W „Accelerando” Stross przedstawił wizję przyszłości człowieka wygenerowaną w oparciu o ekstrapolację nie tylko poziomu nauki, ale przede wszystkim rozwoju ekonomii, co dotychczas pomijano w klasycznej fantastyce naukowej. Stross mocno opiera się na prawach ekonomii, czyniąc z głównego bohatera międzynarodowego przedsiębiorcę. Ewolucja ekonomiczna w ujęciu Strossa doprowadza w przyszłości do uzyskania świadomości przez korporacje. „Accelerando” Charlesa Strossa jest doskonałym przykładem poważnej spekulacji na temat przyszłości człowieka i cywilizacji, co dawno porzuciła polska fantastyka

“Equoid” is set shortly before the events of the “The Fuller Memorandum”. It’s the longest non-novel-length Laundry story so far. And it explains (among other things) precisely what H. P. Lovecraft saw behind the wood-shed when he was 14 that traumatized him for life, the reproductive life-cycle of unicorns, and what really happened on Cold Comfort Farm

In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates, a dot-com startup company that's just been floated on the London stock exchange. The suspects are a band of marauding orcs, with a dragon in tow for fire support, and the bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But she soon realizes that the virtual world may have a devastating effect in the real one-and that someone is about to launch an attack upon both…

The sequel to the critically acclaimed Singularity Sky returns to the twenty-fourth-century interstellar domain humankind has forged through the godlike powers of the Eschaton, an enigmatic being from humanity’s distant future. Now, in an act of apparent sabotage, one remote interstellar colony, Moscow, has met a disastrous fate: its host star exploded, annihilating an entire solar system and forcing the evacuation of nearby colonies. UN hostage negotiator Rachel Mansour, who is recovering from a showdown with a psychotic performance artist harboring a nuclear warhead, is tagged to make the wormhole jaunt to the scene and investigate. Is one of Moscow’s rival colonies responsible? Is the Eschaton? Improbably, the answers to such questions may lie with Wednesday, a rambunctious adolescent girl whose family is fleeing the expanding explosion, and between whose story and Rachel’s the novel alternates. Stross improves on Singularity Sky with better characterizations and entertaining technological inventiveness. Fans of hard SF spiced by political intrigue will relish this dish. Nominated for Hugo and Locus awards in 2005

In this weird little alternative history novella, acclaimed futurist Charles Stross 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 colonization efforts from the Americans and Soviets. When the colonists encounter 1,000-year-old radioactive ruins and poisonous termite-like creatures that exhibit eerie degrees of intelligence, the true nature of their changed world slowly becomes clear. The result is a blend of 1900s H.G. Wells and 1970s propaganda, updated for the 21st century in the clear, chilly and fashionably cynical style that lets Stross get away with premises that would be absurdly cheesy in anyone else’s hands

A short story

Cyberpunk is dead The revolution has been co-opted by half-assed heroes, overclocked CGI, and tricked-out sunglasses. Once radical, cyberpunk is nothing more than a brand. Time to stop flipping the channel These sixteen extreme stories reveal a government ninja routed by a bicycle repairman, the inventor of digitized paper hijacked by his college crush, a dead boy trapped in a warped storybook paradise, and the Queen of England attacked with the deadliest of forbidden technology: a working modem. You'll meet Manfred Macx, renegade meme-broker, Red Sonja, virtual reality sex-goddess, and Felix, humble sysadmin and post-apocalyptic hero. Editors James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel (Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology) have united cyberpunk visionaries William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Pat Cadigan with the new post-cyberpunk vanguard including Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross, and Jonathan Lethem. Including a canon-establishing introduction and excerpts from a hotly-contested online debate, Rewired is the first anthology to define and capture the crackling excitement of the post-cyberpunks. From the grittiness of Mirrorshades to the Singularity and beyond, it's time to revive the revolution. Are you ready?

