John Scalzi claims to be a gateway drug into science fiction literature, I suppose he may well be but I believe Charles Stross is almost the opposite of that. Stross is deservedly one of the most popular active sci- fi authors today but readers not familiar with the genre may find him a little bewildering. His target readership seems to be those who are quite au fait with the common tropes of the genre and also some computer programming terms. Those “in the know” love the science he puts in boo

I can be very creative when comes time to get violent. Hmm... bit of a sleeper. Starts off with the gorgeous, wild panorama of unbridled awesome futuristic visions and then veers wildly into archaic visions--visions much more like now. Don't be fooled, it's just lulling you into complacency. Stay alert, and read on.Leans towards geeky tech speak, the fact that I actually followed along means I've been infected. It's hard for me to judge how geeky, I spend most of my time with people who have adv...

This was the most intriguing new science fiction book I've read in a long time. The plot was kinda standard mystery but everything else was really new. He took some modern technical paradigms, projected them into the future and created an amazingly well developed "world." In addition, the book takes place mostly in an anachronistic simulation of the 1990's. And since the main character is a participant in the experiment there's an interesting ethnographical aspect to the narrative. (eg. he keeps...

I have had such a complicated relationships with Charles Stross books, in that I have often wanted to like them more than I actually have. A few of his most out-there post-human Singularity books I have enjoyed, while understanding very little of them. The Atrocity Archives was the first book of his that I enjoyed, start to finish.Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.In the meantime,...

If I had to pick one word for this book, it would be "smug." I don't have a lot of tolerance for smugness at the best of times, and Glasshouse did nothing to earn its attitude. The worldbuilding was flimsy (if your characters are going to be motivated to horrific acts in pursuit of money, you need to tell me what, in your post-scarcity economy, money is for), the characterization shallow (unsurprisingly so, I guess, when all the characters are suffering from various grades of amnesiac dissociati...

dnf @ 36% because it just straight up had a rape scene that was. not treated as a rape scene at all and i don’t feel like getting any more Surprises

It was really hard to get into at first. For some reason Stross insists on using a different timescale even though their bear a slight linguistic resemblance to terms we use today. It was frustrating and unnecessary. Although it got off to a slow start, it did pick up after the first few chapters (basically when the main character joins the experiment).I had some of the same problems with this book that I have with similar books where a person's consciousness is treated as though it were basical...

This could have been really dull because there's really nothing new in it by way of SF ideas; it relies on wormholes/teleporting, nanobots, uploading your mind then downloading it to any body you fancy, editing your memories in the process, and not much else. You can find all these elements in many other places. The odd thing is that this doesn't necessarily matter. Individual authors' speculations about where these scientific or engineering advances might take humanity physically and culturally...

Stross masterfully blends an engaging, fast paced conspiracy thriller with a wildly imaginative and engrossing vision of far future humanity.A central focus here is memory editing and cloning/consciousness transfer technologies run amok. When you can't trust your own memories to be complete, or rely on the constancy of the physical form of your own body, you are truly unanchored. Yanking out pieces in the Jenga tower that is your identity. Unknowingly susceptible to external manipulation. Scary

Every time I begin a new Charles Stross novel, I feel the same excitement as when I first read William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1985: I'm reading a work of science fiction that is so unique, so bleeding-edge, that I can barely get my head around it.And then the excitement fades as I continue reading.This is Stross's best work to-date because it is his most human; his observations on groupthink, peer pressure, and the irrationality of modern life are insightful and funny. But it is also inconsiste...

(My full review of this book is larger than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find it at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)As I've mentioned here before, although as an adult I try to maintain as varied a reading list as possible, I do naturally gravitate regularly towards the science-fiction (or SF) genre on which I was raised, as well as the "weird-lit" novels of our contemporary times that have been influenced by the genre. And indeed, if you take a close l...

It's the far future. Earth is a distant memory... most people don't even live on planets anymore, but rather small habitats linked by wormhole gates. And death's difficult to come by, because you can back yourself up as easily as taking a shower. If you want, you can change your body-plan or gender while you're at it. But there are still wars, and in the wake of one, many people have chosen to wipe their memories and start fresh. Some of these people, including Robin, an ex-spy who may have a mi...

On first read (in 2006), I thought this was a terrific book:"A dark-skinned human with four arms walks towards me across the floor of the club, clad only in a belt strung with human skulls. Her hair forms a smoky wreath around her open and curious face. She's interested in me."So opens GLASSHOUSE, Stross's [then] latest and best novel, set in the Invisible Republic, a splinter-polity recovering from the Censorship Wars. Here's Robin, the protagonist: "When people ask me what I did during the war...

What seemed like a good idea at the time is now turning out to be stressful.—p.120This was my second run through Glasshouse. The first was in 2007, and I don't think I was quite ready for Charles Stross' prickly posthuman mind games back then. Frankly, I'm not sure I was entirely ready for them now. But I have to say I got a lot more out of this novel, this time through.When Stross drops a Hitler quote as an epigram at the very beginning, though, that kinda sets the tone: this is one royally fuc...

What would you do if you could edit your memories—or more precisely, if others could edit your memories? This is one of the fundamental questions of Glasshouse, one of the earlier novels by Charles Stross. Still firmly within the posthuman stage of his oeuvre, this book is less about the implications of the existence of strong AI and more about the implications of mind uploading and an ability to alter physiology and neurology at an atomic level.Robin has just undergone a radical neurosurgery th...

With this book, Charles Stross has established himself as one of my favourite authors. Previously, I have read quite a few of his novels, including several of the Merchant Princes series, one of the Bob Howard – Laundry books, Halting State and Saturn’s Children. With the exception of Saturn’s Children and perhaps the first of the Merchant Princes novels, I’ve had a hard time immersing myself in his stories and actually liking his characters. I keep picking up his books, however, as I like his c...

The one where Robin wakes up after having a full memory wipe -- which, for obvious reasons, he doesn't remember -- and comes to believe someone from his past is trying to kill him, and volunteers for an experiment re-creating twentieth-century life.OMG, so boring. I gave it my usual fifty pages, and sometimes I'd look at the page number and I'd still be on the same page. Robin isn't really a character, and of course there's a good reason for this -- he's had his memory wiped. But every time he s...

Shockingly, I like the first chapter. I expect things will devolve from here. That's the standard Stross formula.Well, with the exception of having a good first chapter. ***And as it turns out, I loved this book. I've read several of his novels before, all the Hugo-nominated ones, anyway, and this is by far the best. It's also the best of the nominees this year and should win the award. Stross does an excellent job of keeping the focus of the novel not only on the main character, but also in his...

Don’t worry, this book might appear daunting as you begin to peruse the first chapter, but thankfully it doesn’t maintain that level of borderline impenetrability throughout. Yes, Charles Stross (no, I have never read anything else by him), does enjoy in those early stages combining a bizarre mix of archaic language and technological gobbledygook. Okay, that might sound fun to some in a challenging sort of way, but I always like my sci-fi to welcome me, rather than try to baffle me at the outset...

This was an excellent modern science fiction novel from an author that is new to me. It was a strong modern science fiction, I guess I would think of it as 'hard' sci-fi in that the technology was key and well defined although the characterisations and the plot were not in any way neglected - a thing that can occur in some hard sci-fi.The plot dynamics really impressed me. There were a few things about the way Glasshouse was laid out that I think many other sci-fi books could learn from.We start...