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    Iron Sunrise
    Iron Sunrise
    Iron Sunrise
    Audiobook15 hours

    Iron Sunrise

    Written by Charles Stross

    Narrated by George Guidall

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Bestselling author Charles Stross’ novels have garnered numerous awards and nominations, including several Hugo, Nebula, and Locus Award selections. In Iron Sunrise, a godlike future-being known as the Eschaton has enabled humans to achieve interstellar colonization and near speed-of-light travel.

    Just before planet Moscow is vaporized by an unnatural star explosion, its ruling body launches a misguided counterattack against the innocent neighboring system of New Dresden. The strike can’t be recalled without a code known only by a handful of government officials—and they’re being assassinated one by one.

    Now it falls to U.N. operative Rachel Mansour to protect the final codeholder and find out who’s behind this galactic set up. But her best hope lies with Wednesday Shadowmist, a teenage girl who doesn’t even know she holds the answers.

    “Compelling space opera and cutting-edge tech with a tasty dash of satire … Stross skillfully balances suspense and humor throughout … Offering readers a fascinating future that seems more than possible.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateJul 17, 2009
    ISBN9781440718892
    Iron Sunrise
    Author

    Charles Stross

    Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full-time. To date, Stross has won two Hugo awards and been nominated twelve times. He has also won the Locus Award for Best Novel, the Locus Award for Best Novella and has been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke and Nebula Awards. He is the author of the popular Merchant Princes and Empire Games series, set in the same world. In addition, his fiction has been translated into around a dozen languages. Stross lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife Feorag, a couple of cats, several thousand books, and an ever-changing herd of obsolescent computers.

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    Reviews for Iron Sunrise

