The Eschaton Series - Television Tropes & Idioms

A Speculative Fiction series by Charles Stross about a universe where a godlike AI called the "Eschaton" has randomly uprooted and spread humanity across the universe. Contains two books, Singularity Sky and Iron Sunrise

This series provides examples of:

A God Am I: Subverted in that the Eschaton specifically states it is not God - however, it is willingly to take strong, Old Testament action so that causality will not be violated.
- A number of the tribal communities that Eschaton recruited colonists from ignore this rule and worship Eschaton, and tend to be belligerent about it with those that read the Eschaton's laws as written. Warbloggers are able to make quite a living off these conflicts.
Action Girl: Rachel Mansour
Balkanize Me: Earth is mentioned to have tens if not hundreds of thousands of states. They seem to get along, however.
Beam Spam: The New Republic's ships are covered with powerful LIDAR sensor grids, which double as a massive laser batteries.
Big Bad: In the second book, the ReMastered
Bittersweet Ending: In Iron Sunrise, disaster is averted, and Rachel gets her vengeance on the Corrupt Bureaucrat, but in doing so finds out that the ReMastered have infiltrated old Earth and realizes there's a lot more work to do
- Arguably this is over-shadowed by the epic Downer Ending.
Curb-Stomp Battle - At the end of Singularity Sky the Festival offhandedly eats the New Republic's entire navy. The author has compared it in interviews to a Napoleonic-era fleet of tall ships going up against a modern-day submarine.
- A submarine whose automatically-launched torpedoes destroy the fleet before the circus-cum-sysadmin running the thing has even realised there's a threat.
Day of the Week Name: Wednesday Shadowmist
Deus Est Machina: The Eschaton bootstrapped its self from a telephone exchange.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: The Festival descends on a quiet and fairly conservative people; causes chaos in its pursuit of entertainment; is accompanied by Critics, Traders, a bewildering Fringe and terrifying Mimes; and finally departs as suddenly as it came, leaving the locals still wondering what happened. Charles Stross currently lives in Edinburgh.
Downer Ending: Iron Sunrise All indications show that multi-cultural space Nazis will beat an all powerful AI with a non-intervention rule so painfully it posses no memory of their existence...
Eerie Pale-Skinned Brunette: Wednesday Shadowmist in Iron Sunrise - although she's pale because she wants to be. She has chromatophores in her skin which means she can change her skin color.
Fetish Fuel: Lolitas are mentioned explicitly in passing and various fetishes are very explicitly mentioned in the second book. Wednesday comments on exhibitionist BDSM in progress. invoked
Future Imperfect: Unsurprising, given the mess the Eschaton left behind it, but Rachel's grasp of 20th century history is a bit muddled (she compares the cruise ship she's on to an old-fashioned nuclear vessel like the Titanic), and Martin comes from a "traditionalist" village in the People's Republic of West Yorkshire where they believe that real Yorkshiremen wear kilts and drink pints of Tetley's tea.
- "The Cold War was all about who could build the biggest refrigerator, wasn't it?"
A God I Am Not: The Escathon.
Inspiration Nod: Having made the New Republic military a concious parody of Napoleonic-era Prussia, Stross then gives their leader, Admiral Kurtz, the same delusion as Prussia's Generalfeldmarschall von Blucher: he believes he's pregnant with an elephant.
Intrepid Reporter: Frank "the Nose" Johnson, whose blog has the rights to the name "The Times of London".
La Résistance: The New Rebublic's determined attempt to recreate 19th century East European feudalism in a post-Singularity universe has naturally created one of these, with a philosophy that combines communism, anarcho-capitalism and radical transhumanism.
Lensman Arms Race + Space Cold War: Eschaton and the ReMastered. The AI percieves time in a non-linear fashion, hence causality weapons give it a major headache. Despite this, it does not have any "Future" memories of this Nazi cult and is understandably worried, as its hinted that this is a sign that the ReMastered won their cold war. How this can happen is unusual considering that Eschaton can, and will erase threats to itself from existence.
A Nazi by Any Other Name: The ReMastered are very Nazi-like - their philosophy has been "memetically engineered" from Nazism to be just as unpleasant without containing the seeds of its own destruction.) To the point where they make the Draka look like pleasant company.
Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: Or, rather, "Never bring a tazer to an artillery duel."
Outside Context Antagonist: The Festival is definitely a threat to the New Republic, in more ways than one. However, the Republic's government & military have no idea of what the threat really is, and reflexively place the Festival in the nice, neat mental box of "enemy invasion." This leads directly to the aforementioned Curb-Stomp Battle.
Rodents of Unusual Size: The Critics are giant intelligent mole-rats.
Shout Out: Little references to other works are scattered throughout the books. At one point a wheelchair-bound character stands up and shouts, "My emperor! I can walk!"
Strange Girl: Allowing for it being a superscience setting rather than a supernatural one, Wednesday fits the description quite well.
Subspace Ansible: FTL communications are possible via "causal channels," which make use of quantum-entangled particles.
The Commandments: The Eschaton gave humanity three:
I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.
I am descended from you, and I exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
The Singularity: The big one was the emergence of the Eschaton. The New Republic gets another one when the Festival arrives.
Time Travel: Used quite originally in Singularity Sky - the New Republic, thinking they are being invaded in far off world, send a fleet designed to get there just after the news of the invasion was sent from the world, so that from the perspective of the people sending the message the fleet arrives immediately. It doesn't work.
Shout Out: Brits who lived out the Thatcher years will recognize a reference to the People's Republic of South Yorkshire. (The seat held by the man who made that remark is now held by Nick Clegg...).
Trickster: The Festival is a whole race of tricksters who desire stories.
Space Is an Ocean: Averted, much to the shame of the New Republic.
United Nations Is A Superpower: In a very peculiar way. It mostly leaves local governments on Earth alone, but it has scores of agents tasked with enforcing the laws of the Eschaton. It also a lot of pull in backwards worlds (like the New Republic) for the mythical association with Earth-that-Was (which they usually can't distinguish from Earth-That-Still-Is).
- It should be noted that this UN is not the same organization, but rather a development of the Internet Engineering Task Force (yes) that took on the responsibilities and form of the UN after the post-Singularity Earth had settled down (i.e. suitably modified for a world of tens of thousands of polities and millions to billions of sovereign individuals, rather than 193 nation-states).
Weapon Of Mass Destruction: The device which caused the eponymous Iron Sunrise, which refers to a supernova.)