which seems odd given the cataclysmic nature of humanity's transition to a spacefaring society. It works in "Singularity Sky," though, since that novel is already packed tight with other concepts. The Festival and its implications provide more than enough weirdness to keep the reader from worrying too much about the Eschaton. "Iron Sky," by contrast, doesn't have anything else to really grab the reader's attention. Stross used the Eschaton to allow himself to write a novel that doesn't play to his strengths. It's decently executed, and fans like me will still have a decent time reading it, but it's far from Stross's best.
"Iron Sunrise" follows a standard space opera template. Page 1-100: introduce your characters and set up three or four plot threads. In the second hundred pages, start to hint at a deep mystery, preferably of cosmological or eschatological significance. Third, start weaving the plot threads and hint at a final confrontation, while leaving the central mystery unexplained. In the last segment, wrap everything up in a really long passage of expository dialogue. Recently, Stross admitted on his blog that he wanted to write such a novel: a reasonable goal, given that he was a new author and wanted to establish himself in the genre. The problem is that space opera generally presents an inconsistent future: it's tough to imagine a society with all the trappings of the Singularity (nanotech, strong AI, biological modifications, maybe FTL travel, etc) but with mostly unaltered human characters (and token aliens that act like humans anyway).
Stross gets around this with the device of the Eschaton, the practically godlike AI from "Singularity Sky." Without spoiling the details, it's a logically consistent way to bring conventional humanity to a space opera setting. Unfortunately, it always felt like kind of a hack. The details are glossed over in both "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise," which seems odd given the cataclysmic nature of humanity's transition to a spacefaring society. It works in "Singularity Sky," though, since that novel is already packed tight with other concepts. The Festival and its implications provide more than enough weirdness to keep the reader from worrying too much about the Eschaton. "Iron Sky," by contrast, doesn't have anything else to really grab the reader's attention. Stross used the Eschaton to allow himself to write a novel that doesn't play to his strengths. It's decently executed, and fans like me will still have a decent time reading it, but it's far from Stross's best.
posted by Charles Krohn at 1:24 PM
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