Just finished Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise this past week. I had made a good start, got sidetracked, then jumped back in thanks to a long plane trip. Like many of Stross’ works I got a little lost in the baroque ornamentation of singularity science. But I still enjoyed this story, quite like I did the first in this series Singularity Sky.
While the protagonist of Singularity Sky, Rachel Mansour, has a significant role in this tale of interplanetary intrigue, she by no means hogs the spotlight. Instead, Wednesday Strowger, a teenager on the lam after her home planet has been wiped out, twice, is arguably the heroine. Both of them are trying to defeat a dark, planet destroying plot, although it’s not until the latter third of the book that they connect.
Iron Sunrise is more overtly political than Singularity Sky, while the later is a bit more humorous: “Will you entertain us?”. The ReMastered, the bad guys of the novel, are bit of a Nazi pastiche and laid on a little thick, but still quite ominous. Stross pulls a nice ethical twist with them at the climax of the novel. There’s also a host of other interesting characters fleshed out to varying levels of detail.
I’m not going to claim Iron Sunrise blew me away, but it was a solid sci-fi read, and a little more accessible than the typical Stross singularity mindfuck. Worth springing for the paperback edition.