I've been reading Charles Stross' books for a while, and I'd never run into the Eschaton series simply because other books of his had been recommended to me earlier.

I found myself captivated by 'Singularity Sky' within sentences, which is a great achievement. The book opens with: "The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd."

The earliest concept of the setting is that a deliberately engineered feudal environment of artificially engineered scarcity and serfhood encounters an interstellar post-scarcity economy that will provide you with whatever you want - in exchange for entertainment.

Unsurprisingly, the government takes a dim view of what seems to be brutalist economic warfare of the most aggressive sort, and dials its engines to War...

The clash of not just ideologies but conceptualisations of the universe is a fascinating one, and Stross shows the collateral damage that happens as part of a sudden change.

From that spark-point, the plot flows onwards through several point-of-view characters with their own agendas who are swept up in the storm. Eventually it develops overtones of naval or submarine conflict - except with the additional wrinkle that on the other side of the equation is a post-singularity enemy who might not function on the same rules of engagement as you at the level of physics, rather than just tactics...

I think the concepts are excellent and highly imaginative. The downside from my perspective is that I wanted to comprehend more than I did. The core plot elements are all eventually revealed in a satisfying fashion, so there's not a problem there. However, I found that some of the underlying concepts behind the plot aren't explained, as if there was an assumption that readers had already encountered them.

I understand the principle that FTL travel qualifies as a form of time-travel, and was able to figure out 'light-cones' (I think) from contextual discussions of them during the book. However, the jump to how FTL travel might allow for time travel into the past went right over my head. In some ways it's fortunate that this element is not central to the narrative, and is just one component of what's going on. Stross is good at communicating the core points of tension around the concept, I just wished I follow why things worked like they did.

The other thing that struck me about the story is that in comparison to other Stross books I've read, less is essentially at stake. I'm not 100% clear on why that would be, because the situation is one where several characters are utterly doomed if events pan out less than perfectly, but for some reason that felt less tense than it could have done.

In any case, I enjoyed Singularity Sky, and I'm looking forward to Iron Sunrise. My criticisms are only really at a level of "I'd have enjoyed the book more if..." than anything more significant, and they did not get in the way of me following the narrative.