Notes: Iron Sunrise

The work of Charles Stross fell into my lap unexpectedly last year. Jason gave me a blind recommendation of Singularity Sky over the phone while I was searching the local Borders for a book to read on a plane. Happily, that exchange also netted a copy of Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep. Both excellent reads - really the sort of Slipstream meets New Weird births Infernokrusher eats your head kind of stories I had been looking for. Unfortunately, the shine has come off the further works of these two authors - they seem to fall a little flat.

I could do a whole post on Vinge's crap-out in Deepness in the Sky but the only thing worthy of note here is that the flaws in that book closely echo those of Iron Sunrise. Stross and Vinge were drinking buddies, so I guess that makes sense.

The key problem with Iron Sunrise is that it reads like a studio-scripted sequel. It has all the style and flavor of the first book, but no strong plot of it's own. Stross falls back on what were once delicious details of the bizarre post-singularity universe but are now stale reiterations. Recurring characters are static and uninteresting, prone to moments of "my God, we're doomed" realizations and long dramatic pauses. The villains are comically villainous and pointlessly perverse. The new characters are inconsistent in their personalities and rarely distinct from the "fuck everything, I'm a good guy everywoman action hero" attitude that pervades the book's dialogue.

The story is your basic save the universe tale, complete with Nazis. There's a bit of spaceship blueprint porn, some explosions, some sex, some Warren Ellis style shock perversity, and various explorations of the essence of the Singularity trope. Characters explain how the sciencey things work and snub their futuristic populist noses at the rich and ignorant. Then cap the whole thing off with a terribly amateur cliffhanger ending - equivalent to one where the seemingly dead villain jerks back to life long enough to take a potshot at the hero - and you're done.

This is the most phoned-in book I've ever read. Not only that, it was phoned in to the editor's angry spiteful messaging service. I may still pick up Accelerando, in the hopes that Stross zipped past this one to get to the book he REALLY wanted to write, but this outing leaves a lot to be desired.