Toast, and Other Stories

by Charles Stross

Award-winning author Charles Stross is one of today's most exciting and entertaining writers. This collection, Toast, brings together some of his best short stories originally published between 1989 and 2001, including his Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Award nominated work "Lobsters", the first of his many near-future cyberpunk Accelerando stories. Bruce Sterling on speed? The imagination of Sterling squared? All of the glitz, glibly tossed-off newly invented, or hybrid tech-terms thrown at the reader like an info blizzard at hurricane force, but with more core storyline than in some of Sterling's "Deep Eddy" stories.
Contents:
* Introduction: After the Future Imploded (2002) • essay by Charles Stross
* Antibodies (2000) / short story by Charles Stross
* Bear Trap (2000) / novelette by Charles Stross
* Extracts from the Club Diary (1998) / short story by Charles Stross
* A Colder War (2000) / novelette by Charles Stross
* TOAST: A Con Report (1998) / short story by Charles Stross
* A Boy and His God (1997) / short story by Charles Stross
* Ship of Fools (1995) / short story by Charles Stross
* Dechlorinating the Moderator (1996) / short story by Charles Stross
* Yellow Snow (1990) / short story by Charles Stross
* Big Brother Iron (2002) / novelette by Charles Stross

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Genres: Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories, Anthologies, Cyberpunk, Horror, Collections

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Charles David George "Charlie" Stross is a writer based in Edinburgh, Scotland. His works range from science fiction and Lovecraftian horror to fantasy.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who specialise in hard science fiction and space opera. His contemporaries include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Liz Williams and Richard Morgan.

SF Encyclopedia: http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/...

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_...

Tor: http://us.macmillan.com/author/charle...

Reviews

[Kara Babcock · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ever discover an author through another medium, like TV or Twitter or the author’s blog, and realize you want to read everything this author has written and you want to read it yesterday? That’s how I feel about Charles Stross. It’s similar to my evaluation of William Gibson in my last review; Stross writes about the present changes facing humanity in such an interesting way. I don’t always agree with him, and his stories don’t always grab me as narratives, but he is definitely near the top of the heap when it comes to authors of posthuman fiction.

Toast is an intense but somewhat uneven collection of Stross stories. Perhaps the introduction, “After the Future Imploded” is the most valuable part of the book: it has exactly the type of lucid futurist speculation I was talking about above. Stross plays his “what if” game fancifully but also with some sincerity. He sees not only the capabilities that we have today but the capabilities we might have tomorrow, and where that might lead us—not only the issues that we’ll confront, like the rights of uploaded personalities, but what will happen when the present becomes our past.

The two technologies that Stross emphasizes in most of his fiction are nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. The former will be a revolution in computing, because we’ll truly free computers from the “dumb terminal” model we use now. In Toast stories, people’s clothing and coffee cups—everything—are computers. Humanity is wetwired, part of the grid and the Web in an entirely new way. The latter technology is a lot more controversial and amorphous in its definition. Trying to determine what exactly “artificial” intelligence denotes is a difficult chore. But if it, too, happens, then it will be another revolution—and not just because of the possibility of the Singularity. As far as we know, we are the only intelligent beings on the Earth—and perhaps in the observable universe. An artificial intelligence would be something new, something alien and strange. That would be fascinating and frightening.

After coming off the high of Toast’s introduction, I was excited by the first story, “Antibodies”. The moment a character exclaimed, “Someone’s come up with a proof that NP-complete problems lie in P!” I grinned and knew the story would be good. Many science fiction authors are also physicists, or have a strong science background, which makes them comfortable talking about the physics that underlies their plots. Stross’ background is in computers, and it shows in these stories. He speaks the hacker lingo, but more interesting for me, he draws in the deeper mathematics upon which algorithms rely. Plenty of science fiction stories talk about neutrinos and exotic matter, but how many reference P versus NP in a meaningful way? So “Antibodies” was a big hit with me.

