Charles Stross

"Manfred's on the road again, making strangers rich."

—Accelerando

Speculative Fiction author with a bent for Post Cyber Punk work dealing with posthumanism and The Singularity, but who also has a vast array of other fiction out there. Early in his career, he invented several iconic Dungeons & Dragons monsters, including the Death Knight, githyanki and githzerai, and slaadi. He's also on record as being responsible for bringing Footnote Fever to alt.fan.pratchett.

Works by Charles Stross:

• The Accelerando Series: Two books (and a third planned), Accelerando and Glasshouse, that explore the concept of The Singularity and its aftermath.

• The Laundry Series: Also known as The Bob Howard Series, about a special agent for the "Laundry", which is basically MI 6 crossed with H.P. Lovecraft.

• The Merchant Princes Series: A journalist discovers she has the ability to travel to an Alternate Universe at will, where her long-lost family are powerful traders.

• The Eschaton Series: A far-future series featuring UN weapons inspector Rachel Mansour and Martin Springfield, set in a universe where a godlike AI called the "Eschaton" has spread humanity across the stars.

He also has some stand-alone works, including:

• Halting State takes place Twenty Minutes Into the Future and every chapter is an alternating character's viewpoint in the second person (so it will seem like an Adventure Game). The sequel, titled Rule 34, is available now.
• A Colder War, a novella combining the Red Scare with the Cthulhu Mythos with terrifying results.
• Missile Gap, a novella combining the Cold War and the late Space Age with science and a bit of the fantastic. To say too much about the plot would be to give it away.
• Saturn's Children, a novel written in homage to late-period Robert A. Heinlein, about a future in which humanity has gone extinct and the solar system is overrun by robots. It travels all over the solar system; there's an early section set in a Mercurial Base on Mercury itself, the climax takes place on the newly discovered dwarf planet Eris, and it hits a decent fraction of the intermediate planets at one time or another. The American edition has a notably Contemptible Cover (to the point where Stross himself made a blog post saying, in effect, "I'm sorry; it's not my fault.")
  • Said cover actually being a fairly accurate portrait of the protagonist, a literal Sex Bot. If anything, the breasts aren't large enough.
  • And an ironically appropriate reference to the similarly spathic cover art of the most common paperback edition of Heinlein's Friday.
  • Still embarrassing to read on the bus, though.
  • He's said something along the lines of you only get so many vetoes with the publisher until they start ignoring you for a couple books. This was probably at a point he had used up his social capital.
• And in a completely unrelated note, he has released two open-source Perl modules back in the last millennium, but don't expect bug fixes these days.