Singularity Sky

It's been a few years since I read this. I remember being very enthusiastic when I picked it up - the idea really excited me. In the end it wasn't what I expected and I was a little bit disappointed. The book wasn't bad, but it wasn't as great as I hoped.

About half the book seems to be terms related to space and time travel, which is not a language I know and made it hard for me to become invested in the characters and had me wondering when the plot would get back to the opening scene.

This one became a bit of a slog for me. At times it was like David Weber dropped acid with L. Frank Baum and then wrote a story together. I half expected the Cowardly Lion and Scarecrow to pop out of Rochard's World's forests.

Honestly, it was a tough read for me. I prefer stories where the characters are more developed and the big idea latches on to them for fleshing out. This is kind of the way Michener used to write. Moving through time and places with only peripheral notice to the people occupying them. Because of this, I had a hard time feeling very connected to the characters. They were pretty two dimensional to me.

It seems like there is fine line between creating a story that expands upon a theme by following well developed characters, without the those characters becoming so overly done that the story becomes “space opera”. Charles Stross seems to go out of the way to avoid that, but in the meantime I'm not sure I would have finished it up with the group discussion I read it for.