I wish I could say I was as impressed with the rest of the stories. I was really excited when I started reading, and some of the stories are good, but they don’t hit my buttons the way “Antibodies” did. “Bear Trap” is set in Stross’ Eschaton universe (best known for Singularity Sky ). It’s good, but the conflict and the way Stross depicts the wider universe are both so vague and ill-defined that I never got invested. Similarly, “Extracts from the Club Diary” was enjoyable—despite Stross’ questionable faux-Victorian diction—but its direction was somewhat predictable and never quite paid off. “Lobsters” is slightly better, because it raises the intriguing questions surrounding uploaded personalities—both human and non-human. I also like the main character, who is a study in how the Internet is changing the role of the deal broker. Finally, “Big Brother Iron” examines what might happen to the world of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four if Big Brother invented a computer to run the government. Like the other stories I’ve mentioned, it has a really neat premise against which the story doesn’t quite measure up.

Stross writes mostly in the first person, and as a consequence his narrators often sound the same to me. (That might just be me or the mood I was in while reading the book.) It probably doesn’t help that his characters are often the same mould: middle-aged male stuck in a mid-level position, usually has some technology expertise of some kind, who gets into trouble because of external events and has to use his wits to survive. I really need to read one of his novels with a female protagonist, like Halting State. But I suspect my complaint emerges from the similarity in themes among the stories of Toast. They are, in a sense, about looking back during or just after the transition between our current era and whatever comes next (Singularity or not).

Toast isn’t the book I would recommend for a newcomer to Charles Stross (Singularity Sky is pretty good in that respect). Yet if, like me, you are fascinated by ruminations upon our potential posthuman prospects, this anthology might be right for you. It isn’t as amazing as I had hoped. However, it still has that dose of lucid speculation that I’ve come to regard as a hallmark of Stross and of great science fiction in general.

[Yuri Krupenin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Это первое что я прочитал у Стросса; короткий сборник, ранние рассказы, девяностые.

В первую очередь мне было интересно что я могу в точности отследить из чего именно автор эти рассказы собирает: мы делим набор увлечений и интересов, и я помню как в девяностые строил свои картины будущего на базе тех же новостей; Стросс в предисловии характеризует технический прогресс как одностороннее явление, делающее невозможным не только прошлое, но и устаревшие версии будущего, и действительно сейчас его зарисовки выглядят даже ностальгическими (Y2K bug упоминается в двух рассказах, один полностью строится вокруг; 2038 также упомянут, ещё немного осталось).

Что-то состарилось лучше, что-то хуже (киберпанк-постинорию читать просто невозможно, но опять же интересно разбирать на составляющие); видно, что по ту сторону человек любопытный, и ладно, меня заинтересовало достаточно чтобы всё же взяться потом за Accelerando.

[Chris "Stu" · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book of short stories, so it's hard to give it a single review, because all the stories are of different quality. But there's an underlying theme to all the stories. Stross himself in the introduction describes them all as "outdated" stories. That is, they're science fiction stories that illustrate where science fiction story-writing was at some point in the past, showing outdated fears of their day. So the cyberpunk story is VERY dated, as is the Y2K story. However, the best story of the lot "A Colder War" is no less chilling and awesome for being about the Cold War (being fought with the Mutually Assured Destruction of Lovecraftian gods and monsters, rather than just nuclear weapons). This is clearly something Stross developed further into his Laundry Series (still my favorite Stross series), but this short story is a lot more bleak and more fully deals with the utter insanity of the cold war. It's also fun, for being so bleak.

Other standout stories are "Antibodies," which is one of those first person stories where the reader can figure out a lot more than the narrator realizes--always one of the hardest things to pull off, and "Big Brother Iron," which projects the world of "1984" into the early computer age.

