Collections #02 - Wireless
From 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)
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Review
"A new kind of future requires a new breed of guide-someone like Stross."
-Popular Science
"The act of creation seems to come easily to Charles Stross...[He] is peerless at dreaming up devices that could conceivably exist in six, 60 or 600 years' time."
-New York Times
"Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow."
-Gardner Dozois, Editor, Asimov's Science Fiction magazine
"Charles Stross is the most spectacular sciencefiction writer of recent years."
-Vernor Vinge, author of Rainbows End
"One of the most flexible and intellectually powerful authors operating in modern SF."
-SF Diplomat