Books by Charles Stross
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review 1: Charles Stross’ Laundry series just keeps getting better and better, and darker and darker. Knowing this book was about this universe’s version of vampires, I expected a Bob-versus-the-bloodsuckers romp, but was surprised by the darkly realistic take on what it would really be li...
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review 1: I haven't read any books in the Laundry series, so this was the first time I was exposed to the series . It starts off rather abruptly, with little to no explanation as to the setting, which is somewhat expected considering that it's part of a large mythos. However, once you get ...
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review 1: 3 and a half stars. space opera set in a far future dominated by posthuman populations, in which all societal transactions have been monetized. the hero is a forensic accountant who investigates a major scam perpetrated two thousand years back in a very long con. the lost financi...
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review 1: I disliked one thing and one thing only about this book: at the end of the last and potentially best story, Stross admits that it should be a full short novel but he didn't want to drive the cost up by making the collection run over 500 pages. It's more a commentary on the sad st...
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review 1: I'm a Charles Stross fan. As usual, there are prescient and provocative ideas on science fiction themes here in a well plotted, highly detailed story. Follows 'Halting State'; begins, much in the same way, as a police procedural in a near-future Scotland. As the title suggests, t...
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review 1: Accelerando meets the Total Awareness Society. Great meditation on the different ways we could be, as the universe grows colder and darker, individually and collectively. That's the wrong conjunction junction, because in the world of the Palimpsest and frequent backups of EVERY...
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review 1: I am generally a big fan of Stross in general and the Laundry Files in specific and while I enjoyed this book, it has two major issues.First, the characters Bob works with, Persephone and Johnny, are not well-developed enough. They end up feeling like a rougher outline, and thei...
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review 1: It may be pointless reviewing this book other than to say, this is the third in the series, don't start here. Start with the Atrocity Archives and if you later end up here, you'll know why.This was third and my least favourite so far of the Laundry files, and makes me worry a lit...
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review 1: Another of Stross's laundry stories. It wasn't until I started reading it that I realised I had read it before as it appeared in Stross's collection Wireless. Having said that it was still a good re-read and I enjoyed it. I think if you like the series its a good one to try and f...
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review 1: This is a varied collection of mostly excellent recent stories by Charles Stross. In particular, it is worth calling out "Missile Gap" which won the Locus Award for novella in 2007, and "Palimpsest" which won the Hugo Award for novella in 2010. Several other of the stories were n...
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review 1: Somewhat blokey Sci-Fi (albeit with several lead characters), and quite complicated parallel-worlds premise which takes a fair bit of catching up to if you haven't read earlier books in the series (I hadn't).Still, some interesting ideas, especially where the author tries to get ...
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review 1: I enjoyed this novella that covers some of the more intricate nature of time travel. The Stasis is an organisation that has access to time travel and uses it to shape human history, preserving the human race, and reseeding it on Earth after it goes extinct, as it inevitably does...
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review 1: This book was in a bit of a hurry to wrap everything up, but it probably needed to be that way.
review 2: Wow, this turned a lot darker than I was expecting. Stross at his most pessimistic?
review 2: Wow, this turned a lot darker than I was expecting. Stross at his most pessimistic?