Not all stories work: a couple have the exact same set-up: Narrator goes to a science convention, and it's crazy what kids are getting up to these days (in the future). And the last story of the book is actually the first chapter of "Accelerando." Now, "Accelerando" is one of the greatest science fiction novels of the 21st Century so far, so that's not really a huge complaint, but it's not an alternate earlier version of the story, as far as I can tell. It feels like it was there to pad out the book and convince you to buy "Accelerando." Which you should do, right now, but still, you should probably just get that book instead of reading it in "Toast." The rest of the stories are also, good, though.

However, if you have to only restrict yourself to one Stross short-story collection, pick up "Wireless" instead, because it contains "A Colder War" as well, and also contains the great companion piece "Missile Gap," which takes a great set-up, and just runs with it. Don't read too much into the setup: The Earth of the 1950s is picked up, peeled like a grape, and placed on a flat disk many millions of lightyears away. Space travel can't happen anymore, ICBMs don't work, and the US and the Soviet Union freak out at each other but also have to deal with the incredibly changed conflict between them. It's a great setup, and the novella then plays out how that would change everything, rather than spending a lot of time trying to figure out why it all happened.

You can probably tell I'm reading "Wireless" right now.

[Miloš Petrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

Basically a Stross 101: ten stories, all good, all concepts more or less expanded in his long form works.

[Craig Childs · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Despite all our propaganda attempts to convince you otherwise, AI is alarmingly easy to produce; the human brain isn’t unique, it isn’t well-tuned, and you don’t need eighty billion neurons joined in an asynchronous network in order to generate consciousness. And although it looks like a good idea to a naive observer, in practice it’s absolutely deadly."

This is Charles Stross' 2002 short story collection. (Expanded in 2005 to include "Lobsters".)

"Antibodies" (2000) -- A mathematician publishes a proof that can render all encryption algorithms ineffective. Suddenly, low-functioning AI can bootstrap itself to the next level, which means a technological singularity must be just around the corner.

"Bear Trap" (2000) -- After the Singularity, humanity lives in uneasy subjugation to a bewildering variety of sentient AI lifeforms. Stock speculator Alain Blomenfeld is on the run from many of them, having sparked an intergalactic bear market that has plunged the cosmos into financial ruin. His life depends on being able to differentiate between human and construct, reality and unreality.

"Extracts from the Club Diary" (1998) -- In Victorian England, at a dinner party hosted by Oscar Wilde, two men form a gentlemen's club of coffee fanatics. The club exists in secret for 130 years, working on ways to create the perfect brew. Along the way, they revolutionize science, aviation, and weapons of war. However, nature's most perfect coffee bush may wipe out all humankind eventually…

"A Colder War" (2000) -- In this alternate history, Nazis discover an Elder Thing under the ice shelf in Antarctica, along with a gate that connects our world to Lovecraft's Dreamlands. This story has an interesting premise--How would the events of "At the Mountains of Madness" have changed our history?--but it falls flat. Most of the narrative is given to detailing a new variation of the Iran-Contra Affair.

"TOAST: A Con Report" (1998) -- In the mid-2030's, old hackers gather to reminisce about the beginning of the computer revolution. Some of them choose to use nanotechnology to create new bodies with conscious continuity to their current selves. This story predicts wearables, 3D printing, IoT, and internet addiction--all escalated into the realm of absurdity.

"Ship of Fools" (1995) -- On December 31, 1999, a group of IT professionals take a Caribbean cruise to wait out the collapse of civilization when the mainframes fail. This is a fun story, and it captures the various aspects of Y2K hysteria that I remember.

"Dechlorinating the Moderator" (1996) -- After we max out the potential of computers and biotech, the next hot trend will be particle physics. This humorous near-future piece imagines out-of-control conventions where whiz-kids build pocket universes and study subatomic particles with half-lives of a billionth of a second.

"Yellow Snow" (1990) -- A twenty-first century drug dealer alters his genes to produce heroin in his urine and travels back in time to 1984. He expects to get rich, but he finds himself in a parallel universe where drugs, abortion, and "anything you want to do to yourself in private" have been legal since 1933. Written in the cyberpunk style made popular by William Gibson.

