See Denver and Die – Charles Stross novel

Charles Stross – I like his space opera, I like his near future police procedurals but I think I like his Laundry series the best. And the latest in the series, ‘The Apocalypse Codex’, doesn’t disappoint. Bob Howard is a computational demonologist – a profession you don’t have a choice about entering. If you stumble…

2011 Books

A final look back on 2011 and some books published last year. It was ayear in which it seemed to take me forever to finish certain books, no matter how much I was enjoying them. In large part that was undoubtedly a time thing. I don’t seem to have read that many books published in…

Gruesome

I’ve spent the last few weeks plugging the gaps in my Charles Stross collection by reading his 3 Laundry novels back to back. Best classified as spy/sci-fi/horror, the inital book ‘The Atrocity Archives’ seems to be a collection of 3 novellas with stories 1 and 2 linking together better than to 3. As such it’s…

Scottish Fiction – MacLeod/Stross

I’ve just finished Ken MacLeod’s latest ‘The Restoration Game’ hard on the heels of ‘Halting State’ by Charles Stross. Coincidentally both books feature the concept of online games being used for real life purposes. Stross, of course,  isn’t Scottish but he now lives in Edinburgh and ‘Halting States’ is set in a post independence Edinburgh…

Glasshouse

Finished Charles Stross’s ‘Glasshouse’ on holiday recently and whilst I’ve liked his other books (quite a bit actually) ‘Glasshouse’ is the best I’ve read to date. An intelligent sci-fi thriller centred around what memory means to us as individuals and as a society, the Glasshouse of the title is supposedly a research sociological experiment aimed…

Accelerando

I thought it was about time to catch up on my reading. So far this has been a year in which I’ve only read in small chunks and therefore it’s taken me ages to finish any one book. I finally finished ‘Accelerando’ by Charles Stross a few weeks ago and, whilst sometimes taking a long…