Charles Stross


Charles Stross was born in 1964 in Leeds, England, and currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with his wife, Feorag.  He studied in London and Bradford, acquiring degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and worked a variety of jobs, ending up as head Perl mangler at a British dot-com startup, before switching to writing full time in 2000.  (If you grok Perl, you can still find his unmaintained spoor in CPAN.) From 1994 onwards he covered Linux and free software in the British computer magazine, Computer Shopper; between 1999 and 2004 he wrote their monthly Linux column.  Charlie began reading SF in his early years and started writing in his mid-teens.  (He wrote his first novel at the age of 16 which, if ever found, he promises to burn.) In 1986 he made his first professional sale to Interzone, and went on to sell many SF short stories in the UK through the mid-'90s; at the same time gaining a sideline in freelance computer journalism.  After a writing hiatus of a few years he began selling stories in U.S. markets; and soon after, novels.  His Hugo-shortlisted SF novels include the post-singularity space opera Singula rity Sky (Ace, 2003 — written 1995-98), its sequel, Iron Sunrise (Ace, 2004 — written 1998-2002), Accelerando (2005) and Glasshouse (Ace, 2006).  In addition to those tech-heavy novels, he's writing a series of cross-universe economic-minded SF novels Tor, The Merchant Princes: currently comprising The Family Trade (2004), The Hidden Family (2005), and The Clan Corporate (2006), to be followed by The Merchants War and two more.  Finally, he's produced a series of Lovecraftian British spy thrillers, published in hardcover by Golden Gryphon and in paperback by Ace: The Atrocity Archives (2003/05 — includes the 2005 Hugo-winning novella “The Concrete Jungle”) and The Jennifer Morgue (November 2006).  His current projects are Halting State, a near-future thriller set in the world of software companies that produce MMORPGs, due from Ace in September 2007, and Saturn's Children, a space opera set 200 years after the extinction of the human species, due in 2008.


Recently published - Glasshouse (Hugo finalist this year), The Jennifer Morgue In Japanese translation: Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise (due out just before Nippon 2007)

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