Charles Stross Puns

Read and loved both of these novels and much of these authors other works but I've run out of similar novels and am seeking any suggestions for other mind bending hard sci Fi - especially novels about digital consciousness.

Anyone got any recommendations?

I had been waiting for this book for a long time, and it was totally worth the wait. I finished it up last night. It was a great ending. The ending of the original Merchant Princes series was kind of like Empire Strikes Back, ending on a down note, so I was surprised by how well everything worked out for all the human timelines.

In the afterword, he mentions that he may or may not return to this universe. Another book set a couple hundred years in the future would be amazing. I'd like to see what the Commonwealth looks like in 2200. What normalized relations with the US looks like. Trade, immigration, etc. Maybe they have colonies on multiple Mars, with a whole fleet of huge, nuclear powered ships all over the solar systems. Maybe the Hive finds them out. Maybe they figure out how to jaunt across space, not just between worlds. It's fun to imagine.

Thank you, /u/cstross . You keep writing books, I'll keep buying them.

They’re just gas giants with some fusion at the core right?

This was a 5* read for me after bouncing off of it 11 years ago because the opening chapters seemed like the Mos Eisley Cantina.

For the past 18 years I've been juggling writing the Laundry Files with another giant series of novels, and it's going to be complete in just two weeks, when the final book (Invisible Sun) comes out.

The Merchant Princes/Empire Games series starts out looking like a portal fantasy, but rapidly turns into an examination of a group of people who have the ability to travel to parallel universes, and the drastic economic and political consequences of such an ability (with two or three nuclear wars and an alien invasion along the way).

If that sounds interesting, you can find it here:

Merchant Princes series (omnibus editions)

Empire Games trilogy (continues the story)

(Hopefully some of you will find this interesting. If not, feel free to ignore. My next book after Invisible Sun will be Quantum of Nightmares, the sequel to Dead Lies Dreaming, so: back to the Laundryverse.)

I loved the idea of the a gates and t gates, it was good to read a tech utopia after the dystopian books that are everywhere now. I'm going through his other books - rereading singularity sky next. So any non Stross recommendations would be good. I've read most greg bear and Scalzi books - a lot of them are post singularity - so other authors.

I've heard the name here and there but never read his works or heard that much about him. So...question to the floor, is he worth reading and what's his best series?

I just saw he's one of the most written about writers in this community in a post, so presumably he's pretty decent!

EDIT...

THE FAMILY TRADE IS AWESOME. LOTS OF FUN, GREAT PLOT AND I CAN'T WAIT TO READ THE NEXT!

I have a few questions wondering if you guys can answer them?

1. Do we know how many more books before the series ends?
2. When do we get back to reading about Bob, and Moe?
3. Will we find out how the situation in America gets resolved?

How do you think the UK winds up? I'm not expecting a happy ending but it seems like the SA has a few cards up his sleeve.

Why is the PM letting the SA and others he suspects are working against him to live? Is it some sort of arrogance?

What an absolutely bonkers ride of a story this was.

I'm not even going to pretend that I understood or could even visualize most of what I read but I feel that Stross was perhaps going for this angle or maybe he's just some super genius that in one sentence can reveal his vast knowledge of a particular niche within a niche of a particular sector of tech or biology.

First chapter is absolute tech and future-shock and it was a slog to get through in terms of trying to understand all the jingo and just what the hell Macx was talking about half the time. It made me feel like a pug on LSD at a Hackathon not fully grasping the fundamentals of what's being spoken about, but genuinely enjoying myself and just, you know, up for anything, man.

Once you learn to just let it all wash over you and just go along for the ride, it gets easier. Or maybe the book toned down on all the tech shock? Hard for me to tell now but it does get easier.

There were some genuinely laugh-out-loud moments throughout and considering the danger with which the characters were facing in the latter parts of the story, I found it was quite light with its tone regarding the danger of the VO. I felt like there was always hope and a way forward.

