Charles Stross

The Clan Corporate by Charles Stross is the third instalment of The Merchant Princes series - an energetic saga of multiple worlds.In The Family Trade and The Hidden Family, Miriam got in touch with her roots. Now those roots have begun to strangle her. A young business journalist from Boston, Miriam discovered that her family comes from a parallel timeline, that she is very well-connected, and that her family is way too much like the Mafia for her comfort. She’s tried hard to remain her own woman, even going so far to start a profitable (and legitimate) business in a third timeline she has discovered, outside the family reach. There have been murders and betrayals. Now, however, she may be overreaching – if she gets caught, death or worse is around the bend. For instance, there’s the brain-damaged son of the local king who needs a wife . . . But they’d never make her do that, would they?

The story of the worldwalkers just got stranger in Charles Stross's The Merchants' War. More worlds, more surprises. And there's a war going on ... Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in The Family Trade and The Hidden Family that her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a family trap in The Clan Corporate and betrothed to a brain-damaged prince, and then all hell broke loose. Now, in The Merchants' War, Miriam has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and their opponents. There is a nasty shooting war going on in the Gruinmarkt world of the Clan, and we know something that Miriam does not; something that she's really going to hate--if she lives long enough to find out.

The theft of millions of pounds from an online game's bank means real world bloodshed in this compelling and timely thriller

The Hidden Family by Charles Stross is the second instalment of The Merchant Princes series - an energetic saga of parallel worlds. The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between their world and ours makes them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious. Miriam, a hip tech journalist from Boston, discovered her alternate-world relatives with explosive results that shook the worlds. Now, as the prodigal Countess Helge Thorold-Hjorth, she finds herself ensnared in schemes and plots centuries in the making. She is surrounded by unlikely allies, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. With her modern American attitudes, she's not sure she can fit in, or if she even wants to, but to stay alive, she really has no choice . . .

"Halting State is] a near-future story that is at once over-the-top and compellingly believable." - Vernor Vinge, author of Rainbows End In the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates--a dot-com start-up company that's just floated onto the London stock exchange. But this crime may be a bit beyond Smith's expertise. The prime suspects are a band of marauding orcs with a dragon in tow for fire support. The bank is located within the virtual reality land of Avalon Four, and the robbery was supposed to be impossible. When word gets out, Hayek Associates and all its virtual "economies" are going to crash hard. For Smith, the investigation seems pointless. But the deeper she digs, the bigger the case gets. There are powerful players--both real and pixelated--who are watching her every move. Because there is far more at stake than just some game-head's fantasy financial security...

"ONE NIGHTMARISH PANOPTICON." - The New York Times When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him. It's the twenty-seventh century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees' personalities--including Robin's earlier self. On the run from a ruthless pursuer and searching for a place to hide, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity: the Glasshouse, a simulated pre-accelerated culture where participants are assigned anonymized identities. But what looks like the perfect sanctuary turns into a trap, placing Robin at the mercy of the experimenters--and at the mercy of his own unbalanced psyche...

When Robin wakes up in a clinic with most of his memories missing, it doesn't take him long to discover that someone is trying to kill him.It's the twenty-seventh century, when interstellar travel is by teleport gate and conflicts are fought by network worms that censor refugees' personalities and target historians. The civil war is over and Robin has been demobilized, but someone wants him out of the picture because of something his earlier self knew. On the run from a ruthless pursuer and searching for a place to hide, he volunteers to participate in a unique experimental polity, the Glasshouse. Constructed to simulate a pre-accelerated culture, participants are assigned anonymized identities: it looks like the ideal hiding place for a posthuman on the run. But in this escape-proof environment Robin will undergo an even more radical change, placing him at the mercy of the experimenters, and of his own unbalanced psyche . . .

The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day.Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber's son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity.For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form...

The third novel from one of the most exciting new British SF writers of the decade.

The first novel in Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross's witty Laundry Files series Bob Howard is a low-level techie working for a super-secret government agency. While his colleagues are out saving the world, Bob's under a desk restoring lost data. His world was dull and safe--but then he went and got Noticed. Now, Bob is up to his neck in spycraft, parallel universes, dimension-hopping terrorists, monstrous elder gods and the end of the world. Only one thing is certain: it will take more than a full system reboot to sort this mess out . . .

Short story collection containing such gems as "Antibodies," "Bear Trap," "Extracts from the Club Diary," "A Colder War," "TOAST: A con report," "A Boy and His God," "Ship of Fools," "Dechlorinating the Moderator," "Yellow Snow", "Big Brother Iron", "Lobsters".

Iron Sunrise is a suspenseful future tale of intergalactic espionage and planetary destruction.

A major SF debut from a British writer who will stand alongside Banks, Hamilton and Reynolds.

In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross. In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events--scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space--are beginning to rediscover their origins. The New Republic is one such colony. It has existed for centuries in self-imposed isolation, rejecting all but the most basic technology. Now, under attack by a devastating information plague, the colony must reach out to Earth for help. A battle fleet is dispatched, streaking across the stars to the rescue. But things are not what they seem--secret agendas and ulterior motives abound, both aboard the ship and on the ground. And watching over it all is the Eschaton, which has its own very definite ideas about the outcome...