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

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. ( )

Toast contains ten short stories from various times in Stross's career. The ones that really stand out in this readers mind are Antibodies, A Boy and His God and Yellow snow.. ( )

I found the introduction particularly amusing. It was written in 2000(ish), talking about the exponential pace of change and how we've nearly hit the singularity and SF authors can't predict the future anymore and anything written more than 2 years ago is obsolete. (I might be exaggerating slightly - but that's the gist of it.) See, the funny thing is that Charlie Stross was Guest of Honour at the 2008 Eastercon, and based his main talk on this precise introduction.

Apart from that, this was quite an enjoyable anthology. I liked Antobodies, and most of Extracts from the Club Diary. I was very very amused by Dechlorinating the Moderator, with Paul, my nuclear physicist boyfriend being predictably dismissive of it.

Yellow Snow was terribly predictable; and A Colder War has made me actually want to read Lovecraft.

Overall, of course, it's very Charlie.

The one thing that did get my attention was the 2005 afterword. "We've got a grim police-state-and-global-warming future coexisting with and superimposed on the high-tech optimistic future - the one with fusion reactors and cyberspace and no more starvation - that sort of slid in from stage left to replace the jet cars and food pills." Yeah, he's got a point. And particularly this week, which has seen the worst global financial collapse since the Great Depression, and which will still not have anything like the devastating economic impact that the Great Depression did (Did I just put that thought down in writing? Well, you can call me out on it in ten years' time.), it's made me think... ( )

Like many collections of short stories I rate this quite low, because there is always a mix of quality and I'm not particularly a fan of the short story either.

Adding to that, in this case, there are short stories that have been developed into books in their own right (and my feeling is that all good short stories have this capacity) and I've already read them in the longer (and to my mind preferable) version.

However, if you're not sure about what Charles Stross is about, this gives you a pretty good feel for it. There are stories about geeks, stories about cons (in the criminal sense and the fan sense), stories about technology and the increasing pace of technological change, the odd story with cross-over into horror, stories about spies and more.

There's a classic old story too "Yellow Snow" that I remember reading ages ago, but never remembered it was one of his.

Despite my misgivings about the stories I've read as books and the stories that should become books, it was a good romp and is worth a look. ( )