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...
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...
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...