The Eschaton Is Here

Singularity Sky by Charles Stross is a science-fiction book about a universe where a technological singularity (The Eschaton, aptly named after the End Of Everything) happened and spread humanity to the stars, while giving them cornucopia machines, basically nanotechnology capable of producing almost everything from cold air. The book is set in the Republic, one of the colonies the Eschaton created, which gets "attacked" by the Festival, an infovore civilization trying to assimilate as much information as possible, wrecking havoc on the political structure of the Republic in the process.

The book tells basically a straight-forward spy story, pitting an agent of the Eschaton and a UN weapons inspector, both trying to keep the Republic from violating causality by travelling back in time and arriving at the hot spot of the conflict before the Festival did. The Eschaton isn't very keen on causality violations, because that's the only way it's creation could be undone.

Singularity Sky is an interesting read, but flawed insofar as the Singularity it is named for takes a back seat to rather conventional space battles and spy/counter-spy games. I'd rather had some more information about post-singularity earth and the ramifications of a god-like structure that really does meddle in human affairs instead of lengthy descriptions of space battles (which are, at least, physically plausible and not the usual space-opera tripe) and the protagonist's problems escaping the Republic's secret police. Another problem of the book is Stross' tendency to use scientific and technological terms and abbreviations without defining or explaining any. Can be a little jarring if you have to look up a term (like "gray goo", for example) to understand what's happening.