Iron Sunrise

Iron Sunrise is a science fiction novel by the British writer Charles Stross, published in 2004. It continues the story of Singularity Sky, and it was nominated for the Hugo and Locus awards in 2005.

The world of the book is one where human societies were taken from Earth and distributed across the Milky Way seemingly at random, in the aftermath of a technological singularity and the arrival of the strong artificial intelligence known as the Eschaton. A young and hopeful planetary civilisation is destroyed when its sun is made to explode without warning, apparently through a device that violates causality, and the question of who has such a weapon and who ordered it used becomes the centre of the novel. Rachel Mansour, an agent of the United Nations, and Martin Springfield, an engineer, are drawn back into the middle of it, along with a man convinced he is the reincarnation of a dictator and in possession of a nuclear device he intends to use after receiving an eviction notice.

Stross writes science fiction that mixes political and economic speculation with very large machines, and this Eschaton sequence is one of the earliest examples of it.