Synopsis
The Hugo Award-winning author of such groundbreaking and innovative novels as Accelerando, Halting State, and Saturn's Children delivers a selection of speculative fiction brought together in one collection, showdcasing the limitless imagination of one of the twenty-first century's most daring visionaries.
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)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.