I understand it's not fair to hold every single thing Stross wrote in the balance with what is probably his best work, but that's what I am doing, because I loved that one and I was meh about this one. But that doesn't mean the book is not good - I enjoyed reading it - but it doesn't even come close to another "singularity" book: Accelerando. In the case of Singularity Sky, I think the pulp messed up something that could have been a very powerful metaphor of the state of humanity in the present day (and in any past day, too). While I love his positivism and the grandiose hard sci-fi approach, the pulp thing is a bit of a hit and miss with me. He is also an optimist who thinks people with all the information and power they could have will ultimately do the right thing with it. That is why he is often discussing philosophical questions like what the world will be after millennia and what the consequences of time travel are or what if the Old Gods and magic were actually real in the context of a particularly handy tech guy who falls very easily in love and then spends the rest of the book saving the world and serving the one he loves. Charles Stross has a penchant for thinking big and then bringing that to the level of the average reader by the aid of pulp.
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