Meet Edinburgh Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh, head of the Innovative Crimes Investigation Unit, otherwise known as the Rule 34 Squad. They monitor the Internet for potential criminal activity, analyzing trends in the extreme fringes of explicit content. And occasionally, even more disturbing patterns arise… Three ex-cons have been murdered in Germany, Italy, and Scotland. The only things they had in common were arrests for spamming—and a taste for unorthodox entertainment. As the first officer on the scene of the most recent death, Liz finds herself sucked into an international investigation that isn’t so much asking who the killer is, but what—and if she doesn’t find the answer soon, the homicides could go viral

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 aristo and needs to get off-world, she takes a courier position with the mysterious Jeeves Corporation, but the job turns out to have dangers of its own. Designed as a pleasure-module, Freya isn’t quite as obsolete as she could be, as androids have sex with each other incessantly. Hugo-winner Charles Stross has a deep message of how android slavery recapitulates humanity’s past mistakes, but he struggles to make it heard over the moans and gunshots. Readers nostalgic for the SF of the ’60s will find much that’s familiar (including Freya’s jumpsuit-clad form on the cover), but that doesn’t quite compensate for the flaws

This much-anticipated debut novel is set 400 years in the future-and in the wake of perfected time travel, the ultimate advancements in technology and information, and the groundbreaking development of Artificial Intelligence. Is this all a great step for humanity? Or will it be our ultimate downfall? Singularity Sky is a truly visionary novel of the future, and already its author, Charles Stross, has become the most talked-about new voice in science fiction…

An anthology of stories The Devil is known by many names: Serpent, Tempter, Beast, Adversary, Wanderer, Dragon, Rebel. His traps and machinations are the stuff of legends. His faces are legion. No matter what face the devil wears, Sympathy for the Devil has them all. Edited by Tim Pratt, Sympathy for the Devil collects the best Satanic short stories by Neil Gaiman, Holly Black, Stephen King, Kage Baker, Charles Stross, Elizabeth Bear, Jay Lake, Kelly Link, China Mieville, Michael Chabon, and many others, revealing His Grand Infernal Majesty, in all his forms. Thirty-five stories, from classics to the cutting edge, exploring the many sides of Satan, Lucifer, the Lord of the Flies, the Father of Lies, the Prince of the Powers of the Air and Darkness, the First of the Fallen… and a Man of Wealth and Taste. Sit down and spend a little time with the Devil

Robin budzi się w szpitalu, stwierdzając, że stracił prawie wszystkie wspomnienia, a chwilę potem odkrywa także, że ktoś próbuje go zabić. Jest XXVII wiek, między gwiazdami podróżuje się bramkami teleportacyjnymi, a narzędziem wojen są sieciowe robaki, cenzurujące osobowości uchodźców i biorące na celownik historyków. Wojna domowa skończyła się, Robina zdemobilizowano, ktoś chce go jednak zlikwidować ze względu na coś, co wiedziała jego poprzednia osobowość. Uciekając przed bezlitosnym prześladowcą i szukając kryjówki, zgłasza się na ochotnika do niezwykłego eksperymentalnego ustroju — Szklanego Domu. Jest on symulacją kultury sprzed Akceleracji, uczestnicy eksperymentu dostają w nim nowe, anonimowe osobowości: wydaje się, że to idealny azyl dla uciekającego postczłowieka. W tym domu, z którego nie da się uciec, Robin przejdzie jeszcze bardziej diametralną zmianę, znalazłszy się na łasce i niełasce eksperymentatorów oraz własnej niezrównoważonej psychiki…

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 mafiosa-like family called "the Clan." The Clan is holding Miriam's mother hostage in an effort to force the reluctant, thoroughly modern Miriam to make a politically advantageous marriage. Also dragged into deadly Clan politics is Miriam's ex-boyfriend, Mike Fleming, a DEA agent who has infiltrated Miriam's world on the orders of Homeland Security. Miriam's foolish, headstrong decisions help propel the fast-paced plot. Mike's discovery that the Clan may have planted nuclear weapons on our world raises the ante. While Miriam can be frustratingly dense, playing right into her captors' hands, the book gallops along to a cliffhanger ending that will leave readers eagerly awaiting future installments

A bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, The Merchant Princes is a sweeping new series from the hottest new writer in science fiction! Miriam Beckstein is happy in her life. She's a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine in Boston, making good money doing what she loves. When her researcher brings her iron-clad evidence of a money-laundering scheme, Miriam thinks she's found the story of the year. But when she takes it to her editor, she's fired on the spot and gets a death threat from the criminals she has uncovered. Before the day is over, she's received a locket left by the mother she never knew—the mother who was murdered when she was an infant. Within is a knotwork pattern, which has a hypnotic effect on her. Before she knows it, she's transported herself to a parallel Earth, a world where knights on horseback chase their prey with automatic weapons, and where world-skipping assassins lurk just on the other side of reality—a world where her true family runs things. The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between the worlds makes them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently-ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious. Taken in by her mother's people, she becomes the star of the story of the century—as Cinderella without a fairy godmother. As her mother's heir, Miriam is hailed as the prodigal countess Helge Thorold-Hjorth, and feted and feasted. Caught up in schemes and plots centuries in the making, Miriam is surrounded by unlikely allies, forbidden loves, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. Her unexpected return will supercede the claims of other clan members to her mother's fortune and power, and whoever killed her mother will be happy to see her dead, too. Behind all this lie deeper secrets still, which threaten everyone and everything she has ever known. Patterns of deception and interlocking lies, as intricate as the knotwork between the universes. But Miriam is no one's pawn, and is determined to conquer her new home on her own terms. Blending the creativity and humor of Roger Zelazny, the adventure of H. Beam Piper and Philip Jose Farmer, and the rigor and scope of a science-fiction writer on the grandest scale, Charles Stross has set a new standard for fantasy epics

Bob has been behind a desk for too long, busy indexing and archiving the Laundry's secret files, and he's longing for a break when his wife, Mo, announces that she's landed a teaching assignment at a staff college in Cambridge. And he's worrying at the problem of a missing manuscript – an unfinished policy document found in the personal effects of Major-General J. F. C. Fuller (rtd) after his death – which is absent from the Laundry archives. (Fuller was not only the tactician who first invented Blitzkrieg warfare in 1917-18; he was also #2 to Aleister Crowley in the OTO, and a heavyweight Cabalist.) So Bob follows Mo to Cambridge, and is startled to find a Russian spy sneaking around after him. The Fuller Memorandum is missing, and the FSB want it badly. It's got something to do with Fuller's occult obsessions, and something to do with the Laundry's creation in 1941. But Bob doesn't realize just how much is at stake until someone tries to kill Mo, and his boss Angleton starts behaving oddly before lapsing into a coma. The theft of Fuller's document is at the heart of a murderous conspiracy rooted in the GULAGs, and Bob is dumped into a deadly race against time – because if he can't work out where it's been hidden, and how it's connected to Angleton's mysterious illness, it's going to be curtains for the Laundry (and possibly the world) as the cultists of Chernobog try to raise darkness at noon

In the tradition of Roger Zelazny’s classic Amber novels, the second volume of Charles Stross’s thrill-a-minute saga of multiple worlds. Miriam, a hip tech journalist from Boston, discovered her alternate world relatives in The Family Trade, and with them an elite identity she didn’t know was hers. Now, in order to avoid a slippery slope down to an unmarked grave, Miriam, known as Lady Helge to the Family, starts applying modern business practices and scientific knowledge to a trade dominated by mercantilists — with unexpected consequences for three different timelines, including the quasi-Victorian one exploited by the hidden family. Charles Stross is one of the big new SF writers of the 21st century, and the saga of The Merchant Princes is his most ambitious work yet

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 caused by the inadvertent manipulation of complex mathematical equations: in other words, magic. In 1975, the CIA used Howard Hughes's Glomar Explorer in a bungled attempt to raise a sunken Soviet submarine in order to access the Jennifer Morgue, an occult device that allows communication with the dead. Now a ruthless billionaire intends to try again, even if by doing so he awakens the Great Old Ones, who thwarted the earlier expedition. It's up to Bob and a collection of British eccentrics even Monty Python would consider odd to stop the bad guy and save the world, while getting receipts for all expenditures or else face the most dreaded menace of all: the Laundry's own auditors. Stross has a marvelous time making eldritch horror appear commonplace in the face of bureaucracy

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 herself at the center of a desperate power grab as political instability rocks the mafia-like Clan Corporate, who are magically able to cross between parallel worlds. When world-walkers steal nukes from a U.S. installation, it's a race against time to find out who has them, and why, before they can be deployed. The U.S. is also close to discovering a technological method of world-walking, rendering the clan both vulnerable and obsolete. Stross pays heartfelt homage to Roger Zelazny and Lois McMaster Bujold, but with too many characters and too little focus, this novel fails to match their achievements

«В общих словах парадокс, сформулированный Энрико Ферми, можно озвучить следующим образом: если во Вселенной существует множество технологически развитых цивилизаций, почему ни одна из них нас так и не посетила?». Вы до сих пор теряетесь в догадках, почему же инопланетяне так к нам и не прилетели? Но ведь ответ очевиден — потому что МАКСОПы! Они, родные, обескураживающе знакомые! Не верите? Читайте и — делайте выводы!