Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
5people
2017–2026years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- And for anyone who wants to read about Russia in an alien dimension, I can't recommend highly enough Charles Stross's "Merchant Princes" and "Empire Games" series!
- > CCRU does not, has not, and will never exist.
CCRU Writings 1997-2003 was/is a great book that blends reality with weird smart referential alternate realities. Short stories & blurbs that build on one another. Social commentary mixes with quirky cyber-quasi-occultism.
I don't have a ton of other good CCRU materials that I got experience with, but buying CCRU was a good pick. Fun then, and a book I do in fact come back to now & again to be amused by.
It was/is great having such literary/conceptual artifacts from before the onset of There Is No Alternative really set in like it has today, before we settled so deeply into this groove of capitalism molding tech so thoroughly to it's ends.
Related ish, I'd put it off as not my style but I did finally pick up Charlie Stross's Laundry Files saga a couple years back, after being shockingly delighted with his Empire Games which I'd initially thought would be not my style. Laundry Files is a great spy thriller, cross computer geek, cross occult book, that reminded me of a more palatable & long form CCRU. If case anyone is interested in some other pretty solid fun very referential out there reads. That ability to get from here, from reality we have, to these fun nearby thought spaces is so delightful.
- Glasshouse is great. I've enjoyed every Stross novel I've read, and Glasshouse was the first one, after stumbling across a newspaper review when it was released.
Both the Laundry Files & Merchant Princes / Empire games series are also great fun.
You can get a feel for Stross' Laundry Files series from:
"A Colder War" http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm (not Laundry Files, but in the ballpark)
"Equoid" https://www.tor.com/2013/09/24/equoid/
For the longest time I didn't try reading the Merchant Princes series because it _appeared_ to be too much of a fantasy series for my tastes -- boy was I mistaken. It's less "Narnia" and more "what do you reckon would actually happen if a paranoid US administration discovered Narnia" with healthy doses of feuding and economics.
- Actually a plot point in Charles Stross' Empire Games trilogy from memory.
- For anyone new to Charlie Stross' fiction, here are a few links for your perusal:
Stross' 2005 novel Accelerando [1] set around the technological singularity, is made freely available by the author
In addition to various standalone science fiction novels, Stross also has a couple of long series, the Laundry Files and Merchant Princes / Empire Games.
The setting of the Laundry Files is a mix of magic as a branch of applied math, UK secret service bureaucracy and lovecraftian horror. Stross' laundry files novella "Down on the Farm" is available to read here [2].
Stross' early novelette A Colder War, published in 2000, can be read here [3].
The Merchant Princes series is also a great yarn. The setup is that parallel universes with alternate history Earths exist, and tech journalist Miriam discovers she belongs to a bloodline who can "jaunt" into a parallel medieval Earth. One thing Stross does well is applying the science fictional / economic lens of "OK, so if that were true, then what happens?", so instead of simple fantasy tale we get an exploration of stuff like the transdimensional narco-courier-for-guns trade, or what would Rumsfeld do if transdimensional narcoterrorists made a severe error of judgement and picked a fight with the US? The series gets pretty dark...
[1] http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelera... [2] https://reactormag.com/down-on-the-farm/ [3] https://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm
- Prepping notes before I dive in to redraft and finalize Ghost Engine, my new space opera for July 2018 (UK publisher will be Orbit; US publisher TBA).
Also working on a Wild Cards short story for George R. R. Martin, and awaiting the copy edits on Dark State, the second Empire Games book (publication scheduled for January 2018, by Tor).
And in the queue behind that, is the scheduled final rewrite of Empire Games book 3, Invisible Sun (due for publication in January 2019, from Tor).
This should keep me busy through to the end of the year!
