The sky of the singularity

In the swamp of a swampy provincial street, a telephone lies and chirps. If you answer its call, you can fulfill all your desires cheaply. Two such phones are a wonder, a dozen are a nightmare for the local gendarmerie, a hundred are an anarchist uprising... And what if there are thousands of such phones? And what if their ringing is the alarm of the old world? And what if this alarm is still unknown to whom: retrogrades and dark folk? Newly minted lovers of upgrades and revolutions? Or to an entire social system and, perhaps, life within a radius of several dozen light years?

"The Sky of the Singularity" - the debut novel by the famous British science fiction writer Charles Strauss - is written at the intersection of hard sf and space opera; It features themes traditional to the author: technological singularity, interstellar travel, and… the collapse of traditional politics and economics, as well as the conflict between a totalitarian Luddite state and soulless progressivism.