In this collection of short stories, novelist Stross moves the U.S.-U.S.S.R. conflict onto a massive disk in another galaxy in "Missile Gap," offers a spam-filter solution to the Fermi paradox in "MAXOS," suggests clever bargains with the devil in a newly frozen Scotland in "Snowball's Chance," and sets the stage for appearances by Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould in "The Colder War."
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“The act of creation seems to come easily to Charles Stross…[He] is peerless at dreaming up devices that could conceivably exist in six, sixty, or six hundred years’ time.”
— New York Times
“"A new kind of future requires a new breed of guide—someone like Stross.”
— Popular Science“Where Charles Stross goes today, the rest of science fiction will follow tomorrow.”
— Gardner Dozois, editor, Asimov’s Science Fiction magazineCharles Stross is the author of the bestselling Merchant Princes series, the Laundry series, and several stand-alone novels, including Glasshouse, Accelerando, and Saturn’s Children. Born in Leeds, England, in 1964, Stross studied in London and Bradford, earning degrees in pharmacy and computer science. Over the next decade and a half he worked as a pharmacist, a technical writer, a software engineer, and eventually as a prolific journalist covering the IT industry. His short fiction began attracting wide attention in the late 1990s; his first novel, Singularity Sky, appeared in 2003. He has subsequently won the Hugo Award twice. He lives with his wife in Edinburgh, Scotland, in a flat that is slightly older than the state of Texas.
Tim Gerard Reynolds is an established audiobook narrator who has won several AudioFile Earphones Awards and was a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award for Best Fantasy Narration. He trained for the stage at the Samuel Beckett Center at Trinity College in Dublin and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center in New London, Connecticut.
Gideon Emery was raised in England and South Africa, where he won the National Vita Award for Comedy and a Gold Craft Award for Voice-over. Now based in Los Angeles, he has appeared on such television series as 24, Burn Notice, Eleventh Hour, CSI:NY, and Moonlight. His film credits include Primeval, Train, and Takers. He is also an in-demand voice for video games.
Robert Ian Mackenzie, Earphones Award–winning narrator, became an actor after holding a wide variety of other jobs, including everything from London policeman to water ski instructor in Greece. Since then, his acting career has encompassed straight theater, musicals, opera, films, television, voice-overs, commercials, and recorded books.