Books by Charles Stross
The Apocalypse Codex (A Laundry Files Novel)
For outstanding heroism in the field (despite himself), computational demonologist Bob Howard is on the fast track for promotion to management within the Laundry, the supersecret British government agency tasked with defending the realm from occult threats. Assigned to External Assets, Bob discovers the company (unofficially) employs freelance agents to deal with sensitive situations that may embarrass Queen and Country.
So when Ray Schiller—an American televangelist with the uncanny ability to miraculously heal the ill—becomes uncomfortably close to the Prime Minister, External Assets dispatches the brilliant, beautiful, and entirely unpredictable Persephone Hazard to infiltrate the Golden Promise Ministries and discover why the preacher is so interested in British politics. And it’s Bob’s job to make sure Persephone doesn’t cause an international incident.
But it’s a supernatural incident that Bob needs to worry about—a global threat even the Laundry may be unable to clean up…
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The Atrocity Archives (A Laundry Files Novel)
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 . . .
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The Fuller Memorandum (A Laundry Files Novel)
Computational demonologist Bob Howard is taking a much-needed break from the field to catch up on his filing in the Laundry archives when a top secret dossier known as the Fuller Memorandum vanishes—along with his boss, who the agency’s executives believe stole the file.
Determined to discover exactly what the memorandum contained (and perhaps clear his boss), Bob runs afoul of Russian agents, ancient demons, and the apostles if a hideous faith who have plans to raise a very unpleasant undead entity known as the Eater of Souls.
Now Bob must use all of his skills to learn the secret of the Fuller Memorandum in order to save the world—and avoid becoming an item on the Eater of Souls’s dinner menu…
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The Family Trade (Merchant Princes)
A bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, The Merchant Princes is a sweeping new series from the hottest new writer in science fiction!
Miriam Beckstein is happy in her life. She's a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine in Boston, making good money doing what she loves. When her researcher brings her iron-clad evidence of a money-laundering scheme, Miriam thinks she's found the story of the year. But when she takes it to her editor, she's fired on the spot and gets a death threat from the criminals she has uncovered.
Before the day is over, she's received a locket left by the mother she never knew-the mother who was murdered when she was an infant. Within is a knotwork pattern, which has a hypnotic effect on her. Before she knows it, she's transported herself to a parallel Earth, a world where knights on horseback chase their prey with automatic weapons, and where world-skipping assassins lurk just on the other side of reality - a world where her true family runs things.
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 the worlds 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.
Taken in by her mother's people, she becomes the star of the story of the century-as Cinderella without a fairy godmother. As her mother's heir, Miriam is hailed as the prodigal countess Helge Thorold-Hjorth, and feted and feasted. Caught up in schemes and plots centuries in the making, Miriam is surrounded by unlikely allies, forbidden loves, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. Her unexpected return will supercede the claims of other clan members to her mother's fortune and power, and whoever killed her mother will be happy to see her dead, too.
Behind all this lie deeper secrets still, which threaten everyone and everything she has ever known. Patterns of deception and interlocking lies, as intricate as the knotwork between the universes. But Miriam is no one's pawn, and is determined to conquer her new home on her own terms.
Blending the creativity and humor of Roger Zelazny, the adventure of H. Beam Piper and Philip Jose Farmer, and the rigor and scope of a science-fiction writer on the grandest scale, Charles Stross has set a new standard for fantasy epics.
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The Rapture of the Nerds
by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross
Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander¦and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there'
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The Rapture of the Nerds: A tale of the singularity, posthumanity, and awkward social situations
Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.
Rapture of the Nerds is a brilliant collaboration by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two of the defining personalities of post-cyberpunk science fiction.
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The Delirium Brief: A Laundry Files Novel (Laundry Files, 8)
*2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FANTASY NOVEL CATEGORY*
“Smart, literate, funny.” ―Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians
Someone is dead set to air the spy agency’s dirty laundry in The Delirium Brief, the next installment to Charles Stross’ Hugo Award-winning comedic dark fantasy Laundry Files series!
Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess.
Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize.
Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.
Laundry Files
1. The Atrocity Archives
2. The Jennifer Morgue
3. The Fuller Memorandum
4. The Apocalypse Codex
5. The Rhesus Chart
6. The Annihilation Score
7. The Nightmare Stacks
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The Delirium Brief: A Laundry Files Novel (Laundry Files, 8)
*2018 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST FOR BEST FANTASY NOVEL CATEGORY*
“Smart, literate, funny.” ―Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians
Someone is dead set to air the spy agency’s dirty laundry in The Delirium Brief, the next installment to Charles Stross’ Hugo Award-winning comedic dark fantasy Laundry Files series!
Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess.
Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize.
Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.
