At first this novel feels much differently than Singularity Sky, as if the author has matured his style and has much more detail and deeper characters and story- it feels as if it might be big- not epic big, but big. The difference from the almost more cartoonish feel of Singularity Sky is jarring. There's much more violence and brutality and sex (a little) than I remember in SS. And it also feels closer to the present, perhaps because Stross focuses on Earth and colony worlds that are more western and like modern Earth than the further flung New Republic and the Traveling Circus(?).
(spoilers follow)
At the end there's a long 'Diehard on a starship' sequence that doesn't really satisfy, many loose ends are tied up but aside from a few glimpses into the nature of the Eschaton and its time travel computations there's more of a small episodic adventure feel to the novel. The over-the-top mind-enslaving faux-Nazi badguys seem a little like the over-the-top mind-enslaving bad guys from Deepness In The Sky, but perhaps their brutality is more justified by their end-goal rather than sadistic.
The inability of the Eschaton to intervene is not really that clear, though it's probably better left unsaid as invoking too much cavalry-to-the-rescue time-travel would weaken the story as it weakens Transcendant.
The Eschaton driven colonization scheme is an interesting setting- it's a cheap way to create many human cultures with primitive pasts spread across the galaxy. The further from earth that is traveled, the more ancient and alien things get (though in this book they don't travel too far). In other settings similar things could be accomplished by having a future history of earth FTL interstellar colonization followed by apocalypse to set the clock back on all the colonies.
It's a little pointless of the Eschaton to scatter humans outside of its time-reversed lightcone when they then will invent FTL for themselves, deep in the past of the creation of the Eschaton.
The ending is especially cartoonish, sort of like the end to Atrocity Archives where the meddling bureaucrat gets dealt with harshly.