"Big Brother Iron" (2002) -- The People's Computer is compromised by a saboteur, causing a Party Member's shipment of heroin to go missing. O'Brien must find it or risk the Ministry of Love. This story is a sequel to George Orwell's 1984, set fifty years later. Orwell's horrifying totalitarian state has become bloated, corrupt, and lazy (based on Brezhnev's Russia).

"Lobsters" (2001) -- Manfred Macx is contacted by a rogue Moscow Windows NT User Group AI that has been hacked by digitized lobster brains in cyberspace… Don't worry, it all makes sense in the end. This novelette was voted one of the Top Ten of the 21st century by Locus Magazine. This is the original published version "tweaked slightly for 2000-era technologies", according to the author, not the rewritten version that forms the first chapter of the novel Accelerando.

[Christopher Sutch · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came to this collection late in my Stross reading (mainly because I didn't know this book existed until one of his latest novels included it on his list of publications). Boy did I miss out on too much for too long! This was Stross's first book (though I read and am reviewing the expanded edition of 2006) and consists of stories he published between 1990 and 2001 (before his first novel). While most of the prose here lacks the polish and sophistication of Stross's latest work (these are very much journeyman pieces), they do remind me why I started reading him in the first place. The sheer brilliance and vivacity of his mind is addictive: the inventiveness of his ideas hits your brain with the force of a hammer. Usually, you have to spend some time googling words and concepts to get an idea of what he's talking about (unless you're onto all of the knowledge fields he references casually to give context to his work). It's thrilling (albeit at times awkwardly phrased) stuff. My favorite pieces include a sequel to Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" ("A Colder War"), which reads like a prequel to the _Laundry Files_ novels and mixes Cthulhiana with the Iran-Contra scandal; an exercise in imagining what Orwell's _1984_ society would like like in the 1990s with the introduction of computational technology ("Big Brother Iron"); a refreshingly pessimistic AI story ("Antibodies"); and, of course, the brilliant "Lobsters" (in its original magazine-publication form), the story in which Stross came into his full powers as a storyteller. All of the other works in here are just as good as these (even his first published story "Yellow Snow," an exercise in imagining what time travel would mean if a cyberpunk antihero traveled back to the 1980s to try to sell genetically engineered drugs in the Reagan years; needless to say, the story highlights the problem with altering history _and_ writing cyberpunk).

A must read for Stross fans.

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of stories and commentary. One of the more remarkable things it contains is the story "A Colder War." Basically take the Reagan era cold war and mix in the Cthulhu mythos. It is a chilling story.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stross is a great high-tech anthropologist that has a fascinating lens on our current era. His introduction “After the Future Imploded” and afterword are some of the best work in this book, and that’s not damning his fiction in the least.

The fiction is also great. “Antibodies” is a great dark future story about AI written by someone who understands a lot more of the implications than the usual artist. “Extracts from the Club Diary” is a delightful love letter to both coffee and, by the end, Day of the Triffids. What could be a more cozy catastrophe than the relentless pursuit of the perfect cup of coffee leading to genetically modified monstrosities taking over the world. “A Colder War” shows us the seed that the Atrocity Archives sprouted from, set during the 80s cold war (with the delightful “The bombing will begin in 15 minutes.” line.) We get Tom Clancy if he read Lovecraft. “TOAST: A Con Report” is an interesting view on hacker conferences, both now and in that transitional era into transhumanism. “Dechlorinating the Moderator” is a similar anthropological sturdy, but with a little less impact in the additional story layers. “Ship of Fools” is an excellent historical piece on explaining Y2K to this generation.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although Charles Stross is a legend, I found this collection of his shorter works to be tough going. Almost all the works had stories drowning in jargons and market-notions. Practically every character was unloving and unloveable. However, three very bright and eccentric stories truly enlivened this collection. They were~
1. "A Colder War"— one of the GREATEST Lovecraftian scifi and horror piece that I have read.
2. "Extracts from the Vlub Diary"— brilliant reinvention of the 'Science Club' idea and its extrapolation to an inevitable conclusion.
3. "Yellow Snow"— sharp, smart, ruthless depiction of certain issues involved with Time Travel.
Some of the stories like "Toast: A Con Report", "Decholirating the Moderator", "Ship of Fools" were overlong pieces where Douglas Adams went slumming with Stephen Hawking. On the other hand pieces like "Big Brother Iron", despite their readablility, kept nervoulsy oscillating between Smiley and Smiles.
Overall, a hard-to-digest collection, with three bright flashes across the grey of stories.