So, for those that have read his other stuff, whats recommended? Is there more in this universe? >!Do we get to read about what they possibly found out in the void?!<

I was super pumped to get into this series because I’ve been on a portal fantasy high lately as well as a banking/merchant fantasy high. The initial premise of the story sounded incredibly promising with a parallel medieval/high-tech hybrid world (knights on horseback with rifles, wagon trains, a religion system founded by the Great Khan, etc) that’s ruled by warring clan families who are obsessed with bloodlines.

I found myself slogging through the first book The Family Trade however. I’m a completionist so it took me a solid week to get through this book even though it was less than 300 pages, which is unusual for me because I can blow through ten times longer books in that same amount of time. I really struggled with Stross’s declarative prose as well as all the nonstop tech/business/journalism jargon. I felt too like it was a lot more focused on (real-world) political, business and economic analysis rather than the fantasy/world-building side.

I’ve heard too that the series gradually switches more to being a straightforward sci-fi and economic thriller which doesn’t really interest me all too much

This will probably be a bit of a rant, since i really enjoyed the previous books with their combination of British humor, workplace politics and cosmic horror and their main character Bob kind of grew on me. I was really excited about the book because it is from the perspective of his wife Mo who has been shown as a bad-ass agent who is slowly coming unraveled at the seems by pressure from work. Since it was shown that she was the more competent and serious of the two i was expecting something like Declare but with more humor and a main character falling apart . It seems like the Mo from the previous books was lost somewhere and instead we got a jealous, self centered narcissist that just blames everyone else for her problems. She is just an unpleasant protagonist for me mainly because of her holier-than-thou attitude exemplified by stuff such as:

->!Her saying that she fells just as angry as if Bob cheated on her after she is made bait by the SA. Even thought only a few hours ago she was on a date with a coworker with whom she chose to cheat on her husband.!<

->!Or being angry at Bob for leaving when she chose her violin(that she was probably having an affair during the marriage ) over him when the violin tried to kill him.!<

And i wouldn't have such a problem with a protagonist who isn't a good person except for the fact that she never gets called out for or faces any serious consequences for her behavior and it kind of feels like the author is saying that there is no problem with her actions. And hell she even gets a raise at the end.

Another problem for me is that since in the past books we saw the world through Bob's eyes we know that even if he misses some social cues he genuinely cares and loves his wife . So because of what she does and says during the book it kind of feels like, at some points, you're watching someone kicking a puppy.

There is quite a lot of foreshadowing in the beginning of the book and i was able to guess pretty accurately who the bad guys were by about the first quarter. This plus the fact the the protagonist was warned on several occasions about dangers and just chose to ignore them out of selfishness it makes her feel more like the blond/pretty girl in a horror movie than a competent agent. To the point that at the ending i was kind of rooting for the bad guys.

And finally the ending.>!In what i can describe as a bitching session in which she just blames everyone around her for her problems and

Not sure why, but damn I am struggling with this book. Maybe it's the fact that I'm listening to the audio as opposed to reading it, but I am having a lot of trouble understanding what is going on and what a lot of these words mean and such. I'm reading the technical companion alongside it here but even still, it is a struggle. I like the whole "what makes consciousness what it is" concept of the book and other similar novels, but it's a bit tough for me.

Is there anything that's slightly less technical that you would recommend in place of this, or should I just power through?

I'm a multiple Hugo-award winning SF author. I have a new novel out tomorrow ("The Apocalypse Codex", pub. Ace: ISBN 978-1937007461). And Reddit ... I'm all yours!

(Authentication: check Twitter for @cstross )

(Update: wrists blowing out from carpal tunnel, keyboard on fire! You've been great, but we can't go on like this ...)

“His Infernal Majesty leans towards me confidingly. “You have imposter syndrome,” He says, “but paradoxically, that’s often a sign of competence. Only people who understand their work well enough to be intimidated by it can be terrified by their own ignorance. It’s the opposite of Dunning-Kruger syndrome, where the miserably incompetent think they’re on top of the job because they don’t understand it.”

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9557154-his-infernal-majesty-leans-towards-me-confidingly-you-have-imposter

From the Laundry files, which I would recommend to Sysadmins generally if you haven't read them already. (But don't start with the book I just linked - it's quite late in the series. Atrocity Archives is where it starts)

Books such as “A Colder War” etc.

