Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross. Tor, $24.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7653-2910-3
Doctorow (Little Brother) and Stross (Rule 34) take a comic tour of a post-Singularity solar system where posthumans dump digital junk on the “pre-posthumans” who cling to terrestrial life. Huw Jones, a Welsh potter abandoned by parents who ascended
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Charles Stross, Author . Ace $24.95 (352p) ISBN 978-0-441-01719-5
Prolific novelist Stross pauses to collect short stories that have not (yet) been stitched up into his longer work. Stories that move the U.S.–U.S.S.R. conflict onto a massive disk in another galaxy (Locus Award–winner “Missile Gap&
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Charles Stross. Tor, $25.99 (352p) ISBN 978-0-7653-3757-3
In Stross’s middling second Empire Games novel (after Empire Games), plots don’t just thicken; they proliferate and snarl in each other like weeds. In the year 2020 in Timeline Two, a world somewhat like ours, U.S. spies have recruited Rita Douglas,
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Charles Stross. Tor, $25.99 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7653-3756-6
The multiverse teeters on the edge of a new cold war in this overly long and complicated novel, a continuation of Stross’s popular Merchant Princes series. In 2020, Rita Douglas, an aimless 20-something, is pulled into a plot by the Department of...
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Charles Stross. Ace, $27 (400p) ISBN 978-0-425-28119-2
In the latest Laundry Files supernatural investigation, Stross makes the wise decision to move away from the jaded and worn voices of Bob Howard and Mo O'Brien as protagonists, but the story suffers from muddled plotting and jokes that too often...
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Charles Stross. Ace, $26.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-425-25686-2
Hugo winner Stross continues his Laundry Files series (The Apocalypse Codex) with another entertaining but occasionally repetitive tale of a British government agency fighting the supernatural. Some British investment bankers have accidentally...
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Charles Stross. Subterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com), $35 (112p) ISBN 978-1-59606-664-9
Stross’s Hugo-nominated Laundry Files novella, first published in Tor.com in 2013, is an entertaining mash-up of Lovecraftian mythology and an extremely twisted take on a fantasy trope. Bob Howard, bureaucrat and agent for the Laundry—a secret...
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Charles Stross. Ace, $25.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-425-25677-0
In this loosely connected follow-up to 2008’s Saturn’s Children, Stross injects the trappings of space opera with his own wildly imaginative concepts, weaving a tale of economic intrigue against a backdrop of eons and light years. In the year 7000,...
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Charles Stross. Ace, $25.95 (336p) ISBN 978-1-937007-46-1
The fourth novel (after 2010’s The Fuller Memorandum) in Stross’s series about the Laundry, a British mystical intelligence agency, continues its fun blend of Lovecraftian horror, espionage, and office satire. Everyman geek Bob Howard has been...
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Charles Stross. Subterranean (www.subterraneanpress.com), $35 (136p) ISBN 978-1-59606-421-8
Stross's Hugo Award–winning novella (first published in his 2009 collection, Wireless) is a detailed look at the Stasis, a time travel organization, and the training and subsequent career of Pierce, one of its recruits. Pierce's story is related in...
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Charles Stross. Ace, $25.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-441-02034-8
Hugo winner Stross blends plausible near-future SF and crime in this brisk sequel to 2007's Halting State. In the mid-2020s, the police monitor the Internet full-time to prevent crime. In Edinburgh, this job falls to DI Liz Kavanaugh's Rule 34 Squad
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Charles Stross, Ace, $24.95 (304p) ISBN 9780-441-01867-3
Stross's third Laundry novel (after 2006's The Jennifer Morgue) continues to describe the Kafkaesque absurdity of government bureaucracies, but the tone turns dark when series hero Bob Howard accidentally kills a civilian during a routine exorcism....
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Charles Stross, Author Tor $24.99 (303p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1673-8
In the meandering sixth and final book in Stross’s Merchant Princes series (after 2008’s The Merchants’ War
), the war within the Clan Corporate fully spreads to our dimension. In the summer of 2003, Clan defectors attack...
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Charles Stross, Author . Ace $23.95 (313p) ISBN 978-0-441-01072-1
In his first novel, British author Stross, one of the hottest short-story writers in the field, serves up an energetic and sometimes satiric mix of cutting-edge nanotechnology, old-fashioned space opera and leftist political commentary reminiscent...
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Charles Stross, Author . Ace $24.95 (323p) ISBN 978-0-441-01594-8
Sex oozes from every page of this erotic futuristic thriller. In a far-future class-driven android society, most of the populace are slave-chipped and owned by wealthy “aristos.” When low-caste but unenslaved android Freya offends an...
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Charles Stross, Author . Ace $23.95 (368p) ISBN 978-0-441-01159-9
Best known for his short fiction, Stross shows that he's a master of the novel form as well in this exciting sequel to 2003's acclaimed Singularity Sky
, serving up compelling space opera and cutting-edge tech with a tasty dash of satire. In
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Charles Stross, Author . Tor $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-7653-0929-7
Best known for his Accelerando novels (Singularity Sky
, etc.) of an ever-speedier techno-Singularity, British author Stross mixes high-tech with medieval trappings in this highly entertaining science fantasy in the "misplaced modern" mode....
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Charles Stross, Author . Tor $24.95 (304p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1347-8
Miriam Beckstein, aka Countess Helge Thorold-Hjorth of the Clan, finds her own world to conquer in this fast-moving sequel to The Family Trade
(2004)—a neo-Victorian America ruled by an English king in exile. Determined to show her uncle,...