[Patrick · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much impressed. The essay at the beginning is interesting, but none of the stories really grab me. I don't much care for Lovecraftian horror, and the 1984-fanfic of 'Big Brother Iron' is misguided at best. Come to that, there's far too many techie terms, as if its written mainly for the amusement of bored sysadmins. 'Lobsters' is kind of interesting, to be fair

[Caleb Smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Random and intentionally outdated. These stories are sometimes tedious, but always interesting at their core.

[Gonçalo Araújo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very nice stories. Some of them are very amusing.

[Doc Ezra · Rating 3 out of 5]

As Stross himself admits in the foreword, the genre of speculative “cyber” fiction is one increasingly fraught with the peril of obsolescence in the shadow of Moore’s Law. This collection of stories makes for a fascinating late-20th snapshot of myriad possible futures…some definitely closer to home than others. Technology has both surpassed and fallen short of most of these fictions, in various ways, but the ideas Stross explores through the lens of a cyberpunk transhumanist possible future are all bangers.

There are shades of the Laundry here, and the sadly discontinued Eschaton series, as well as a couple of straight latter-day Gibsonian hacker fever dreams. They’re all definitely enjoyable, but likely baffling to anybody under the age of about 30, rooted as they are in a version of the future that seem distinctly Gen X in their construction (and in most cases their politics).

If you’ve never read any Stross, this would be a pretty strange place to start, but if you’re already a fan, give in to the completionism urge and pick this set up.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2981018.html

A collection of early Stross short stories, one of which ("Dechlorinating the Moderator", published in 1996) is actually set this coming Easter weekend, 30 March - 2 April 2018, in Maastricht which is not too far from here. The introduction, written with a decade or so of hindsight, is a very interesting insight into how Stross now feels about his own early fiction, and how the world has changed in ways which were and weren't imaginable last century. I particularly enjoyed the Lovecraftian "A Boy and his God" and "A Colder War", and the 1984 update "Big Brother Iron". Some of the others have worn less well. Worth a look.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished “Toast” by Charles Stross, which was his first published work. It is a collection of short stories that range from the pre-Laundry exploration of the Cthulu Mythos in modern times (A Colder War), to stories of the human race on the brink of the singularity. One can see the directions that his later works will take in these stories. Some are slightly dated, as is the fate of everything written about the near future. However, I found them all to be very readable and interesting. I think it is a pretty good introduction to his literature.

Mr. Stross made the collection available for free under a Creative Commons license when it effectively went out of print. It can be downloaded from his website in a variety of formats.

[Gregg Kellogg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This shows the early genius of Stross. Lobsters, which formed the basis of Accelerando, was ahead of its time in so many ways. But, alas, with success comes repetition, at least in Science Fiction. I love the Laundry, Clan and other series he’s committed to, but it tends to focus him on what has worked before, and doesn’t stretch him to take new risks. I hope to see some new original work that breaks new ground in the future.

[Jill Frederickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the characters and the worlds he writes in this group of stories. His deep knowledge of the world of financial transactions and of computer programming means that some stories went over my head. Interesting to read the 2005 postscript in light of where the world is now in 2020.

