Cielo de singularidad

This is a solid, fast-paced story that still inspires plenty of deep thinking and consideration of ideas. The Festival has arrived at a colony planet of the New Republic. The New Republic is a Russian-like state encompassing an entire planet, complete with Russian character names and uniforms. The New Republic is not on the planet Earth, and Earth has no real governmental entity, perhaps a Libertarian way of life (I don't know a whole lot about Libertarianism, but that's what I concluded). The New Republic has split from Earth to form their own government. The New Republic sees the Festival as an enemy, and a fleet is sent to attack it.The Festival is simply asking the colonists for information: stories and myths; in return, they grant 3 wishes, genie-style. And one farseeing colonist asks for the technology that allows the Festival to grant the wishes, his own wish-granting machine. This is the basic plot, but the author describes it all much more scientifically and technologically than I am in my review.And that's an aspect of the book I really like. There's a lot of technical jargon, and even my degree in engineering didn't prepare me for this. But I understood the basics, and I could follow along for the most part. It's difficult to write graspable technobabble, and I'm impressed with [a:Charles Stross 8794 Charles Stross http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1218218373p2/8794.jpg]'s ability to do so in this novel.The story follows Martin Springfield and Rachel Monsour, two people who on the surface appear to just be against the New Republic's attack of the Festival, but perhaps they both have other motives. The reader follows the two on board the battlecruiser Lord Vanek as it illegally traverses through time to get to the colony just as the Festival is arriving.This 300 page book packs an incredible amount of story in its seemingly simple pages. We've got a whole lot of Singularity going on (as if the title didn't give that away), some old-fashioned Revolution, father-son issues, time travel, age prevention, forbidden weapons, talking rabbits, and Baba Yaga just to name a few. There's a lot of deep-thinking, too, about unintended results and enemies we can't begin to understand.I'm very happy that I picked up this book at the library. The only other book of [a:Charles Stross 8794 Charles Stross http://photo.goodreads.com/authors/1218218373p2/8794.jpg]'s that I've read is [b:Saturn's Children 2278387 Saturn's Children Charles Stross http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1266693988s/2278387.jpg 2284499], and I frankly didn't finish it – it just wasn't working for me. After this read, I'll definitely pick up the other book in the series, and hopefully some others!