Tropedia

  • Before making a single edit, Tropedia EXPECTS our site policy and manual of style to be followed. Failure to do so may result in deletion of contributions and blocks of users who refuse to learn to do so. Our policies can be reviewed here.
  • All images MUST now have proper attribution, those who neglect to assign at least the "fair use" licensing to an image may have it deleted. All new pages should use the preloadable templates feature on the edit page to add the appropriate basic page markup. Pages that don't do this will be subject to deletion, with or without explanation.
  • All new trope pages will be made with the "Trope Workshop" found on the "Troper Tools" menu and worked on until they have at least three examples. The Trope workshop specific templates can then be removed and it will be regarded as a regular trope page after being moved to the Main namespace. THIS SHOULD BE WORKING NOW, REPORT ANY ISSUES TO SelfCloak. DON'T MAKE PAGES MANUALLY UNLESS A TEMPLATE IS BROKEN, AND REPORT IT THAT IS THE CASE. PAGES WILL BE DELETED OTHERWISE IF THEY ARE MISSING BASIC MARKUP.

READ MORE

Tropedia
  • Farm-Fresh balanceYMMV
  • WikEd fancyquotesQuotes
  • (Emoticon happyFunny
  • HeartHeartwarming
  • Silk award star gold 3Awesome)
  • Script editFanfic Recs
  • MagnifierAnalysis
  • HelpTrivia
  • WMG
  • Photo linkImage Links
  • Haiku-wide-iconHaiku
  • Laconic
Charles-stross-eastercon-09 edited 5426
Cquote1
"Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich."
Cquote2


Speculative Fiction author with a bent for Post Cyber Punk work dealing with posthumanism and The Singularity, but who also has a vast array of other fiction out there. Early in his career, he invented several iconic Dungeons & Dragons monsters, including the Death Knight, githyanki and githzerai, and slaadi. He's also on record as being responsible for bringing Footnote Fever to alt.fan.pratchett.

Works by Charles Stross:[]

  • The Eschaton Series: A far-future series featuring UN weapons inspector Rachel Mansour and Martin Springfield, set in a universe where a godlike AI called the "Eschaton" has spread humanity across the stars.

He also has some stand-alone works, including:

  • Halting State takes place Twenty Minutes Into the Future and every chapter is an alternating character's viewpoint in the second person (so it will seem like an Adventure Game). The sequel, titled Rule 34, is available now.
  • A Colder War, a novella combining the Red Scare with the Cthulhu Mythos with terrifying results.
  • Missile Gap, a novella combining the Cold War and the late Space Age with science and a bit of the fantastic. To say too much about the plot would be to give it away.
  • Saturn's Children, a novel written in homage to late-period Robert A. Heinlein, about a future in which humanity has gone extinct and the solar system is overrun by robots. It travels all over the solar system; there's an early section set in a Mercurial Base on Mercury itself, the climax takes place on the newly discovered dwarf planet Eris, and it hits a decent fraction of the intermediate planets at one time or another. The American edition has a notably Contemptible Cover (to the point where Stross himself made a blog post saying, in effect, "I'm sorry; it's not my fault.")
    • Said cover actually being a fairly accurate portrait of the protagonist, a literal Sex Bot. If anything, the breasts aren't large enough.
    • And an ironically appropriate reference to the similarly spathic cover art of the most common paperback edition of Heinlein's Friday.
    • Still embarrassing to read on the bus, though.
    • He's said something along the lines of you only get so many vetoes with the publisher until they start ignoring you for a couple books. This was probably at a point he had used up his social capital.
  • And in a completely unrelated note, he has released two open-source Perl modules back in the last millennium, but don't expect bug fixes these days.