I reread this book. The story contains examples of on-the-fly coding, warring product theology factions, the save-the-world technology, confusing and incomplete project managemant, and a horrible result. Charles Stross has beautifully described at least one of the projects that I have worked. The...
Although the IT geek dark humor is still present, The Apocalypse Codex is another step towards a more serious Laundry Files. The writing, pacing, and intrigue are more mature, and the depth of the novel itself is very far from the synopsis.I find that these changes are for the better. Howard ha...
I'd read the story Palimpsest as a stand-alone novella and enjoyed it enough to track down the collection of short stories it was originally published in. This was a fun read with great ideas--I had to stop reading midway through some stories and could not stop thinking about them which is alway...
Another short story set in the Laundry, like Overtime. In this one, our hero Bob is sent to check on the residents of the Funny Farm - Laundry agents who have gone mad from exposure to thaumaturgical energy. When he gets through enough layers of red tape to enter the most secure wing of the facil...
A political rant disguised as alternate history/multiverse scifi. The earlier books in this series ranged from fair to very good. Stross' politicized self-righteous, and personal anger at the Bush Administration grafts itself into the storyline, cheapening the series and ultimately making it f...
The final book of Stross' "Merchant Princes" series (or the first Merchant Princes series, as it is open for a host of sequels), about the Clan: a family of dimension travelers from an alternate Earth. The protagonist of the series, Miriam Beckstein, was raised in America and, on discovering her...
Charles Stross returns to the world of British occult espionage in The Jennifer Morgue, a sequel to his eccentric, high-density work in The Atrocity Archives (reviewed here). Staying true to form, Stross once again constructs an elaborate parody of genre fiction by simultaneously using and mockin...
When this book was published, Charles Stross was science fictionâs most recent sensation. After years of relative anonymity, heâd been shortlisted for SF awards for his novels (both SF and fantasy) and novellas. Iron Sunrise, which garnered the best novel nomination for the 2005 Hugo Awards...
"Imagine a world where speaking or writing words can literally and direclty make things happen, where getting one of those words wrong can wreck unbelievable havoc, where with the right spell you can summon immensely powerful agencies to work your will. Imagine further that that in this world the...
I was under the impression that this was a science fiction book set in the far future, with a family that controlled merchant interests across a far-flung, loosely-connected human civilization. I was completely off the mark on that … and I couldn’t be happier. The word for this book, I think, is ...
Ever discover an author through another medium, like TV or Twitter or the author’s blog, and realize you want to read everything this author has written and you want to read it yesterday? That’s how I feel about Charles Stross. It’s similar to my evaluation of William Gibson in my last review; St...
We’ve just entered the tail end of 2013, fast approaching the middle of decade the second of the twenty-first century. Few of the changes Charles Stross lays out in this book have come to pass, which isn’t surprising. Many of them are still possible within our lifetime, though, which is interesti...
Miriam Beckstein has gotten in touch with her roots and they have nearly strangled her. A young, hip, business journalist in Boston, she discovered (in The Family Trade ) that her family comes from an alternate reality, that she is very well-connected, and that her family is a lot too much like t...
John Scalzi claims to be a gateway drug into science fiction literature, I suppose he may well be but I believe Charles Stross is almost the opposite of that. Stross is deservedly one of the most popular active sci- fi authors today but readers not familiar with the genre may find him a little be...
The first book in this series started as a refreshing take on the world-walking motif, in which instead of people just being kings in a magic world and then occasionally coming home, they exploit arbitrage opportunities, bringing goods back and forth. It was an interesting spin. Unfortunately, it...
Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in The Family Trade and The Hidden Family that her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a fa...
From the first line, this book hooked me: "The day war was declared, a rain of telephones fell clattering to the cobblestones from the skies above Novy Petrograd." A post-Singularity descendant of humanity, the Festival, arrives in orbit around the backwater Rochard's World. The Festival's will...
I loved the central conceit to this book: it's almost an opposite to Asimov's Robots series. In this, humans created robots with artificial processors modeled on human brains (Stross never quite calls it a positronic brain, but...) and installed the Three Laws of Robotics as every good science fi...
The information content of which can be quite handily nutritious to an eater because, well, that’s what they live on. An eater without a body is relatively harmless as long as your brain is warded, or the eater is surrounded by a secure containment grid, or otherwise occupied by another eater. An...
Cast the fly back four weeks and see what you catch, reeling in the month-old memories ... IT'S LATE ON A RAINY SATURDAY MORNING IN February, and Mo and I are drinking the remains of the breakfast coffee while talking about holidays. Or rather, she's talking about holidays...
Besides which, while you’ve had a bellyful of hanging out with folks from work recently, Elaine is different. She’s pretty intimidating in a work context, but right now she seems to want company. She’s an odd mixture of spiky stand-offishness and—Well, maybe she just wants company because she’s s...
TEAM OF CHAMPIONS I wake up hours later than I meant to. A small black cat is curled up against my head, weighing down my hair. Her purr is deafening, but what pulls me out of a deep and dreamless sleep is the indescribable sensation of having my eyebrows licked. “Urgh!” I growl. Spooky chirrups ...
This version made available for 2010 Hugo Award voters by kind permission of the publishers. All rights reserved. FRESH MEAT This will never happen: You will flex your fingers as you stare at the back of the youth you are going to kill, father to the man who will never now become your grandfathe...
DARPA, the Pentagon department tasked with nurturing Mad Science in all its most speculative forms, had decided to throw a brainstorming conference on the 100 Year Starship—a mind-meld to try and figure out what research they’d have to conduct in order to have a hope of beginning to build a stars...
Joe shivered slightly in the driver’s seat as he twisted the starter handle on the old front-loader he used to muck out the barn. Like its owner, the ancient Massey Ferguson had seen better days; but it had survived worse abuse than Joe routinely handed out. The diesel clattered, spat out a gobbe...
An enforced week of idleness at home-idleness that was curiously unrestful, punctuated by cold-sweat fear-awakenings at dead of night when something creaked or rattled in the elderly apartment-was followed by a week of presenteeism in the office, hobbling around with a lightweight cast on his foo...
GREEN LIME LIFE GOES ON. Over the next week, Mo gradually recovers some of her usual humor and level-headedness: a couple of visits to the security-cleared therapist are approved, and a discreet prescription or two. I try to do the supportive husband thing, with mixed resu...
Note: Bits of this novel may offend you. If that is the case, please remember that there's an "off" switch attached: if you don't like it, don't read it. Please also remember that this is a work of fiction. Attitudes, beliefs, and actions espoused in it bear no relation to reality whatsover. Year...
I broke the rule this year, and now I’m paying the price. It’s not my fault I failed to book my Christmas leave in time—I was in hospital and heavily sedated. But the ruthless cut and thrust of office politics makes no allowance for those who fall in the line of battle: “You should have foreseen ...
This is crazy, he told himself. How can you be tired at a time like this? The air conditioner in the conference room wheezed, losing the battle to keep the heat of the summer evening at bay. He desperately needed another coffee. Despite the couple o...
The SF field harbors a large, and very vocal minority of libertarians who claim that laissez-faire policies are the answers to all our problems. However, they make the mistake of assuming that their preferred theory is universally applicable. Even if you agree with them, it’s important to underst...
I am surrounded by fucking ants. Can’t they get anything right? This is not rocket science. (Rocket science: fucking 1930s shit invented by Nazi übermensch engineers and so easy that by the 1990s even a bunch of camel-fucking towel-heads could master it.) This is not AI. (...