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Charles Stross is an English author who writes science fiction. Though, Stross hates being categorized as a pure science fiction writer because he has dabbled in fantasy and Lovecraftian Horror. His determination to experiment has always made Stross’ books difficult to market.
Order of Singularity Sky Series
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Singularity Sky | 2003 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Iron Sunrise | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
3 | Accelerando | 2005 | Description / Buy |
Order of The Merchant Princes Series
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | The Family Trade | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
2 | The Hidden Family | 2005 | Description / Buy | |
3 | The Clan Corporate | 2006 | Description / Buy | |
4 | The Merchants' War | 2007 | Description / Buy | |
5 | The Revolution Business | 2009 | Description / Buy | |
6 | The Trade of Queens | 2010 | Description / Buy |
Order of Laundry Files Series
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | The Atrocity Archives | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
2 | The Jennifer Morgue | 2006 | Description / Buy | |
3 | Down on the Farm (Short Story) | 2010 | Description / Buy | |
4 | Equoid (Short Story) | 2010 | Description / Buy | |
5 | Overtime (Short Story) | 2010 | Description / Buy | |
6 | The Fuller Memorandum | 2010 | Description / Buy | |
7 | The Apocalypse Codex | 2012 | Description / Buy | |
8 | The Rhesus Chart | 2014 | Description / Buy | |
9 | The Annihilation Score | 2015 | Description / Buy | |
10 | The Nightmare Stacks | 2016 | Description / Buy | |
11 | The Delirium Brief | 2017 | Description / Buy | |
12 | The Labyrinth Index | 2018 | Description / Buy | |
13 | Escape from Yokai Land (Short Story) | 2022 | Description / Buy | |
14 | Season of Skulls | 2023 | Description / Buy |
Order of The New Management Series
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Dead Lies Dreaming | 2020 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Quantum of Nightmares | 2022 | Description / Buy |
Order of Laundry Files Collections
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Three Tales from the Laundry Files (Short Story) | 2014 | Description / Buy |
Order of Halting State Series
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Halting State | 2007 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Rule 34 | 2011 | Description / Buy |
Order of Freyaverse Series
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Saturn's Children | 2008 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Neptune's Brood | 2013 | Description / Buy |
Order of Empire Games Series
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Empire Games | 2017 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Dark State | 2018 | Description / Buy | |
3 | Invisible Sun | 2021 | Description / Buy |
Order of Charles Stross Standalone Novels
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Glasshouse | 2006 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Missile Gap (Short Story) | 2006 | Description / Buy | |
3 | Scratch Monkey | 2011 | Description / Buy | |
4 | The Rapture of the Nerds | 2012 | Description / Buy |
Order of Charles Stross Short Stories/Novellas
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Approaching Xanadu (Short Story) | 1989 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Lobsters (Short Story) | 2001 | Description / Buy | |
3 | Halo (Short Story) | 2002 | Description / Buy | |
4 | Nightfall (Short Story) | 2003 | Description / Buy | |
5 | Festival of Fools | 2003 | Description / Buy | |
6 | The Concrete Jungle (Short Story) | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
7 | Elector (Short Story) | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
8 | Palimpsest (Short Story) | 2009 | Description / Buy | |
9 | A Tall Tail (Short Story) | 2012 | Description / Buy |
Order of Charles Stross Short Story Collections
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Toast, and Other Stories | 2002 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Wireless | 2009 | Description / Buy |
Order of Charles Stross Non-Fiction Books
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | The Web Architect's Handbook | 1996 | Description / Buy |
Charles Stross Anthologies
# | Read | Title | Published | Details |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Asimov's Science Fiction, June 2001 | 2001 | Description / Buy | |
2 | Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future | 2002 | Description / Buy | |
3 | The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15 | 2002 | Description / Buy | |
4 | Year's Best SF 8 | 2003 | Description / Buy | |
5 | The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 16 | 2003 | Description / Buy | |
6 | ReVisions | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
7 | The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-First Annual Collection | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
8 | Asimov's Science Fiction, September 2004 | 2004 | Description / Buy | |
9 | One Million A.D. | 2005 | Description / Buy | |
10 | The Best of the Best: 20 Years of the Year\'s Best Science Fiction | 2005 | Description / Buy | |
11 | The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction | 2006 | Description / Buy | |
12 | The Space Opera Renaissance | 2006 | Description / Buy | |
13 | Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology | 2007 | Description / Buy | |
14 | Space Opera | 2007 | Description / Buy | |
15 | The Book of Cthulhu | 2011 | Description / Buy | |
16 | The Recent Weird | 2011 | Description / Buy | |
17 | The Year's Top Ten Tales of Science Fiction 4 | 2012 | Description / Buy | |
18 | Digital Rapture | 2012 | Description / Buy | |
19 | Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2012 edition | 2013 | Description / Buy | |
20 | Some of the Best from Tor.com, 2013 | 2013 | Description / Buy | |
21 | The Time Traveler's Almanac | 2013 | Description / Buy | |
22 | Zombies: More Recent Dead | 2014 | Description / Buy | |
23 | More Recent Weird | 2015 | Description / Buy | |
24 | Shoreline of Infinity 8½: Edinburgh International Book Festival Special Edition | 2017 | Description / Buy | |
25 | Fables from the Fountain | 2018 | Description / Buy |
The author started writing in 1999. While his first published novel was ‘Singularity Sky’, he had written a novella called ‘Atrocity Archive’ some years earlier that his newly acquired agent loved but also rejected because she didn’t expect anyone to publish it.
