Dirk Grobbelaar's Reviews > Singularity Sky

Incomprehensible review

This is one of those books that is going to take a while to assimilate. I am attempting a review, which may or may not actually be a true reflection of my reading experience.

This leads us deep into the forest of ethics, wherein there is a festival of ambiguity.

There is bucketloads happening, mostly pertaining to a singularity event on a far flung and isolated colony of future, post diaspora humanity, and initiated (or driven) by something called The Festival (an “information plague”… or something else entirely...).

’It’s beginning. Better strap yourself in – we’re way too close for comfort.’

Since there is a lot going on here, there is a lot to either like, or dislike, depending on your leanings.

What did I like? The space battles, such as they are. It’s a unique-ish approach, dealing with closed time loops / causality events (among other things), grey goo (nanotech, for the uninitiated), as well as (more conventional, in a manner of speaking) exploding and kinetic objects being accelerated over vast differences.

What did I dislike? Well, it’s an occasionally bizarre story with some humorous elements that I struggled to get a handle on. It’s hard to describe, but this is either something you will appreciate… or not at all. After all, the book pretty much starts with cell phones raining down from space.

Fortunately I don’t have to write too much about Singularity Sky. There are lots of reviews posted here, and the book was hot property when it came out in 2003 (it was nominated for a Hugo award in 2004) so there is enough discussion already to keep the curious satisfied.

Riding a chicken-legged hut through a wasteland that had recently gone from bucolic feudalism to transcendent posthumanism without an intervening stage, [he] drifted through a dream of crumbling empires.

The revolutionaries were ideologically committed to a transcendence that they hadn’t fully understood - until it arrived whole and pure and incomprehensible, like an iceberg of strange information breaking the surface of a frozen sea of entropy. They hadn’t been ready for it; nobody had warned them. They had hazy folk memories of Internets and cornucopiae to guide them, cargo-cult assertions of the value of technology - but they hadn’t felt the elephant, had no sense of the shape the new phenomena took, and their desires caused new mutant strains to congeal out of the phase space of the Festival machinery.

In the end, it is the nature of the Festival, or the big reveal, that pretty much makes or breaks the novel. Or, that’s to say, the nature of the Festival in conjunction with the author’s depiction of human socio-political behaviour in extreme circumstances. The novel is also a commentary on censorship / freedom of speech and the nature of information and interpretation thereof.

In conclusion, it’s a clever novel, but possibly too clever for me. I enjoyed it well enough though, although I suspect that some of the nuances were lost on me. I would have loved to give this exactly 3.5 stars (a bit of a cop out) but now I am sitting with the dilemma of rounding up or down.

Houses grew and fissioned in slow motion, great sessile beasts prodded hither and yon by their internal symbionts. It was all unspeakably alien to him: an eerie half-life crawling over the once-familiar city, echoes of the way he’d lived for years, lying like a corpse in an open casket. Even the searing light of a nighttime shuttle landing at the field outside the city could-n’t bring it back to a semblance of the life he’d known.