Charles Stross

The Laundry Files — (2004-2012) Publisher: Bob Howard is a computer-hacker desk jockey, who has more than enough trouble keeping up with the endless paperwork he has to do on a daily basis. He should never be called on to do anything remotely heroic. But for some reason, he is.

Forthcoming: The Apocalypse Codex

Stand-alone novels:

Accelerando — (2005) Publisher: Expanding on his award-winning short story cycle from the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction, Charles Stross delivers the story fans and peers have been expecting with Accelerando, a novel destined to change the face of the genre.

Glasshouse — (2006) Publisher: In the twenty-seventh century, accelerated technology dictates the memories and personalities of people. With most of his own memories deleted, Robin enters The Glasshouse — an experimental polity where he finds himself at the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche.

Glasshouse

So chock full of the social consequences of nano-science and memory editing is Charles Stross’s Glasshouse, I’m still trying to pick myself up from the floor. In a whirl, I can’t decide whether the ideas were expressed in cohesive enough fashion to produce a book I can praise or if I’ve simply been blinded by an imaginative eruption that is worthy enough in itself of admiration. Beyond a dumb-faced sense of wonder, I’m also wondering if anyone else could have a more defined view after riding Stross’s tilt-a-whirl of futuristic possibilities… 

Set at an unknown time in the far future, humanity — or what resembles humanity, considering anyone can edit memories or nano-dapt into any living form — is recovering from war. Infected via the A-gates and T-gates which humanity used for said alterations, society was attacked by rebels wielding viruses that affected the psyche before the body. But with the rebels now defeated, the main character, Robin, has his memories as a soldier in the war wiped and is attempting to start a new life — woman, man, two or four arms, it all changes depending on “his” mood, with the gates safe once again. Choice regarding appearance is not an issue; paranoia, however, is. Fearing that the rebels are still after him, Robin checks into a research program and agrees to participate in an experiment. While isolating himself from society, he helps recreate the dark ages, aka the late 20th century. The history for this time is missing due to Censorship Wars. Funny and insightful, Robin’s experiences in the biodome-style experiment, while providing the bulk of the novel, also serve to offer up Stross’s post-humanist agenda. With the sky the limit in terms of physical appearance and emotional display, how do you know what anything is? Who to trust? If your worst enemy could be smiling beside you and you wouldn’t know it, how would this affect the psyche? How do we measure identity? But this is only the beginning. There is a plethora of other questions and ideas packed into Glasshouse and simply not enough room in this review to discuss them.

No space opera lasers flashing or spaceships warping, Glasshouse is SF to the extreme but with a social agenda. The plot devices are too numerous to express Stross’s premise cogently, and perhaps this style is all part of the theme: to flood the mind with possibilities until it’s uncertain what is real. Whether pertinent or not, the ideas are interesting enough to warrant a read. Readers of Greg Egan, Peter Hamilton, Bruce Sterling, Frederick Pohl, Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson take note. All the stops pulled, Glasshouse is science fiction for the 21st century.
—Jesse Hudson
FanLit thanks Jesse Hudson of Speculiction for contributing this guest review.

Missile Gap — (2007) Publisher: It's 1976 again. Abba are on the charts, the Cold War is in full swing — and the Earth is flat. It's been flat ever since the eve of the Cuban war of 1962; and the constellations overhead are all wrong. Beyond the Boreal ocean, strange new continents loom above tropical seas, offering a new start to colonists like newly-weds Maddy and Bob, and the hope of further glory to explorers like ex-cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin: but nobody knows why they exist, and outside the circle of exploration the universe is inexplicably warped. Gregor, in Washington DC, knows but isn't talking. Colonel-General Gagarin, on a years-long mission to go where New Soviet Man has not gone before, is going to find out. And on the edge of an ancient desert, beneath the aged stars of another galaxy, Maddy is about to come face-to-face with humanity's worst fear???

Saturn's Children — (2008) Publisher: Sometime in the twenty-third century, humanity went extinct — leaving only androids behind. Freya Nakamichi 47 is a femmebot, one of the last of her kind still functioning. With no humans left to pay for the pleasures she provides, she agrees to transport a mysterious package from Mercury to Mars. Unfortunately for Freya, she has just made herself a moving target for some very powerful, very determined humanoids who will stop at nothing to possess the contents of the package.