Laundry Files
1. The Atrocity Archives
2. The Jennifer Morgue
3. The Fuller Memorandum
4. The Apocalypse Codex
5. The Rhesus Chart
6. The Annihilation Score
7. The Nightmare Stacks
Copies
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The Labyrinth Index (Laundry Files, 9)
“A bizarre yet effective yoking of the spy and horror genres.” ―The Washington Post Book World
The Lovecraftian Singularity has descended upon the world in The Labyrinth Index, beginning an exciting new story arc in Charles Stross' Hugo Award-winning Laundry Files series!
Since she was promoted to the head of the Lords Select Committee on Sanguinary Affairs, every workday for Mhari Murphy has been a nightmare. It doesn’t help that her boss, the new Prime Minister of Britain, is a manipulative and deceptive pain in the butt. But what else can she expect when working under the thumb of none other than the elder god N’yar Lat-Hotep a.k.a the Creeping Chaos?
Mhari's most recent assignment takes her and a ragtag team of former Laundry agents across the pond into the depths of North America. The United States president has gone missing. Not that Americans are alarmed. For some mysterious reason, most of the country has forgotten the executive branch even exists. Perhaps it has to do with the Nazgûl currently occupying the government and attempting to summon Cthulhu.
It's now up to Mhari and her team to race against the Nazgûl's vampire-manned dragnet to find and, for his own protection, kidnap the president.
Who knew an egomaniacal, malevolent deity would have a soft spot for international relations?
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Dark State: A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse (Empire Games, Book II) (Empire Games, 2)
Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross dives deep into the underbelly of paratime espionage, nuclear warfare, and state surveillance in this provocative techno-thriller set in The Merchant Princes multi-verse
Dark State ups the ante on the already volatile situations laid out in the sleek techno-thriller Empire Games, the start to Stross' new story-line, and perfect entry point for new readers, in The Merchant Princes series.
In the near-future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers across timelines, one in the midst of a technological revolution and the other a hyper-police state, is imminent. In Commissioner Miriam Burgeson’s timeline, her top level agents run a high risk extraction of a major political player. Meanwhile, a sleeper cell activated in Rita's, the Commissioner's adopted daughter and newly-minted spy, timeline threatens to unravel everything.
With a penchant for intricate world-building and an uncanny ability to realize alternate history and technological speculation, Stross' writing will captivate any reader who's a fan hi-tech thrillers, inter-dimensional political intrigue, and espionage.
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Dark State: A Novel of the Merchant Princes Multiverse (Empire Games, Book II) (Empire Games, 2)
Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross dives deep into the underbelly of paratime espionage, nuclear warfare, and state surveillance in this provocative techno-thriller set in The Merchant Princes multi-verse
Dark State ups the ante on the already volatile situations laid out in the sleek techno-thriller Empire Games, the start to Stross' new story-line, and perfect entry point for new readers, in The Merchant Princes series.
In the near-future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers across timelines, one in the midst of a technological revolution and the other a hyper-police state, is imminent. In Commissioner Miriam Burgeson’s timeline, her top level agents run a high risk extraction of a major political player. Meanwhile, a sleeper cell activated in Rita's, the Commissioner's adopted daughter and newly-minted spy, timeline threatens to unravel everything.
With a penchant for intricate world-building and an uncanny ability to realize alternate history and technological speculation, Stross' writing will captivate any reader who's a fan hi-tech thrillers, inter-dimensional political intrigue, and espionage.
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Invisible Sun (Empire Games, 3)
Product Description
The alternate timelines of Charles Stross’ Empire Games trilogy have never been so entangled than in Invisible Sun―the techno-thriller follow up to Dark State―as stakes escalate in a conflict that could spell extermination for humanity across all known timelines.A inter-timline coup d'état gone awry.A renegade British monarch on the run through the streets of Berlin.And robotic alien invaders from a distant timeline flood through a wormhole, wreaking havoc in the USA.Can disgraced worldwalker Rita and her intertemporal extraordaire agent of a mother neutralize the livewire contention between their respective timelines before it's too late?
Review
"Complexly plotted and with characters to match, Dark State exceeds the promise of Empire Games." ―Booklist, starred review"No one beats [Stross] at hypertech." ―The Wall Street Journal on Empire Games "A well-written book, full of mystery and intrigue, with entire worlds at stake." ―Michael Flynn on Empire Games"A classic thriller in the Cold War spy mode...elegant...compelling." ―Locus on Empire Games
About the Author
CHARLES STROSS is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has won three Hugo Awards for Best Novella, including for the Laundry Files tale “Equoid.” His work has been translated into over twelve languages. His novels include the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series (including Locus Award finalist The Dilirium Brief), and several stand-alones including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn's Children. Like many writers, Stross has had a variety of careers, occupations, and job-shaped catastrophes, from pharmacist (he quit after the second police stakeout) to first code monkey on the team of a successful dot-com startup (with brilliant timing, he tried to change employers just as the bubble burst) to technical writer and prolific journalist covering the IT industry. Along the way he collected degrees in pharmacy and computer science, making him the world’s first officially qualified cyberpunk writer.
