In Iron Sunrise, a sequel to his acclaimed 2003 novel Singularity Sky, Charles Stross mixes two parts space opera with a shot of cyberpunk melodrama and a dash of high tech satire: the result is an occasionally uneven but remarkably tasty concoction of modern science fiction. Set in a sprawling 24th century reality where humanity has spread across the stars not through their own doing but rather through the actions of the enigmatic being known as the Eschaton (some sort of sentient artificial intelligence, ostensibly from somewhere in humanity's future, who also holds the potentiality of time travel but forbids humans to utilize devices which likewise violate "casuality" in its "light cone"), the story follows a disparate group of characters as they deal with the aftermath of the murder of a world.

When the Eschaton unilaterally transported the bulk of earth's population to a myriad number of other worlds (for reasons of its own), its actions opened up one of time's little conundrums: "seeded" planets with cultures that often were older than that of the homeworld. Regardless, the inhabitants of many of these worlds had to adapt to the often harsh environments of their new planets, and each world developed its own unique history. In the parlance of the interstellar community, New Moscow (named, it appears, after the city in Idaho, and not its more famous counterpart) was a "McWorld," just another bland, comfortable, tolerant, and ultimately boring outpost of humanity. At least, until the iron sunrise, when somebody killed the sun and the planet was destroyed in a supernova.

All indications suggest that the neighboring planet of New Dresden - a rival world embroiled in a bitter trade dispute - was responsible for the crime. While Moscow wasn't much of a military powerhouse, it did have one primary weapon system (arguably based upon the notion of "mutually assured destruction"): in the event of a catastrophic attack, it had a STL counterstrike set up: ships that traveled Slower-Than-Light but with sufficient firepower that they essentially could not be stopped. The only hope of a targeted world would be to evacuate before the ships arrived. The supernova assault triggered the response team, and the last known target was New Dresden, so that's where New Moscow's STL attack headed: in thirty five years, they would reach their target and destroy whatever remained.

The U.N., now the central government of earth, the home world of human civilization throughout the galaxy, believes that someone else was responsible for the attack on New Moscow. They hope to convince the few remaining ambassadors of New Moscow of this, in order for those ambassadors to issue the "recall codes" to tell the STL ships to stand down. That's really New Dresden's only hope, because at even the fastest rate of evacuation billions of people would likely die if New Moscow's retaliatory attack were to land. Unfortunately, someone is assassinating the ambassadors, and that's where U.N. special operative Rachel Mansour comes in: as a member of the U.N.'s black chamber, the secret ops division, it falls to her to stop the assassinations and find out what is really going on.