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Charles Stross is a full-time writer who was born in Leeds, England in 1964. He studied in London and Bradford, gaining degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs, including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance journalist.

The Hugo Award-winning author of such groundbreaking and innovative novels as Accelerando, Halting State, and Saturn's Children delivers a selection of speculative fiction brought together in one collection, showdcasing the limitless imagination of one of the twenty-first century's most daring visionaries.

Publishers Weekly

Prolific novelist Stross pauses to collect short stories that have not (yet) been stitched up into his longer work. Stories that move the U.S.-U.S.S.R. conflict onto a massive disk in another galaxy (Locus Award-winner "Missile Gap"), offer a spam-filter solution to the Fermi paradox ("MAXOS") and suggest clever bargains with the devil in a newly frozen Scotland ("Snowball's Chance") demonstrate Stross's ability to crisscross genres, blending SF, fantasy, horror and espionage. He also pays homage to his literary forebears, combining Lovecraft and the Iran-Contra scandal ("The Colder War") and bringing in Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould as characters. Though individual pieces are well-done and deservedly popular, the collection has an overall sense of early drafts and reworkings of other pieces, as with "Trunk and Disorderly," a P.G. Wodehouse-on-Mars "test run" for 2008's Saturn's Children. (July)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Missile Gap 1

Rogue Farm 4

A Colder War 82

Maxos 132

Down on the Farm 136

Unwirer Cory Doctorow Doctorow, Cory Charles Stross Stross, Charles 174

Snowball's Chance 207

Trunk and Disorderly 221

Palimpsest 268