Showing results by author "Charles Stross" in All Categories

The American Commonwealth is caught in a deadly arms race with the USA, its parallel-world rival. And the USA’s technology is decades ahead. Yet the Commonweath might self-combust first – for its leader has just died, leaving a crippling power vacuum. Minister Miriam Burgeson must face allegations of treason without his support, in a power-grab by her oldest adversary. However, all factions soon confront a far greater danger.... In their drive to explore other timelines, hi-tech USA awakened an alien threat.

Manfred Macx is a patent junkie, spending his days dreaming up ideas that will make him rich, very rich indeed. He patents them and then offers them up to anyone for free. In doing so, he has shunned the need for cash, preferring to live off the generosity of his benefactors. Enter uploaded lobsters wanting to defect, government investigations, and a dominatrix ex-girlfriend who works for the IRS and you've got yourself a hip post-cyberpunk tale.

Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing when one of the great and the good is assassinated. You can kill a politician, but their ideas usually live on. They have a life of their own. How much more dangerous, then, the ideas of mathematicians? The announcement of the solution to the traveling salesman problem heralds the imminent destruction of humanity.

An unabridged audio collection of the "best of the best" science fiction stories written in 2011 by current and emerging masters of the genre, edited by Allan Kaster, as narrated by top voice talents. In "Dying Young", by Peter M. Ball, cyborgs, clones, and post-humans collide with a dragon bent on revenge in a post-apocalyptic space western. In "Canterbury Hollow", by Chris Lawson, two lovers on a planet orbiting a killer sun share their few remaining weeks together before they die....

Here is a modern novelette in H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos. Imagine David Cronenberg directing Dr. Strangelove, based on a script by H. P. Lovecraft. Imagine an alternate history in which nuclear bombs are not the ultimate weapon, but instead are merely a stepping stone to eldritch technologies accessible through certain trans-dimensional forces first encountered in 1920s Antarctica, technologies that neither the United States nor the USSR can quite contain.

Miriam Beckstein is a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine. So when she discovers a huge money-laundering scam, she thinks she's hit the big time. But when she takes it to her editor, not only is she fired, but she starts to receive death threats. And that's just the beginning. To distract her furious daughter, Miriam's adoptive mother unearths mementos from her real mother, murdered when she was an infant.