Promotional Information

* Review coverage in the genre press * Featured on www.orbitbooks.co.uk and in the e-zine

About the Author

Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He has worked as a pharmacist, software engineer and freelance journalist, but now writes full time.

Reviews

'Stretches the limits of narrative to make us see how wonderful ideas can be' TIME OUT 'Stross's most accomplished and strikingly imaginative SF book so far' STARBURST 'Utterly original, gripping the reader with the power of its ideas' DREAMWATCH 'Intelligent future history grounded by terrific characters' DREAMWATCH

'Stretches the limits of narrative to make us see how wonderful ideas can be' TIME OUT 'Stross's most accomplished and strikingly imaginative SF book so far' STARBURST 'Utterly original, gripping the reader with the power of its ideas' DREAMWATCH 'Intelligent future history grounded by terrific characters' DREAMWATCH

Stross (Singularity Sky) explores humanity's inability to cope with molecular nanotechnology run amok in this teeming near-future SF stand-alone. In part one, "Slow Takeoff," "free enterprise broker" Manfred Macx and his soon-to-be-estranged wife/dominatrix, Pamela, lay the foundation for the next decade's transhumans. In "Point of Inflection," Amber, their punky maladjusted teenage daughter, and Sadeq Khurasani, a Muslim judge, engineer and scholar, try to escape the social chaos that antiaging treatments have wreaked on Earth by riding a tin can-sized starship via nanocomputerization to a brown dwarf star called Hyundai. The Wunch, trade-delegation aliens evolved from uploaded lobster mentalities, and Macx's grandson, Sirhan, roister through "Singularity," in which people become cybernetic constructs. Stross's three-generation experiment in stream-of-artificial-consciousness impresses, but his flat characters and inchoate rapid-fire explosions of often muzzily related ideas, theories, opinions and nightmares too often resemble intellectual pyrotechnics-breathtakingly gaudy but too brief, leaving connections lost somewhere in outer/inner/cyber space. Agent, Caitlin Blasdell. (July) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.