Singularity Sky is where Stross gets it, chewing through the insulation of insufferable singulatarian techno-optimism to bite into the high voltage wire of Awesome that makes for a great and surprisingly deep space opera. The New Republic is a deliberate anachronism patterned after one of the Great Powers of the 19th century, and the bucolic colony of Rochard's World has fallen prey to The Festival, a self-replicating interstellar civilization that trades radical cyborg enhancements and nanotech cornucopias for folk tales. In response, the New Republic has dispatched it's proud battlefleet of heavily armed space cruisers on a course that threatens to trespass the Third Commandment. "I am the Eschaton. I am not your god. I am descended from you. Do not violate causality in my light cone. OR ELSE." It's up to a cynical warp-drive engineer and a UN diplomat to keep the hapless militarists of the New Republic from inviting a disaster from a god-like force they can't even begin to understanding. Great action, great characters, great cosmology, and a great book over all.