Singularity Sky

Singularity Sky is a science fiction novel by the British writer Charles Stross, published in 2003. It is the first of the two Eschaton novels; Iron Sunrise followed it.

The setting is a future in which a near-godlike intelligence, the Eschaton, exists and enforces rules about what the human civilisations descended from it may do with time travel and other technologies. The New Republic is a state that has held its colony worlds at roughly industrial-revolution levels for its own purposes, and it learns that one of them has been visited by the Festival, a posthuman body that rewards hosts for entertaining it by granting whatever they ask for, including technology far beyond what the colony has.

On the colony the result is an abrupt singularity: money, work and authority stop meaning what they meant, and extensive social and political disruption follows. The Republic responds by sending its fleet, and the novel follows the campaign from the flagship, where an engineer and an intelligence agent from Earth are trying to prevent a forbidden technology from being used and beginning to fall in love with each other along the way. The book was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel.