In the twenty-first century man created the Eschaton, a sentient artificial intelligence. It pushed Earth through the greatest technological evolution ever known, while warning that time travel is forbidden, and transgressors will be eliminated.
Distant descendants of this ultra high-tech Earth live in parochial simplicity on the far-flung worlds of the New Republic. Their way of life is threatened by the arrival of an alien information plague known as the Festival. As forbidden technologies are literally dropped from the sky, suppressed political factions descend into revolutionary turmoil.
A battle fleet is sent from Earth to destroy the Festival, but Spaceship engineer Martin Springfield and U.N. diplomat Rachel Mansour have been assigned rather different tasks. Their orders are to diffuse the crisis or to sabotage the New Republic’s war-fleet, whatever the cost, before the Eschaton takes hostile action on a galactic scale.
- 'Breathtaking … a real contender for "space opera of the year"' LOCUS, 'Stross is an author who anyone interested in SF should read and relish' SFX, 'Darkly funny and crackling with high-bandwidth ideas' PAUL McAULEY, 'Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow' Gardner Dozois, 'There seems to be a consensus across the board: Charles Stross is the cutting edge of modern science fiction' SF SITE
Paperback:
£7.99
Published 03/02/2005