Wireless

I picked up on Charles Stross via short stories, I think - but then saw none, while I read all his novels. Reading this collection has been revelatory: they are VERY good, and I think his time traveller series is the best thing I’ve read in the genre since Up The Line by Robert Silverberg, temporal anomalies and all. Thanks, Charlie!!

I've been a fan of Charles Stross writing ever since I encountered his homage to Lovecraft in _A Colder War_. This volume reprints that story together with eight others of varying lengths. If you prefer novel-length stories you should be aware that two of the titles (_Missile Gap_ and _Palimpsest_) are substantial enough to hold their own with much longer works.The first story, _Missile Gap_, is set on an Earth that has been translated to a giant flat disk and set in an ocean with many other translated worlds. It's a little bleak - don't expect a bunch of plucky humans to triumph because of their native can-do-it-ness. The vast godlike forces that could do something like this would be practically oblivious to the survival of species, let alone individuals.The second is _Rogue Farm_: A farmer has to deal with a post-human entity that wants to use his farm as a launching site. It's a very short (and light) work and I didn't really care for it._A Colder War_ is one of my favorite stories. Charles Stross uses Lovecraft's stories as the basis for an alternate history Cold War thriller. It's *very* bleak - the best possible outcome is the annihilation of humanity. I'd love to see this as a graphic novel._Maxos_ is a vignette originally published in _Nature_. It's quite funny and deserves more elaboration._Down on the Farm_ is set in Stross's Laundry universe (_The Atrocity Archives_, _The Jennifer Morgue_) which use Lovecraftian horror as their background (they're related but not connected to _A Colder War_ which also appears in this collection). The Laundry stories seem to follow a standard pattern - the narrator is thrust into a crisis where things are not what they appear and he has to save the day through improvisation, facing eldritch horrors which are often less frightening than the nightmare that is government work. I liked this story, but it doesn't really stand alone. I'd recommend reading Stross's _The Atrocity Archives_ first._Unwirer_ was written with Cory Doctorow. The hero is part of a team that sets up wireless networks against government and MPAA interference. It's surprising how well the two authors' styles merge but it's not a very deep story._Sonwball's Chance_ is a deal-with-the-de'il story (I once read that every author has to do one of these) that taps into Stross's interest in planetary engineering and government bureaucracy. It's short and slight but worth the read._Trunk and Disorderly_ is a Wodehouse pastiche. I used to like Wodehouse but I just couldn't get into this story. The author notes its relationship to _Saturn's Children_: if you were a big fan of the latter you might appreciate this more.The last story, _Palimpsest_ is nearly worth the price of admission by itself. It's more than a little reminiscent of a famous story by Isaac Asimov but so, so much better. The key to time travel is held by an organisation that wants to stop humanity going extinct. To do this it periodically re-seeds Earth with populations taken from earlier iterations of humanity and, between epochs, does things like re-ignite ths sun (which ought to have burned out within a few billion years). This story has it all - deep time, stellar engineering, time travel, paradoxes, the Singulaity and more. The author notes that it's a novella that wanted to be a novel, and I think it feels a little constrained. None the less, it's an amazing read and highly recommended.I gave this book five stars. There were a few stories I didn't care for, but that's true of any collection. The gems of this collection would be worth buying on their own and justify the ranking.

I love reading Mr. Stross. It is a unique experience to read his fiction— for me, barely keeping up with his narrative. It’s a wonderful experience, like a puzzle that you know is too difficult for you, but if you keep needling away it, eventually everything falls into place.These short stories provide a series of that feeling. I personally don’t love the excursions into fantasy/supernatural, but that’s a personal preference, not a critique.Thanks for a throughly engaging and enjoyable experience, Mr. Stross. I hope for another glimpse into your imagination soon.

Charles Stross presents some of his best short and not-so-short stories in this book, which is very much worth reading. "A Colder War" in particular is probably the best HPL tribute I've ever read. Stross has a unique talent for capturing our mundane reality in its fullness and then... altering it with imagination, creativity, and stellar writing. Before you know it, you're no longer in Kansas, Toto. Read this.

I never miss a Charles Stross novel or short story, and if he starts writing plays, essays, poems, and greeting cards I will get each of those, as well. But...But he needs to insert a bit of quality control. This collection of short stories is a case in point, although his last "Laundry" novel was weak, and Saturn's Children was somewhat dry and long.The problem is very clear in Wireless. He has great ideas, but when these ideas become somewhat illogical, he plows through the absurdity and publishes the drecky result.The opening short story, Missile Gap, poses a few really big questions. Who moved all of the people of the Earth, in 1962, to a large disc containing hundreds of worlds in a very zoo-like place? How will Communist Russia and McNamara's United States play this new situation? Enough grist here for a great novel! NOPE. Intelligent hive-species (termites) are systematically destroying these human civilizations within the zoo, and they do so here, again. Sorry for the spoiler. But it hardly spoils anything, because the story is spoilt. Stross loses all discipline, he just sort of inserts idea after idea, higgledy-piggledy, and then ends the story with a nuclear blast.The next story, about rogue "farms", which are multiple person downloads that wander and harvest resources to blast off into outer space, is sorta creepy, feels like the Festival in an earlier novel, and makes no sense, in a creepy fashion. You can argue that this is what short stories are for... to which I would counter that a great short story is internally coherent, not just creepy.Instead of Mr. Stross's best work, the stories in this book are his throw-offs. His writer's notebook. I would suggest that he slow down, write less, improve the internal logic of his work, and the quality. Because he has great imagination, is a good story teller, but is starting to waver in his quality, which makes me, a great fan, somewhat sad.

A damn good collection, with some amusing stuff written before the topic it addresses got smoothed out. Recommended.Fish slice aardwolf.

A bit hit and miss, happily the hits outweigh the misses and some of these stories are excellent. The last one in particular, Charles, come on you're right this really should be a novel, make it happen !

Some stories are great, some terrible but they all end before you get to the really good bit.The style is so similar, its sometimes confusing s to which background belongs to which story.I don't normally buy short stories, I won't again.

Nice mix of stories with different themes and lengths.

Framed by the perfect forward this collection both shares the notion of creating sf with some blindingly engaging stories. You also get to see how short story ideas mutate and grow to become novels. A beautiful collection for Stross fans.