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 always a good sign. My favourites other than Palimpsest were Down on the Farm, which is about an investigation at a hospital for magical maladies and Unwirer, about pirate wireless internet operators on the lam from the law, written with Cory Doctorow. I also liked Trunk and Disorderly, in which wealthy playboys romp through space, much to the dismay of their responsible butler. It features a Dalek named Toadsworth who just wants to inebriate. Maybe that's too over the top for some but I enjoyed it. Most of the other stories were quite good as well except MAXOS which was just a letter written to Nature magazine. I immediately recommended this to my husband. More struggling with short stories on my part. Actually I'm struggling with all fiction at the moment. Of the ten books I read before Wireless, only 1 was fiction, and that was a holiday read.I finished Wireless impressed with Stross, but not particularly impressed with the collection. I've now read a few of Stross's blog posts and I'm currently following him on Twitter, and I like the guy. He's clearly very smart, and that's evident from the stories themselves too. But I didn't get much out of some of them.My favourite was Unwirer, written with Cory Doctorow. It's alt-history cyberpunk, and it's probably the most straightforwardly written of the bunch. It's one of those fictions that manages to convince you you're cool while you're reading it and smarter for doing so, even though in reality you're borderline useless.Missile Gap, A Colder War, Down on the Farm and Palimpsest all have good stuff going for them - some combination of a great concept, extraordinary inventiveness, impressive scope, and Stross's way with telling, but also suffer from some combination of being tediously complex/obscure, having little characterisation, being too long and running out of steam, or being too short to fully develop.The other four stories did nothing for me, and Trunk and Disorderly in particular was abject.Throughout I kept thinking that I'd get on better with full-length Stross, and I finished with that same thought. I'd have to be selective about what I chose though, as some of the afterwords to the stories hint that a few of Stross's longer works might also entail some of the things that annoyed me here.I actually found most of the afterwords more interesting than the stories themselves. There I go again, struggling with fiction.
What do You think about Hladnije Od Pakla (2012)?
An Excellent set of short stories - Palimpsest was outstanding, even amoung the other gems.
—kiki
It's all great, but "Palimpsest" in particular is fantastic.
—Maggieheidy2330
Short story collection. I didn't finish it.
—aaris
