NEWTON'S WAKE: A SPACE OPERA
In the aftermath of the Hard Rapture-a cataclysmic war sparked by the explosive evolution of Earth's artificial intelligences into godlike beings-a few remnants of humanity managed to survive. Some even prospered. Lucinda Carlyle, head of an ambitious clan of galactic entrepreneurs, had carved out a profitable niche for herself and her kin by taking control of the Skein, a chain of interstellar gates left behind by the posthumans. But on a world called Eurydice, a remote planet at the farthest rim of the galaxy, Lucinda stumbled upon a forgotten relic of the past that could threaten the Carlyles' way of life. For, in the last instants before the war, a desperate band of scientists had scanned billions of human personalities into digital storage, and sent them into space in the hope of one day resurrecting them to the flesh. Now, armed, dangerous, and very much alive, these revenants have triggered a fateful confrontation that could shatter the balance of power, and even change the nature of reality itself.
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What Hacker News says
- For more in this line, check out Newton's Wake, by Ken MacLeod. In that book, there are combat archeologists: people who go places where a singularity blew through, leaving all manner of post-singularity technology lying around, and they have to make sense of it to use them or steal ideas from them, only they have to do this in the midst of armed conflict over ownership of those things.
- I read Newton's Wake by Macleod last year and didn't like it much. Put me off reading anything else by him.
I would recommend Charlie Stross to fill the void.
- Newton's Wake is kind of variable. Some bits I like, some bits are meh.
If you feel like giving Macleod another try, I think his best books are The Cassini Division and The Stone Canal; they're part of a quartet, but these two books are the best and are very much a thematic pair, and if you read one you should read them both. (In part they show us the same setting from drastically opposed viewpoints, both done sympathetically.)
Giant spaceships, explosions, god-like beings, wormholes through space and time, sentient robots, non-sentient robots, maybe-sentient robots, full on ultralibertarian capitalism, full on ultraliberal socialism, nanotechnology, pre-, post- and intra-singularity technology, and some very big guns.