[Tae · Rating 2 out of 5]

“A colder war” and “Big brother iron” are OK, I really liked “Extracts from the club diary”, and “Lobsters” is the first chapter of Accelerando (which I absolutely loved, so go read that instead). I wanna say the rest didn’t aged well, but I’m not sure I would liked it even if read in 2005

[Daniel · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really dated, and not at all up to his newer work

[Earl Truss · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked every story in this book except Bear Trap. I did not get the point of the story at all.

[Matt Haeske · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book like 10 years ago and there’s 1 or 2 stories from here I still think about all the time

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the book. I wanted the stories to keep going, but found each new one engaging.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

His first album, with all the glad rough edges and density of new ideas that implies. Bunch of short stories showing off his range and introducing themes. About half are very good, though the others are becoming very dated as the last twenty years of tech and tech hype overtake his speculations.

Heady subversions of the Lovecraftian, the Clancyan, the techno-optimist, and the Doctorovian. The stories are also often silly and humane. His books sometimes receive symposia from eminent academics.

Start with Accelerando though.
[Free! here]

[William Leight · Rating 3 out of 5]

This collection of stories -- Stross's first published work -- opens with an introduction in which he explains that the rapid pace of technological change makes it almost impossible for near-future sci-fi writers to operate, as the real world may shortly render their work laughably obsolete. Perhaps this is why his next two novels were set in the post-Singularity future instead. At any rate, Stross's tendency towards techno-utopianism results in him getting a bit carried away: stories in which it is possible to build accelerators capable of creating a Higgs boson in the course of a couple of days in a hotel banquet hall remain (alas) science fiction, and I suspect that such will still be the case in 2018, when "Dechlorinating the Moderator" is set. Really, only "Yellow Snow" and "Ship of Fools" feel out of date, the first because of its generically cyberpunky style (though the central idea is still interesting) and the second because it centers around the Y2K bug. And since its predictive value is just one, and hardly the best, reason to read science fiction, these stories would still be likable even if they were all as quaint as Stross feared they might be in 2000.

Stross mostly does hard SF, which means that when he introduces an advanced technology to one of his stories he does his best to explain it or at least render it vaguely plausible with strings of jargon. But two of the best stories in this collection actually aren't don't fall in this category at all: instead, they attempt to bring the works of previous authors forward in time. "A Colder War" examines the effect the events of Lovecraft's "In the Mountains of Madness" could have had on the Cold War; "Big Brother Iron" examines the likely future of Big Brother's Oceania based on the actual future of Stalin's USSR. Of the other stories, "Yellow Snow" and "Extracts from the Club Diary" are essentially just setups for jokes; "Bear Trap" is set in the same universe as his subsequent Eschaton novels, and shares their frenetic pace and occasional incomprehensibility; "Dechlorinating the Moderator" is a story about a possible future in which particle physics is reduced to a hobby for teenage geeks, one which I am relieved to be able to say isn't particularly plausible; "Lobsters" is probably the best story here, and made me want to read "Accelerando", the first chapter of which it subsequently became; "Antibodies" is fine; "Ship of Fools" was hard to read because of the Y2K thing; and "TOAST: A Con Report" was just hard to read. On the whole, an enjoyable if uneven collection.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Toast is a collection of Charles Stross' earliest short stories—a glimpse into the origin myth of one of our most dazzling SF superheroes. As such, it felt a little awkward to read the way I did, long after I was exposed to his more polished later work, and a full decade after its initial publication (though the edition I picked up is actually the "2005 remix" according to the Afterword).

But the roots of those later works are here—you can see inklings of Stross' Laundry novels in "A Colder War," for example, and the basis of Accelerando in "Lobsters," which became that book's first chapter. There's also "Big Brother Iron," an extended riff on 1984, and the worst-case Y2K scenario "Ship of Fools," and his first published story, "Yellow Snow," from all the way back in 1990... even the Introduction, "After the Future Imploded," is pretty killer analysis.