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Neptune's Brood (A Freyaverse Novel)
The year is AD 7000. The human species is nearly extinct—for the fourth time—due to its fragile nature.
Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, believes that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye.
He’s correct: Krina and Ana each possess half of the fabled Atlantis Carnet, a lost financial instrument of unbelievable value—capable of bringing down entire civilizations. Krina doesn’t know that Count Rudi suspects her motives, so she accepts his offer to get her to Shin-Tethys in exchange for an introduction to Ana.
And what neither of them suspects is that a ruthless body-double assassin has stalked Krina across the galaxy, ready to take the carnet once it is whole—and leave no witnesses alive to tell the tale…
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The Nightmare Stacks (A Laundry Files Novel)
The Laundry Files’ “fast-paced blend of espionage thrills, mundane office comedy and Lovecraftian horror” (SFX) continues as Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross assigns a day trader to a permanent position on the night shift...
After stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires, Alex Schwartz was drafted by the Laundry, Britain’s secret counter-occult agency that’s humanity’s first line of defense against the forces of darkness. Dependent on his new employers for his continued existence—as Alex has no stomach for predatory blood-sucking—he has little choice but to accept his new role as an operative-in-training.
For his first assignment, Alex is dispatched to Leeds to help assess the costs of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker for use as the Laundry’s new headquarters. Unfortunately, Leeds is Alex’s hometown, and the thought of breaking the news to his parents that he’s left banking for the Civil Service, while hiding his undead condition, is causing him more anxiety than learning how to live as a vampire secret agent preparing to confront multiple apocalypses.
Alex’s only saving grace is Cassie Brewer, a drama student appearing in the local goth festival who is inexplicably attracted to him despite his awkward personality and massive amounts of sunblock.
But Cassie has secrets of her own—secrets that make Alex’s nightlife behaviors seem positively normal...
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The Annihilation Score (A Laundry Files Novel)
From the Hugo Award-winning author of The Rhesus Chart comes another supernatural case from The Laundry Files...
Dominique O’Brien—her friends call her Mo—lives a curious double life with her husband, Bob Howard. To the average civilian, they’re boring middle-aged civil servants. But within the labyrinthine secret circles of Her Majesty’s Government, they’re operatives working for the nation’s occult security service known as the Laundry, charged with defending Britain against dark supernatural forces threatening humanity.
Unfortunately, one of those supernatural threats has come between Mo and Bob. An antique violin, an Erich Zahn original, made of white human bone, was designed to produce music capable of slaughtering demons. Mo is the custodian of this unholy instrument. It invades her dreams and yearns for the blood of her colleagues—and her husband. And despite Mo’s proficiency as a world-class violinist, it cannot be controlled…
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Empire Games: A Tale of the Merchant Princes Universe (Empire Games, 1)
Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games, expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travellers walk between parallel universes.
The year is 2020. It's seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence―the paratime espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth's great leap forward―has a problem. For years, she's warned everyone: "The Americans are coming." Now their drones arrive in the middle of a succession crisis.
In another timeline, the U.S. has recruited Miriam's own estranged daughter to spy across timelines in order to bring down any remaining world-walkers who might threaten national security.
Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies try to find a solution to the first contact problem that doesn't result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women―a mother and her long-lost daughter―are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.
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The Rapture of the Nerds: A Novel
by Cory Doctorow, Charles Stross
A brilliant collaboartion from Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross, two defining personalities of post-cyberpunk SF―now repackaged with a new cover!
Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander…and when that happens, it casually spams Earth's networks with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems. A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there's always someone who'll take a bite from the forbidden apple.
So until the overminds bore of stirring Earth's anthill, there's Tech Jury Service: random humans, selected arbitrarily, charged with assessing dozens of new inventions and ruling on whether to let them loose. Young Huw, a technophobic, misanthropic Welshman, has been selected for the latest jury, a task he does his best to perform despite an itchy technovirus, the apathy of the proletariat, and a couple of truly awful moments on bathroom floors.
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A Conventional Boy A Laundry Files Novel
In this new Laundry Files adventure the fate of the world will literally depend on the roll of dice... twenty-sided dice, that is.
In 1984, Derek Reilly was just another spotty teenage dungeon master growing up in middle England. But then a secret government agency tasked with suppressing magical intrusions received a tip-off – and one midnight raid later, his life was turned upside down by the Satanic D&D Panic.
Decades later Derek, now middle-aged and institutionalized, is a long-term inmate at Camp Sunshine, a center for deprogramming captured Elder God cultists. He’s considered safe enough to edit the camp newsletter, and he even has postal privileges – which he uses to run a play-by-mail game. After 25 years, Derek finally has reason to escape: a nearby D&D convention. While Derek’s D&D games were full of fictional elder gods and world-ending threats, a LARP game at the con is a dread ritual designed to summon a great evil into our world, and it’s up to Derek and his players to stop them.
The fate of the world may depend on the contents of Derek’s magic dice bag.
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