Iron sunrise
When the planet of New Moscow was brutally destroyed, its few survivors launched a counter-attack against the most likely culprit: the neighbouring system of trade rival New Dresden. But New Dresden wasn't responsible, and as the deadly missiles approach their target, Rachel Mansour, agent for the interests of Old Earth, is assigned to find out who was. The one person who does know is a disaffected teenager who calls herself Wednesday Shadowmist. But Wednesday has no idea where she might be hiding this significant information. Time is limited and if Rachel can't resolve this mystery it will mean annihilation of an entire world.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
28mentions
22people
2010–2025years
46% recommend50% neutral4% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My favourite Stross books are "Saturn's Children", "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise" in that order, to name some of his other books. "Neptune's Breed" is the sequel to "Saturn's Children". For "Singularity Sky" and "Iron Sunrise", I really enjoyed the concept of an AI that seeks to prevent the use of time travel to change history, by using secret agents that are distributed between multiple star systems.
- It's not fair to call it "Blueskyism" because it really started on Twitter and Tumblr and was prevalent on Mastodon until many of those people moved to Bluesky between Nov 2024-Jan 2025.
I had to create a long list of block rules (like I don't care if you car blew its "transmission" or if you came from "transnistria") [1] to be able to stand Mastodon, I even blocked sci-fi writer Charlie Stross [2] because he kept saying mainstream politicians who hear "the call of the mild" like Keir Starmer were fascist. My impression is that Mastodon is getting better lately, I dunno if the obnoxious people are in despair, moved to Bluesky, came to the conclusion that it was their fault Harris lost, or if I finally blocked the last one, or if my tribe found me or if I just don't care anymore.
I share 5 photos a day and about the same number of articles similar to what I post to HN on both Mastodon and Bluesky. My feed is full of other people's photos and similar sorts of articles. I use the tools available to suppress angry people and it works -- I get mostly good engagement, maybe one hysterical angry person a month. I'm not there to pick fights the way the people who Neil lionizes do. It's their business, it's how they drive traffic to their blogs.
Where I do see the negative people is when I play the followback game where I pay attention to two variables (but don't take rigorous notes) One of them is negativity, if their bio says "#BlueCrew", anything about politics or that somebody is "diss abled" or blames their problems on somebody else I won't follow them. In sets that I look at it is typical to have somewhere between 20-60% negative people. I am noticing really poor follow-back performance from the academic science sorts of people and first thought these people were just stuck up but then noticed a lot of them posted last 1-2 months ago. So it could be they are getting too much bad engagement or not enough good engagement, it fits with the story of decline that we keep hearing about though.
I keep thinking about automating my followback spamming and that would require developing a classifier for negative people and if I did that I'd be getting good stats but between taking photos, developing photos and posting photos and Arknights I haven't gotten around to it.
[1] I don't care if it's a good thing or a bad thing, it's that people are angry about whether they are for or against it and anger is contagious.
[2] If only he kept writing books like Iron Sunrise and Singularity Sky but he broke bad the way Niven and Heinlein did in the 1970s.
- I adore Banks' universe, but recall reading some notes from him years ago, as tialaramex indicated, that 'all the interesting stuff happens at the edge' given utopias are, almost by definition, pretty tedious.
Even though there's a good amount of utopia-description in the novels, I'd still be wary about extrapolating too much from what are primarily stories of exceptions.
(One might suggest, in response to TFA's expectation there'd be more arseholes in the Culture, that one of the most important things a utopian Culture would ensure is a robust education for all its citizens -- but I realise some popular contemporary earth-bound cultures may take that as a subtle dig.)
> we need more fiction examples of positive AI superintelligence
I'd rate the Eschaton series by Charlie Stross (sadly only two books ever published in that series, and it's unlikely we'll ever see a third) - Singularity Sky & Iron Sunrise - in this category.
I think Accelerando might fit, too.
- It's a significant gap, to be sure.
Charlie Stross has written some excellent books - his Eschaton series might be relevant to your interests, though unfortunately he's said he won't write any more and so we have only the two (Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise). I listened to the audio books of these, and the narration was excellent.
I also have very fond memories of reading Accelerando, though reviewers said it was more like an essay than a novel, I don't recall having anything like that takeaway when I read it.
- I should read it again in light of that. I did find that Stross's early work (Accelerando, Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, Colder War) heavily influenced my worldview and path in life. I haven't touched Accelerando in over a decade although I go back to the other novels on occasion.
- Has a history.
Piers Anthony didn’t quite rail against his fans but he complained bitterly about having a contract that obligated him to write Xanth books at a superhuman rate even if it made him rich. He probably hates Xanth more than I did.
Similarly Douglas Adams hit it big with Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which created a new kind of fan. I read an Asimov book and then read more Asimov books and then Heinlein and Pohl and Herbert and Anderson and Leiber and Smith and Anthony and many others. People whose first book was Hitchhiker followed the trajectory of reading the same book hundreds of times rather than hundreds of books by different authors. Adams’ success left him typecast and boxed in, something he was resentful about, probably more resentful than I was at feeling really alone in a world of ‘sci-fi fans’ who had never branched out past Doug Adams (and who wouldn’t have even bought a Doug Adams book that was the slightest bit different.)
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I’ll not though I enjoyed Stross’s early books (Iron Sunrise and Singularit Sky) and I like his antipope blog but I could not stand following him on Mastodon because he uses the word “fascist” the way some people use another f-word, as in “Keir Starmer is a fascist”
He gets halfway through that article before he uses that word, to his credit.
I grew up around the same time as Musk and certainly the branch of 1970s sci-fi he talks about appealed to me a lot, but he leaves out the story of the “new wave” which formed in opposition to the strand he’s talking about but ran out of steam in the 1970s and the rise of Tor Press which had a much more militaristic (would someone dare say “fascist?”) orientation which turned me off.
