Iron Sunrise

The second UK release from Edinburgh-based writer and purveyor of fine beards, Charles Stross, has just hit the shelves. Iron Sunrise, a follow-up to excellent Singularity Sky, it sees the return of Rachel Mansour, the UN black-ops specialist, assigned to investigate the forced mini-supernova which has destroyed an entire civilisation (yes, Charlie thinks big for his weapons of mass destruction!). The key to the dreadful events may be a rebellious teenage girl, Wednesday, who may have seen something she shouldn’t have on one of her less-than-authorised jaunts (and may be in terrible peril because of it).

The Eschaton, a post-singularity ‘weakly god-like’ AI which removed billions of humans from Earth and seeded them (seemingly) randomly throughout the galaxy centuries before, may also be involved. The Big E are shadowy, but still take an interest in human affairs – especially WMDs and any attempt at using faster-than-light travel to effect time-travel or history alterations – such causality infringements have lead to responses ranging from a few mysterious deaths to rather more massive interventions. Rachel’s husband Martin – the engineer from Singularity Sky – understands this; he has actually been an agent for the Eschaton.

Iron Sunrise combines Big Concept SF with believable, sympathetic (well some of them!) characters. It also features Charlie’s trademark wry humour, which is used to comment on a variety of topics, from social conformity to social rebellion (very even-handed of him), poverty, health care, political systems and also manages to make interesting references to current events, notably in the status of refugees and the use of WMDs for ideological ends. It’s gripping, imaginative and comes with a wonderfully sarcastic sense of humour throughout. Charlie Stross really is one of the new wave of UK writers you should be paying attention to and this is one of my personal top picks from the spring releases.

Charlie has also kindly contacted us to let us know that his next – and eagerly awaited – novel, Accelerando, is having its publication date moved forward to August 4^th to coincide with the Worldcon in Glasgow. Accelerated Accelerando – just what we want, as long as the date change doesn’t bring the Eschaton down on us for causal violation.