Stross has been around, paid his dues; these are some of the dues he's paid. And while I wouldn't necessarily give Toast to someone now as their first experience with Stross, I would definitely recommend it to Stross' fans, as a way to go back and fill in the blanks in a very interesting history.

[Kek-w Kek-w · Rating 3 out of 5]

Uneven collection of short stories by Stross -- probably because it includes some of his earliest published work: I loved cyberpunk back in the day, but the 'cyberpunk' story, in particular, is very much of its time and the humour he tried to inject doesn't really work -- and some of the humorous stories are nowhere near as funny as they *think* they are.

Or maybe, to be fairer, the humour didn't work for me -- sorry to say, a lot of humorous Brit SF / Fantasy I just don't find funny (and I'm a Brit), though clearly many thousands do. I think it's the tone of their writing that's off-putting. I'm loathe to knock anything that clearly gives so many ppl pleasure - or to knock other pro writers (I know how much work / effort goes into producing stories) -- so best to let's maybe stick with the 'doesn't work for me' / personal taste thing and move on.

Still, gripes aside: the stories (or parts of stories) that didn't work were short enough that you're soon onto the next one... and the good stuff was REALLY good. They didn't stick around long enough to really grind.

Two or three of the stories felt head and shoulders over some of the others (or, maybe, they were just more to my own personal taste, I dunno) and that helped propel me through the collection. On balance I was left remembering the good stuff (one in particular was EXCELLENT) and that's the aftertaste I'd rather have when finishing a book :-)

[February Four · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been trying to get over my distaste of Stross's books. I kept wondering: was it just the Laundry universe I just couldn't get into? Maybe if I try something else it'll be okay... so when my husband got a copy of Toast (long story, he didn't mean to because he doesn't really enjoy Stross either), I figured I'd give it one more shot.

I managed to finish two stories out of ten ("Antibodies" and "Bear Trap"). I just couldn't stand the rest. I'd read "Lobsters" a long time ago, and it's a one-shot one-trick story for me; no point reading it again since I still remember it clearly. "Lobsters" would have been #3 on my list, I suppose. Or not. It was a while ago and I was a little less discerning then.

I really need to learn that no matter how good certain authors are supposed to be, reading is a personal experience. Some people don't like certain foods; I hate celery unless it's in soup, and I detest bell peppers unless they're very finely chopped and mixed in with wild rice as a casseroule/baked dish. In the same way, I just don't mesh with Stross's books.

Unfortunately (for me or him?) I still have one more book to go. Wireless is also a collection of short stories. I am hoping for something better than Toast, but we shall see.

By the way, the ending to Bear Trap was absolutely GROAN-WORTHY.

[Tim Hicks · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn't finish it, and I am a big Stross fan. OK, except for the later books in the Merchant series. But the Laundry more than makes up for that.

Anyway, I started with the Y2K story. I worked in the computer field then, and maybe the story was too close to home. But it seemed as dated as a gaslighter, and less interesting.

Picked a couple more, including the first one about mathematics. I have a maths degree and I still didn't like it. It felt stiff and over-geeky, like Cory Doctorow's stuff. And of course I know that Stross can now wrote MUCH better than this.

Not recommended except for completists.

[Raj · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of fairly early short stories by Stross mostly united by the theme of the future passing them by. The vision that they were describing has already been overtaken, such as in Ship of Fools, which is about the Y2K bug.

Other stories stand up better, such as the one set in the Eschaton universe and his Lovecraft-inspired stories, particularly the whimsical A Boy and his God. Overall, this is a thought-provoking and enjoyable collection of stories, full of Big SF ideas and a good introduction to Stross' work.

[Jon Knight]

An interesting collection of stories - the first rumble of a lot of themes that play on through his other work. Available for free on the author's website: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-...

Probably mostly of interest to true-believing Strossian or those with an interest in the increasing difficulty of writing near future SF. The collection is built around the concept of the ageing of stories, but now even the 2005 afterword feels old!