Accelerando is a set of short stories that checks in on the status of humankind at roughly 10-year intervals from the present (~2005) through the end of the century.  The stories follow three generations of an influential family through massive technological advancements and the resulting economic, political, and cultural upheaval.

"Nobody, it seems, has figured out how to turn a profit out beyond geosynchronous orbit."

The primary technological advancement driving the book is simply an extension of Moore's Law - vastly increasing computational power.  Combined with brain-computer interfaces and nanotechnology, humans gain near-unlimited control over their consciousness and the world around them.  A person's consciousness can be uploaded, simulated, multi-threaded, forked, merged, and edited.  However, space travel is still really hard, bound by the laws of physics.  Capitalism runs rampant and steers far clear of utopian and dystopian clichés. The legal system is unable to keep up with technological advancement and continues to complicate everything.

Stross's ideas are excellent, original or at least told in an original way, and thought-provoking.  His answer to the Fermi paradox is brilliant and hilarious.  Matrioshka brains are cool.  Name-dropping President Santorum is a nice touch.  It's hard for me to resolve that this is the same Charles Stross that wrote Saturn's Children and The Laundry Files, other than via a mutual reference to the concrete cows of Milton Keynes.  Stross has range (though his sense of humor is largely the same), and I've barely scratched the surface of his works.

The biggest letdown of Accelerando is that it is not an adventure story.  There is no plot set up, struggle, and resolution.  It is a set of connected scenes that convey a possible future for human civilization, like an update on Asimov where the clunky robots are replaced with self-replicating limited liability corporations.  While it tells a story, don't expect to get emotionally connected to the outcome.  Manfred Macx is a memorable character and his early antics have potential, but rather than immerse the reader in any particular imbroglio, the book fast-forwards another ten years where the world is barely recognizable.

Unlike the other Stross

This is The Daily Moldbug post of /r/darkenlightenment where one long-form link to the founder of neoreaction, Mencius Moldbug, gets made every day, going chronologically through all Unqualified Reservations posts ever made. You can easily refer to previous Daily Moldbug posts on /r/darkenlightenment’s sister sub /r/TheDailyMoldbug. You can review more moldbug link compilations at molbuggery and the cathedral compilation.

Charles Stross discovers the Cathedral

This will probably be a bit of a rant, since i really enjoyed the previous books with their combination of British humor, workplace politics and cosmic horror and their main character Bob kind of grew on me. I was really excited about the book because it is from the perspective of his wife Mo who has been shown as a bad-ass agent who is slowly coming unraveled at the seems by pressure from work. Since it was shown that she was the more competent and serious of the two i was expecting something like Declare but with more humor and a main character falling apart . It seems like the Mo from the previous books was lost somewhere and instead we got a jealous, self centered narcissist that just blames everyone else for her problems. She is just an unpleasant protagonist for me mainly because of her holier-than-thou attitude exemplified by stuff such as:

->!Her saying that she fells just as angry as if Bob cheated on her after she is made bait by the SA. Even thought only a few hours ago she was on a date with a coworker with whom she chose to cheat on her husband.!<

->!Or being angry at Bob for leaving when she chose her violin(that she was probably having an affair during the marriage ) over him when the violin tried to kill him.!<

And i wouldn't have such a problem with a protagonist who isn't a good person except for the fact that she never gets called out for or faces any serious consequences for her behavior and it kind of feels like the author is saying that there is no problem with her actions. And hell she even gets a raise at the end.

Another problem for me is that since in the past books we saw the world through Bob's eyes we know that even if he misses some social cues he genuinely cares and loves his wife . So because of what she does and says during the book it kind of feels like, at some points, you're watching someone kicking a puppy.

There is quite a lot of foreshadowing in the beginning of the book and i was able to guess pretty accurately who the bad guys were by about the first quarter. This plus the fact the the protagonist was warned on several occasions about dangers and just chose to ignore them out of selfishness it makes her feel more like the blond/pretty girl in a horror movie than a competent agent. To the point that at the ending i was kind of rooting for the bad guys.

And finally the ending.>!In what i can describe as a bitching session in which she just blames everyone around her for her problems and