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.
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The technological singularity, speculative economics, and bureaucratic horror form the bedrock of contemporary hard science fiction, and few works explore these concepts as rigorously as Accelerando. Charles Stross established his reputation in modern speculative fiction by combining cutting-edge computer science, post-human philosophy, and fast-paced space opera.
Born in Leeds, England, in 1964, Stross pursued a varied professional career before becoming a full-time fiction author. He earned a bachelor's degree in pharmacy in 1986 and qualified as a pharmacist in 1987 before changing fields to study computer science at Bradford University from 1989 to 1990. Throughout the late 1980s and 1990s, he worked as a technical writer, software developer, and freelance journalist for technology publications, even writing the technical book The Web Architect's Handbook in 1996.
Stross sold his first short fiction to Interzone in the late 1980s after having written for role-playing game magazines in his youth. Around 2000, he shifted his primary focus to writing fiction full-time. He relocated to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he continues to write novels and short stories that have earned three Hugo Awards for Best Novella alongside multiple Locus Awards and nominations for the Nebula and Arthur C. Clarke Awards.
Stross is recognized for his detail-dense prose and sharp focus on systemic complexity, incorporating real-world computer networking, financial systems, and organizational politics into his speculative worlds. His space opera and hard science fiction stories frequently interrogate how rapid technological evolution reframes human identity, economics, and governance. Alongside his hard science fiction, Stross frequently merges cosmic horror with mundane administrative absurdities, examining how formal hierarchies respond to incomprehensible threats.
Eschaton