    4/5

    15 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Good old-fashioned space opera, with the addition of a singularity for more fun.
    • 4/5
      A well-written and well-paced tale of planetary genocide, interstellar plots and cults seen through the eyes of a few key players, from a disaffected teenager with voices in her head to some scary totalitarian plotters. Although enjoyable, I didn't find this book as much of a revelation as Stross's debut novel, Singularity Sky. It doesn't contain an idea which is as novel, and as much fun, as The Festival. But it is set in the same overall world of causal channels and the god-like presence of the Eschaton, and humans who want to outwit them. The characters are good and varied and the settings well-imagined, and the plot has enough twists to satisfy those who like such things. But I would have liked to know more - or less - about the ReMastered and quite why they act as they do. Their presence is a given and there are some aspects of the plot which turn on their behaviour which don't quite ring true. We're given to believe that their 'puppets' are key to their plots for planetary takeover. Yet the only one directly described in the text clearly behaves like a B-movie zombie that would convince no one. But, that nagging problem aside, this is a good read which will satisfy anyone who's enjoyed Stross's other work or that of Ken Macleod (and I include myself in their number.)
    • 4/5
      The Iron SUnrise is a supernova, a collapse of a star. This is a novel of political intrigue.
    • 4/5
      (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Regular visitors will know that I'm currently in the process of reading every novel sci-fi author Charles Stross has ever written; I started last time with his very first, 2003's Singularity Sky, which told a surprisingly funny and absurdist tale set in the far future, centuries after the human race was split and flung across the universe one day by a far advanced alien life form, because of a united humanity recently discovering time travel and thus technically now capable of accidentally wiping out this "Eschaton"s very existence. And this is the same universe where his next novel is set as well, 2004's Iron Sunrise, although it's not exactly a sequel; for although it features the same duo of main heroes as the first book (a plucky female UN inspector and a male secret agent for the Eschaton, the two now married after falling in love in the first novel), the story itself takes place among an entirely different planetary system, basically starting with the unexpected explosion of a local star and the destruction of the world orbiting it (the "iron sunrise" of the book's title), which leads us down an ever-widening rabbithole of conspiracies, ultra-fascist organizations, and galaxy-domination plots.And indeed, the either good or bad news, depending on what you think of the subject, is that Iron Sunrise adheres much more strongly to the traditional tropes of 1990s and early 2000s cyberpunk, after a first novel that cleverly combined hard science-fiction with the gonzo silliness of countercultural "motley fool" writers like Ken Kesey; the latter now features such familiar genre touches as a rebellious 15-year-old girl as our main protagonist, five or six different small storylines that all come together into one giant climax at the end, spaceship chases and planet-hopping bloggers and all the other things you would expect from a SF tale written in those years. (Also, this second novel makes it clear that the Eschaton is actually a single entity, essentially the result of a cloud computing system like the Google server farm gaining sentience; and while that helps make things clearer from a plot standpoint, I admit that it kind of removes the fun in the first novel of never quite knowing what exactly the Eschaton is/are.) Still, although far from his best or densest or trippiest work, Iron Sunrise is definitely an interesting read and worth the time of Stross completists; although I have to confess that I'm looking much more forward to the next title in my reading list, 2005's Accelerando, the first of Stross's books to make a big splash in America and coiner of the entire cultural phrase "The Accelerated Age" (a popular way among SF fans to refer to stories that take place in a post-Singularity universe).
    • 5/5
      Nice combination of the genres of 'space opera' and 'secret agent'.
    • 2/5
      I liked this one much more than Accelerando, and liked some of the characters, but it still didn't warm me up much to this guy's writing.
    • 4/5
      Stross is an excellent writer of very complicated worlds. Despite his general fascination with sexual culture that doesn't really seem to advance the plot, the man writes a darn good singularity.
    • 3/5
      Pretty average. Continuation of the 'Singularity Sky' universe (distopia) with some of the same characters. The plot is pretty slow and heavy, and annoyingly disjointed. 'Singularity Sky' was much better.
    • 4/5
      Having read a few Ken MacLeod books, it follows that I should get into fellow brit Charles Stross. I started with Iron Sunrise (I know i'm supposed to have read Singularity Sky but I got mixed up at the bookstore so read this first)The basic story focuses on Wednesday who lives on a space station in the future until her home planet is destroyed in a mysterious and unexpected supernova. She happens to have been drawn into the mystery of the cause of this supernova which turns out to be dangerous to her life. As a refugee she meets (amongst others) a burnt out warblogger, a pair of interplanetary spooks, a godlike singularity intelligence, some unlikely assasins and a bunch of high-tech neofacists.The story is full of lots of cool things like dynamic makeup and clothing for our heroin, computer implants with interfaces through rings and finger movements, guns that shoot around corners (pretty standard but always fun) and intelligent cyborg dogs (also pretty standard i guess).The actual plot kept me guessing and involved. The characters have some humanity but probably aren't that realistic - they had good history and reactions to things but not much variety of world view. When comparing with Ken Macleod, whose characters have contrasting views on things even when they are on the same 'side'. There wasn't much philosphical value either - it was just the story with not much attempt at asking any moral questions. There is a moral dillemna at the end of the book which Wednesday must face but it's a bit of a cliche. I think there was room to more fully explore the warblogger's conflict of interest between getting a good story and helping out. The same with many of the other characters who seem to do what they do without much thought.
    • 3/5
      I don't remember much about this one but I know i've read it.
    • 4/5
      Stross loves a good conspiracy, and if there is a way to throw in possession and a little righteous anger from the minion of the good guys all the better. Sometimes the pacing of his stories doesn't work so well for me, but this one had me hooked almost immediately. Rachel is a black-ops WMD disarmament specialist for the UN. Wednesday is a goth kid whose whole planet is destroyed by forces unknown, while she manages to hide some critical piece of evidence and escape, only to have her family killed by a faction of the ubermensh race of the ReMastered. Of course, they all end up on a space luxury liner run by the White Star Line, along with a preeminent assassin and a war correspondent. Subtle is not a tool that Stross used while writing Iron Sunrise, but it is an engaging, rollicking space-opera. Enjoy.
    • 3/5
      Far slower to get to an enjoyable point than singularity sky. Same universe, same characters, but the method of writing has taken a far different turn. For whatever reason I found myself looking at the book as a chore until I reached about halfway through, at which point it became immensly enjoyable. It's no singularity sky, but it's a lot of fun once the lengthy intro is over.