Singularity Sky

One hundred fifty years after the Singularity, humanity is scattered across the stars. Nine-tenths of the species vanished overnight when transcendent AI was born, and the survivors live in the shadow of what remains. The New Republic is a colonial power that still runs on Industrial Revolution technology, kept that way by a government that worked for generations to keep its people backward.

Then the Festival arrives at one of the New Republic's worlds. It is a posthuman entity that will grant any wish, and its price is that it be entertained. Technology pours into the hands of a population that was never meant to have it, and the colony falls into chaos. The New Republic answers by declaring war on something it does not understand and sending a fleet.

Rachel Mansour and Martin Springfield are on the ground as that fleet advances. They are agents of the Eschaton, a godlike intelligence that enforces a single rule: no technology that allows time travel and so endangers causality. If the war goes wrong, it could erase everyone involved.

This is space opera with a satirical edge, aimed at colonialism and rigid hierarchy. The tone is sharp and comic even as the stakes grow large, and the story moves between the agents, the fleet and the colony it is sent to subdue.