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Books you can buy

See my weblog -- there are links at the top of the right-hand column.

My Book FAQ will tell you what's due out and when.

Welcome to my fiction pages and virtual short story collection.

I've been selling science fiction stories to magazines and anthologies since 1987. A collection of my earlier short stories (titled Toast) is available; there are also no less than nine fourteen novels under contract, of which six are currently in print (as of February 2006). For full details, see my book FAQ.

People ask me where I get my ideas. There's a partial answer in this interview (by Lou Anders, for Revolution SF).

Note that the stories on this website are Copyright © Charles Stross, 1987-2006. Unauthorized reproduction outside the terms of the notice (you did read it, didn't you?) is going to get you some real bad karma. (Maybe you'll come back as a slug in your next life. Or if you're really bad, a lettuce.) If you want permission to reprint or reuse some of them, get in touch via the email form (see link at top of page): I don't bite, and I'll probably say "yes" to any reasonable proposals.

You'll notice a shortage of recent stories in the virtual collection. In 1999 I realised that I hadn't sold anything for a couple of years, and decided to rectify the situation. The result was a sudden burst of work. This was in turn followed by a hiatus in 2003-2004 (while I worked frantically on novels), and my production of short fiction is still depressed due to a surfeit of novels. I'll try to maintain a complete ongoing bibliography here. There'll probably be a new short fiction collection some time in 2008 that collects the post-Lobsters non-Accelerando stories.


Trunk and Disorderly
Novella, due for publication in Asimov's SF, January 2007.
Minutes of the Labour Party Conference, 2016
Short-short, to be published in the anthology, "Glorifying Terrorism", late 2006.
Missile Gap
Novella, published in "One Million Years AD", ed. Gardner Dozois, January 2006. (To be republished in a limited edition hardcover by Subterranean Press in 2007.)
MAXOS
Short-short published in Nature's "Futures" slot, September 2005.
Snowball's Chance
Short story published in "Nova Scotia", the new anthology of Scottish SF, August 2005.
Pimpf
Short spin-off from "The Jennifer Morgue" (sequel to "The Atrocity Archives"); published in issue #1 of Baen's Universe magazine.
Appeals Court
Collaboration with Cory Doctorow; sequel to "Jury Service", published back-to-back with "Jury Service" in a chapbook bundled with issue #2 of Argosy Magazine as "The Rapture of the Nerds" in early 2004.
Survivor
Ninth and last in the series beginning with "Lobsters". (Published in December 2004 issue of Asimov's SF.) These stories have effectively been reworked into the novel Accelerando.
Elector
Eighth in the series beginning with "Lobsters".
Unwirer
Collaboration with Cory Doctorow, published in ReVisions, an alternate science fiction history anthology from DAW books, edited by Isaac Szpindel and Julie Czerneda.
Curator
Seventh in the series beginning with "Lobsters" (published in Asimov's SF, Dec 2003 issue)
The Concrete Jungle
Novella, sequel to the short novel "The Atrocity Archive", published together with it in "The Atrocity Archives", April 2004.
Flowers from Al
(Co-written with Cory Doctorow) -- published in "New Faces in Science Fiction", ed. Mike Resnick.
Jury Service
(Co-written with Cory Doctorow) -- novella, online at SciFi.com.
Nightfall
Sixth in the series beginning with "Lobsters" (published in Asimov's SF in the April 2003 issue). Shortlisted for the 2004 BSFA award. Shortlisted for the 2004 Hugo award for best novelette.
Rogue Farm
Published in "Live without a Net" (edited by Lou Anders, published by Roc.) A short film adaptation also exists.
Router
Fifth in the series beginning with "Lobsters", published in Asimov's SF in the September 2002 issue. Shortlisted for the 2002 BSFA award.
Halo
Fourth in the series beginning with "Lobsters", published in Asimov's SF, in the June 2002 issue. Shortlisted for the 2002 Hugo award and the Sturgeon award.
Tourist
Third in the series beginning with "Lobsters" and "Troubadour"; published in Asimov's SF in the February 2002 issue.
Troubadour
Sequel to "Lobsters"; published in the October/November 2001 issue of Asimov's SF.
Lobsters
Published in Asimov's SF Magazine, June 2001. Re-published in Ikarie (Czech SF magazine), republished in Year's Best SF #19 (ed. Gardner Dozois), the 2003 Nebula Awards anthology, and elsewhere.. Shortlisted in the novelette category in both the 2002 Hugo and Nebula awards; runner-up for the 2002 Sturgeon award.
Big Brother Iron
Novella, available only in the Toast collection.
A Colder War
Published in Spectrum SF #3, Summer 2000; republished in "The Year's Best Science Fiction #18" (ed. Gardner Dozois, 2001).