Scratch Monkey — (2011) Publisher: The 2011 Boskone Book by Boskone's Guest of Honor Charles Stross. It contains his previously unpublished novel, Scratch Monkey, an essay about writing the novel, and a second essay about a writer's view of publishing. The novel is set in the distant future, when humans have spread through the galaxy, physically and virtually. We are not alone; we have created a race of AIs, the Superbrights, to administer and expand the virtual side of our presence in the Milky Way. Oshi Adjani works for a Superbright, traveling to worlds where her Boss cannot go, and solving the problems he has set her. One success reveals a secret of the Superbrights, so the Boss forces her into one last, deadly mission, with her freedom as her reward for doing the impossible.

Palimpsest — (2010) Publisher: Welcome to the Stasis, the clandestine, near-omnipotent organization that stands at the heart of Charles Stross's Hugo Award-winning novella, Palimpsest. By mastering the mysteries of the Timegate, the Stasis has repeatedly steered mankind away from the brink of utter extinction. Through countless millennia, through the 'mayfly flickerings' of innumerable transient civilizations, its members have intervened at critical junctions, reseeding the galaxy with viable potential survivors. In the process, they have reconfigured the basic structure of the universe, all in the name of human continuity. Pierce is a newly recruited member of the Stasis, serving out a complex twenty-year apprenticeship while struggling to find his way through the paradoxical maze of history (and unhistory) that surrounds him. As his once simple existence expands and replicates over vast stretches of time, Pierce uncovers a new and unexpected destiny, one that will embroil him in the larger purposes of the Stasis and in the ultimate, unresolved fate of humanity itself. Skillfully merging the threads of an individual life with the grandest, most overarching concerns, Palimpsest offers both visionary brilliance and narrative excitement in equal measure. Powerfully imagined, beautifully constructed, and writtenthroughout with great economy of means, it is the kind of mind-expanding mini-epic that only science fiction — and only a master practitioner like Charles Stross — could produce.

Palimpsest

Agent Pierce murdered his own grandfather to join Stasis, the covert organization which works outside of time to reseed the Earth with humans every time they’re about to make themselves extinct. Pierce considers himself a loyal agent, and he didn’t even realize that there is a group that works in Opposition to Stasis — he’s only in training. So, why is someone trying to assassinate him?

Palimpsest follows Agent Pierce from initiation, through his twenty years of training, to his gruesome graduation ceremony, and onto his assignments as a new agent. The segments involving Pierce’s progress are written in both second and third person and are occasionally interrupted by chapters of Powerpoint-style lectures which show glimpses of alternate histories of our universe and describe the way the galaxy was restructured so that it could last for trillions of years.

It’s easy to see why Palimpsest won the Hugo Award for best novella in 2010. First of all, it’s beautifully written. This comes from “Slide 6”:
Six hundred and fifty million years later, the outlines of Earth’s new continents glow by night like a neon diadem against the darkness, shouting consciousness at the sky in a blare of radio-wavelength emissions as loud as a star.

And how can you not admire this?:
The day after he murdered himself in cold blood, Agent Pierce received an urgent summons to attend a meeting in the late nineteenth century.

You’d be tempted to think that time-travel, with its accompanying paradoxes, is a well-worn theme, and Palimpsest does re-visit some of the age-old questions, but it’s got some fresh and fascinating questions to ask, too: If a historical event is written over, which history is the correct one? (This is where the title “Palimpsest” comes from.) Is it ethical to decide who you want to be and then go back in time to remake yourself? What happens when a powerful organization evolves so that it has abandoned its original purpose and made itself its reason for being? What is the best way to make sure that the human species survives?

Pierce’s predicaments, and the issues he deals with, are exciting, but the story was so quick, sketchy, and subtle, and it jumps around so much, that I rarely had more than a tentative grasp on what was going on at any moment. I had to do a lot of rereading to make sure I knew what was happening, though I admit that I have rarely enjoyed being lost as much as I did here, and Stross was likely going for that effect. The characters, including Pierce himself, are also sketchily drawn, making it hard to connect with them. Pierce, who was just as bewildered as me, was mostly a passive character pushed along by his strange circumstances. Only at the end did he seem to seriously consider what he might do to affect his world (again, this was probably intentional).

In his afterword, Charles Stross says “Palimpsest wanted to be a novel. It really, really wanted to be a novel. Maybe it will be, someday.” I agree: Palimpsest wants to be a novel. It needs to be a novel. I want it to be a novel. This superb story deserves much more space and time (so to speak). —Kat Hooper