Singularity sky
In the twenty-first century man created the Eschaton, a. It pushed Earth through the greatest technological evolution ever known, while warning that time travel is forbidden, and transgressors will be eliminated. Distant descendants of this ultra high-tech Earth live in parochial simplicity on the far-flung worlds of the New Republic. Their way of life is threatened by the arrival of an alien information plague known as the Festival. As forbidden technologies are literally dropped from the sky, suppressed political factions descend into revolutionary turmoil. A battle fleet is sent from Earth to destroy the Festival, but Spaceship engineer Martin Springfield and U.N. diplomat Rachel Mansour have been assigned rather different tasks. Their orders are to diffuse the crisis or to sabotage the New Republic's war-fleet, whatever the cost, before the Eschaton takes hostile action on a galactic scale.
Stats for nerds
25recommend
55mentions
42people
2008–2026years
55% recommend45% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I absolutely LOVE Accelerando. I've recommended it to everyone I meet for years.
If you're looking for other great sci-fi reads:
John Ringo - Live free or die
John Varley - Titan (-> Wizard / Demon)
Charles Stross - Singularity Sky
Vernor Vinge - A Fire Upon the Deep / A Deepness in the Sky
Robert Heinlein - Stranger in a Strange Land
Dan Simmons - Hyperion
Alastair Reynolds - Revelation Space / The Prefect
Orson Scott Card - Enders game
Isaac Asimov - Foundation
- Glasshouse[1] by Charles Stross
Permutation City[2] by Greg Egan
We Are Legion (We Are Bob)[3] by Dennis E. Taylor
Halting State[4] by Charles Stross
Singularity Sky[5] by Charles Stross
Dungeon Crawler Carl[6] by Matt Dinniman
Zero World[7] by Jason M. Hough
The Shockwave Rider[8] by John Brunner
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasshouse_(novel)
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permutation_City
[3]: https://www.amazon.com/We-Are-Legion-Bob-Bobiverse/dp/166822...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_State
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_Sky
[6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Crawler_Carl
- 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.