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Charles Stross, Author . Ace $24.95 (390p) ISBN 978-0-441-01284-8
Stross (Singularity Sky
) explores humanity's inability to cope with molecular nanotechnology run amok in this teeming near-future SF stand-alone. In part one, "Slow Takeoff," "free enterprise broker" Manfred Macx and his soon-to-
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Charles Stross, Author . Tor $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7653-0930-3
Stross's lively third volume in his Merchant Princes SF series (after 2005's The Hidden Family
) finds 33-year-old Boston journalist Miriam Beckstein still caught in a "barely post-feudal" alternate world where she's part of a...
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Charles Stross, Author . Cosmos $14.95 (247p) ISBN 978-0-8095-5603-8
The title of Stross's provocative new SF collection—a revised, expanded version of a 2002 title of the same name—is a mordant reference to catastrophes at the climaxes of these 11 stories. In "A Colder War," a stand-alone...
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Charles Stross, Author . Ace $24.95 (335p) ISBN 978-0-441-01403-3
The censorship wars—during which the Curious Yellow virus devastated the network of wormhole gates connecting humanity across the cosmos—are finally over at the start of Hugo-winner Stross's brilliant new novel, set in the same far-fu
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Charles Stross, Author . Golden Gryphon $35.95 (313p) ISBN 978-1-930846-45-6
In this alternately chilling and hilarious sequel to The Atrocity Archives
(2004) from Hugo-winner Stross, Bob Howard is a computer übergeek employed by the Laundry, a secret British agency assigned to clean up incursions from other realities...
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Charles Stross, Author . Ace $24.95 (351p) ISBN 978-0-441-01498-9
This brilliantly conceived techno-crime thriller spreads a black humor frosting over the grim prospect of the year 2012, when China, India and the European System are struggling for world economic domination in an “infowar,” and the U.S.
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Charles Stross, Author . Tor $24.95 (336p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1671-4
Readers unfamiliar with Stross's Clan Corporate
(2006) and its predecessors should hunt them down before diving into this breakneck fourth Merchant Princes episode. The clan, a Machiavellian trading dynasty whose members can cross among...
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Charles Stross, Author . Tor $24.95 (320p) ISBN 978-0-7653-1672-1
Stross's disorganized fifth Merchant Princes story (after 2007's The Merchants' War
) continues the adventures of hapless Boston journalist Miriam Beckstein. Newly free of political imprisonment, pregnant and on the lam, she finds...
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Charles Stross, Author, Ken MacLeod, Introduction by . Golden Gryphon $24.95 (295p) ISBN 978-1-930846-25-8
Lovecraft's Cthulhu meets Len Deighton's spies in Stross's latest, as the Scottish author explains in his afterword to this offbeat book offering two related long novellas, "The Atrocity Archive" and "The Concrete Jungle"
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Charles Stross, Author, J. K. Potter, Illustrator . Subterranean $35 (99p) ISBN 978-1-59606-058-6
In this weird little alternative history novella, acclaimed futurist Stross (Glasshouse
) takes the familiar clashes of the Cold War and stretches and warps them to fit a flattened Earth where the emergence of new continents incites competitive...
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Edited by Paula Guran. Prime (prime-
books.com), $16.95 trade paper (480p) ISBN 978-1-60701-450-8
From the seemingly bottomless reservoir of Lovecraftian pastiches and homages, Guran (New Cthulhu) has sieved 19 above-average reprints, all published between 2010 and 2014, and most tailoring their terrors to contemporary times. The monstrous...
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Jonathan Strahan. Night Shade (www.nightshadebooks.com), $19.99 trade paper (500p) ISBN 978-1-59780-345-8
Strahan’s sixth annual genre-spanning anthology lacks the clarity (or perhaps narrowness) of purpose of a series focusing solely on fantasy or SF, but the 31 selections demonstrate a knowledge of and affection for the fantastic that rival editors...
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Lucius Shepard, Author, Charles Stross, Author . Golden Gryphon $22.95 (125p) ISBN 978-1-930846-23-4
In this fascinating excursion into modern mythmaking, Shepard (Louisiana Breakdown
) draws on his experiences in the late 1990s riding the railroad and researching an apocryphal "hobo mafia" that dubbed itself the FTRA (Freight Train Riders...
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Charles Stross. Tor.com, $29.99 (384p) ISBN 978-1-250-26702-3
The madcap 10th entry in Stross’s Laundry Files series (following The Labyrinth Index), set in an alternate England where magic is a branch of applied mathematics that coexists alongside technology, finds the country under New Management, as the...
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Charles Stross. Tordotcom, $19.99 (96p) ISBN 978-1-250-80570-6
Ghostbusters meets H.P. Lovecraft—with some Japanese horror tropes and Hello Kitty kitsch thrown in—in Stross’s fun, bite-size 11th installment to his Laundry Files series (after Dead Lies Dreaming). In an alternate England where magic coexists with
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Charles Stross. Tordotcom, $28.99 (240p) ISBN 978-1-250-35784-7
Stross’s excellent 13th installment in his Laundry Files series (after Season of Skulls) comprises a gleefully nerdy novella and two bite-size stories. In 1984, at a time when role-playing games were viewed as potentially satanic, Derek Reilly and...
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