Charles Stross: Toast

First, a short success story. I learned about Charles Stross on the internet, in fact, I found his novelette "A Colder War" there. I read that story online and was hooked. It took some time, but recently I stumbled across a collection of his short stories (Toast), and money changed hands, money that hopefully will at least in part end up in Mr. Stross' hands. Thus, handing out freebies on the web might have been the correct strategy in this case.

And the success story does not end here, as this a fantastic collection. It combines stories from the early nineties to the early noughts, and combines many different themes, although the main emphasis lies on the approaching singularity of technological and scientific progress. Stross mostly depicts this event as very interesting, and he also describes its (bizarre) fallout: People burnt out at 25 as it becomes very easy to fall behind the technological curve, high energy physics as a party gag, the inability to function without smart clothing, a world overrun by gengineered coffeeplants... Frankenstein is alive and well in Stross' short stories, but he isn't exactly a romantic. He comes across like a hallucinating prankster, a Joker on LSD. Stross' protagonists are often nostalgic old fogeys who, while they are able to interact with posthumanist people, wish for the good old days when machines were machines, people were people and technology's quantum jumps happenened every few months. For a tech-savvy reader of today, it is easy to identify with them, and Stross often seeds his stories with technological slang that might put off some readers, but ultimately adds some believability to his ideas: Even if some of his depictions are quite surreal, the stories not dealing with FTL-travel or alien gods come across as hard SF.

The best story in this collection is A Colder War - the one I found on the net. It combines his creed of human stupidity, an alternative history of the Cold War and H.P. Lovecraft's Mythos. Again, the idea of the singularity crops up, again, it seems both inevitable and ultimately dehumanizing.

This is a brilliant collection, and I can wholeheartedly recommend it.