Singularity Sky
by Charles Stross

Description

In the twenty-first century, life as we know it was changed forever by two events - the discovery of faster-than-light travel and the creation of the Eschaton, an artificial intelligence that achieved independent sentience. Four hundred years later, the far-flung human colonies that arose as a result of these two extraordinary occurrences are scattered over three thousand years of time, across a thousand parsecs of space. One such colony, the New Republic, exists in self-imposed isolation. Founded by men and women suffering from an acute case of future shock, the member-planets wanted no part of the Eschaton or the technological advances that followed its creation. But their backward ways are severely compromised when they are attacked by an information plague that calls itself The Festival. As advanced technologies suppressed for generations begin literally to fall from the sky, the colony slips into revolutionary turmoil. Help is on the way, however, in the form of a battle fleet dispatched from Earth. Or is it? Secret plans, hidden agendas, and ulterior motives abound, both on the rescue ships and among the populace of the beleaguered colony. And watching it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about mankind