Wireless
- ISBN13: 9780441017195
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Science fiction guru Charles Stross “sizzles with ideas” (Denver Post) in his first major short story collection.
The Hugo Award-winning author of such groundbreaking and innovative novels as Accelerando, Halting State, and Saturn′s Children delivers a rich selection of speculative fiction- including a novella original to this volume- brought together for the first time in one collection, showcasing the limitless imagination of one of the twenty-first… More >>
The book begins and ends with redo stories. In the beginning it’s 1,001,979 AD, and the hive mind is using a process of repetition to teach the primates to stop throwing crap at each other. The end redo feels a lot like Asimov’s “End of Eternity.”
In between, there’s an amusing letter, a human reboot, a Laundry story, Ollie North ending the world as we know it, evil and climate change in a Scottish pub, etc. And, of course, the Doctorow collaboration.
The collaboration with Cory Doctorow gives us a story about celebrity culture, unfortunately larded with rants about the way health care is delivered in the US (we’re savages), and against US IP law (we’re pwn3d by the RIAA and telcos). Nothing about sick Canadian babies being sent to Buffalo because in all of Ontario there are only two NICUs; nothing about Canadian “Human Rights Commissions” mostly interested in stamping out free speech (ask, oh, Ezra Levant). Bottom line: I’m tired of Brits and Canadians lecturing us from the tops of their middens. Tell you what, Mr Stross: do a horror story about the UK’s NHS, about the UK’s soaring crime rates (where self-defense will get you a prison sentence), about the UK’s no-go areas for non-Muslims, then get back to me.
So, like the parsons egg, this book is good in places. It might have gotten three stars if I hadn’t been so miffed at “Unwirer.”
Rating: 2 / 5
The nine entries affirm the author’s strong scientific and hi tech foundations that make his science fiction novels so fascinating. However, the contributions are uneven as some are really great while others feel more like a beta test for something grander and more complete. The super contributions include the excellent novella “Missile Gap” in which the Cold War is fought on a different platform; “Unwirer” future of America starts with unplugging as wireless connections are outlawed; “Down on the Farm” with Bob Howard (enuf said) and “Snowball’s Chance” of hell in Scotland. Of special mention is “The Colder War” that focuses on the convergence of Lovecraft and the Iran-Contra. Although overall fun to read with more than half being excellent entries, WIRELESS as a whole does not compare to Mr. Stross’ novels.
Harriet Klausner
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a lovely buffet for Stross fans: a couple of stories involving the Laundry (“the inmates here are not only mad: they’re computer science graduates”), some geopolitical intrigue, humorous pieces that don’t fit in any universe, and more grand time-traveling and world-engineering epics.
Unfortunately, it appears that nobody proofread the Kindle edition. Words are inexplicably split in two, as if any potential hyphen was replaced with two spaces, leading to such clunkers as “dialectiza tion”. The effect is jolting and enough to kick anyone out of the flow of reading.
Stross gets an A, Kindle gets a B- for effort.
Rating: 3 / 5
A collection of Stross’s shorter pieces. The best exhibit Stross’ ability to merge imaginative plotting, clever variation of popular fiction genres, and some satirical elements. A Colder War, for example, is a Cold War novel with a Lovecraftian background in an imaginative story with some pointed satire of the Reagan administration. His science fiction pastiche of PG Wodehouse is similar. There is a good Laundry story along the same lines. A nice relaxing read.
Rating: 4 / 5
I’ve been aware of Stross for awhile now, and I know about his growing reputation for highly original post-cyberpunk fiction, but this collection of nine short stories is my first real experience with his writing. There’s something of a Tim Powers flavor to his work that gives it considerable appeal. “Missile Gap” is about the Cold War of c.1979 as it continues on the huge flat disk in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud to which Earth’s continents have been removed by some unknown agency. (Now, *there’s* a set-up for a story!) Stross apparently likes to drop the reader right into the middle of things and let him flounder around awhile before finally explaining the story. He certainly gets your attention — if you show a bit of patience. And you should — it’s an excellent story. “A Colder War” is kind of similar, except it joins the brainless cowboy diplomacy of the Reagan era with ancient Lovecraftian evil and a bitter kind of alienation. The idea of Oliver North with access to the Ancient Ones will give you the willies. Stross also likes to bring in real science types like Carl Sagan and Stephen J. Gould and Buckminster Fuller. And he likes to describe scenarios in which the missiles are in the air and the sirens are screaming. “Maxos” is a short-short that purports to be a new form called “flash fiction,” but this is the first I’ve heard of it. In the form of a letter to NATURE, it suggests a possible solution to the Fermi Paradox, . . . one involving Nigerian investments. “Unwirer,” co-written with Cory Doctorow, is about a world — right now, more or less — in which the telcos have protected their profits by bribing or coercing Congress to make wireless communications illegal — no public Internet access — and the FCC has anti-terrorist powers to arrest and imprison (via secret courts) wireless guerillas who string repeaters along hillsides. Only in Europe, where freedom still has some meaning, is innovation still legal. The way the guys tell it, it’s a truly scary scenario — largely because it’s very easy to imagine it happening. “Down on the Farm,” on the other hand, is kind of a ho-hum story about Agent Bob of the secret government department known as “The Laundry,” whose job is to deal with spells, magic, demonology, and other truly Black Ops. For more of his adventures, you want to read _The Atrocity Archives,_ but I’m afraid this one just doesn’t do much for me. The last and longest piece in the book is the never before published “Palimpsest.” You would think there were no new time-travel variations to explore but Stross manages it. The agents of the Stasis (after murdering their own grandfathers as an initiation rite) have to deal with a timestream covering more than a trillion years, in which humanity has risen and fallen and become extinct many thousands of times and their remit is to keep reseeding the species. We see all this from the personal perspective of an individual student-agent, first in the midst of his twenty years of training, and later as he patrols his beat — a brief slice of time stretching only from Carthage to the Cold War. And I admire the author’s facility with the language, as shown in phrases like “the mayfly flicker of empires.” All in all, this volume is worth your time and consideration and Stross is definitely on my list of authors to investigate further.
Rating: 4 / 5