She argued that there was no way to identify the genre in which it could be marketed. It could have been horror, science fiction or humor. That scattered approach to storytelling drove the agent to compel Stross to pursue more mainstream stories.
So he temporarily shelved ‘Atrocity Archive’. Stross finally got it published in an obscure Scottish magazine, eventually attracting the interest of Golden Griffin, a small publisher in the US. He wrote ‘The Concrete Jungle’ for them. Golden Griffin chose to publish the story along with ‘Atrocity Archives’ in a volume also titled ‘The Atrocity Archives’.
While ‘Singularity Sky’ had attracted all the right attention, it was The Atrocity Archives and, in particular, ‘The Concrete Jungle’ that placed Charles Stross on the publishing map. The award it won finally convinced Stross’ agent of the potential some of the writer’s experimental stories held despite the marketing challenge they would present.
While Charles Stross went on to dip his toes into the thriller and Fantasy sub-genres, his fans continue to categorize him as a hardcore SF writer, primarily because of the intellectual approach the author always takes with his stories.
Born in 1964 in Leeds, England, Stross took an interest in Science Fiction at an early age. He read every notable work in the genre that he could find. His education led him into the medical field. Despite earning a Bachelor’s Degree in Pharmacy and putting the skills of his trade into practice, Stross decided to extend his educational journey by pursuing a post-graduate computer science degree from Bradford University.
Before 1999, he was a pretty competent programmer who produced literary works of a technical nature in his field of expertise. He continued along that same path, as a technical writer, even after landing an agent. But once fiction took a hold of his heart, he embraced it wholeheartedly, never looking back.
Charles Stross’ political views as a liberal democrat permeate a lot of the stories he writes. Stross expects science fiction to mirror the real world, to show readers what mankind could become, for better or for worse. He has always supported the concept of e-publishing, going so far as to upload some of his books online where his fans can read them for free.
He believes that young authors need the internet to grow but traditional publishing will continue to oppose it because it stifles their earnings.
Charles Stross Awards
Stross has received Hugo, British Science Fiction Association, Arthur C. Clarke, John W. Campbell Memorial, and Prometheus Award nominations. He also won the Hugo and Prometheus Awards for ‘Iron Sunrise’ and ‘Glasshouse’.
Best Charles Stross Books
Stross’ fans love all the attention he injects into building the societies and communities which constitute the futuristic settings of his stories, with some of the best books in his bibliography including:
Singularity Sky: The Eschaton changed the destiny of Earth. A sentient AI created by mankind in the 21st Century, the Eschaton brought about the greatest technological revolution in human history. For all the blessings it delivered, the AI had one rule. Mankind was forbidden from tampering with time, lest they suffer the violent ire of the Eschaton.
Now the human race has gone to the stars, colonizing new worlds and creating a new society known as the New Republic. When an alien race descends upon the New Republic and gives its people a bevy of forbidden technologies, a spaceship engineer and a diplomat are dispatched to quell the resulting revolutionary turmoil before Eschaton takes drastic measures.
Atrocity Archives: Bob Howard’s world was boring. Yes, he worked for a secret government agency. However, while his fellow agents went on missions to save the world, the techie stayed behind to restore lost data. When Bob finally gets noticed and thrown into active duty, he is forced to face off against dimension-hopping terrorists and ancient deities with nefarious intentions.
When Does The Next Charles Stross book come out?
Charles Stross doesn't seem to have an upcoming book. Their newest book is Season of Skulls and was released on May, 16th 2023. It is the newest book in the Laundry Files Series.