Michael Swanwick reviewed it in Locus and said "... so deftly and glancingly are the eldritch horrors worked into the story that it becomes a chilling metaphor for the self-deluding madness and unexamined evil that in our history wore a blander face. I hadn't been paying close attention to Stross's work ... It's a mistake I won't make again."

Sam Youd (aka John Christopher) wrote "An extraordinary offspring of John W. Campbell and HP Lovecraft: it shouldn't work, and I'm still not convinced it can, but Stross suspends my disbelief. These are two very different kinds of imagination. What suspends disbelief is the quality of writing, which is excellent -- echoes of early Zelazny, but possibly better."

NEW: You can read it online at Infinity Plus.

Antibodies
Published in Interzone #157; republished in "The Year's Best Science Fiction #18" (ed. Gardner Dozois). Mentioned in Locus' "Recommended Reading List" for 2000.

Shortlisted for the 2001 Theodore Sturgeon Award (lost to Ian MacDonald's "Tendoleo's Story").

Bear Trap
Published in Spectrum SF issue #1 (January 2000). Mentioned in Locus' "Recommended Reading List" for 2000.
Toast: A Con Report
Published Interzone, August 1998; reprinted in "The best of the rest #2" 1999, and "Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future" (ed. Gardner Dozois, 2001).
Extracts from the Club Diary
Published in Odyssey (1998).
A Boy and His God
Published in Odyssey 3 (1998).
Dechlorinating the Moderator
Published in Interzone 101 (1996).
Tarkovsky's Cut
Collaboration with Simon Ings, published in New Worlds #3 (1991)
Ship of Fools
Published in Interzone 98 (June 1995).
Examination Night
Published in Villains, ed. Mary Gentle (Penguin 1992, UK).
Yellow Snow
First published in Interzone 37 (July 1990).
The Boys.
Published in Interzone 21, in 1987: first professional sale.
SEAQ and Destroy
Published in There Won't Be War, in 1992. (Written in 1988, hence the anachronisms.)
The Midlist Bombers
Published in issue 4 of Farpoint; magazine folded at issue 5, in 1991.
Generation Gap
Published in Interzone, issue thirty-something.
Ancient of Days
Published in volume 1 of a series of shared universe anthologies edited by Roz Kaveney ( The Weerde, 1991).
Red, Hot and Dark
Sequel to Ancient of Days. From The Weerde #2.
Something Sweet
From New Worlds #1: collaboration with Simon Ings.

How not to sell a novel

It's a well-known cliche that every writer has half a novel sitting in a desk drawer, waiting to be published. I've got one that could have been published in 1994, except for a total communications breakdown between myself and an editor. As there seems no hope of publishing it in the immediate future, and as I'm working on other projects, I've put the novel on this web site under a Creative Commons license. (Note: this is the attribution, non-commercial, no-derivs license. The novel is not available for commercial sale). It's old stuff; I wrote the first draft in 1988, and this final version dates to 1993. I still have a fond spot for it, though, unlike most of the other unsold novels lining my filing cabinet; it's a little patchy in places, but I think it's sufficiently close to commercial quality that it deserves to see the light of day. So here's Scratch Monkey.


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