The Singularity. It is the era of the posthuman. Artificial intelligences have surpassed the limits of human intellect. Biotechnological beings have rendered people all but extinct. Molecular nanotechnology runs rampant, replicating and reprogramming at will. Contact with extraterrestrial life grows more imminent with each new day. Struggling to survive and thrive in this accelerated world are three generations of the Macx clan: Manfred, an entrepreneur dealing in intelligence amplification technology whose mind is divided between his physical environment and the Internet; his daughter, Amber, on the run from her domineering mother, seeking her fortune in the outer system as an indentured astronaut; and Sirhan, Amber’s son, who finds his destiny linked to the fate of all of humanity. For something is systematically dismantling the nine planets of the solar system. Something beyond human comprehension. Something that has no use for biological life in any form…

The winner of multiple Hugo Awards, Charles Stross is one of the most highly regarded science fiction writers of his time. In The Apocalypse Codex, occasionally hapless British agent Bob Howard tackles a case involving an American televangelist and a supernatural threat of global proportions. “Stross gives readers a British superspy with a long-term girlfriend, no fashion sense, and an aversion to martinis.”-San Francisco Chronicle

Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross dives deep into the underbelly of paratime espionage, nuclear warfare, and state surveillance in this provocative techno-thriller audiobook set in The Merchant Princes multi-verse

Dark State ups the ante on the already volatile situations laid out in the sleek techno-thriller Empire Games, the start to Stross’ new story-line and a perfect entry point for new listeners, in The Merchant Princes series.

In the near-future, the collision of two nuclear superpowers across timelines, one in the midst of a technological revolution and the other a hyper-police state, is imminent. In Commissioner Miriam Burgeson’s timeline, her top level agents run a high risk extraction of a major political player. Meanwhile, a sleeper cell activated in Rita’s, the Commissioner’s adopted daughter and newly-minted spy, timeline threatens to unravel everything.

With a penchant for intricate world-building and an uncanny ability to realize alternate history and technological speculation, Stross’ prose will captivate listeners who like hi-tech thrillers, inter-dimensional political intrigue, and espionage.

When magic and superpowers emerge in the masses, Wendy Deere is contracted by the government to bag and snag supervillains in Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross’ Dead Lies Dreaming: A Laundry Files Novel.

As Wendy hunts down Imp?the cyberpunk head of a band calling themselves “The Lost Boys”? she is dragged into the schemes of louche billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge. Rupert has discovered that the sole surviving copy of the long-lost concordance to the one true Necronomicon is up for underground auction in London. He hires Imp’s sister, Eve, to procure it by any means necessary, and in the process, he encounters Wendy Deere.

In a tale of corruption, assassination, thievery, and magic, Wendy Deere must navigate rotting mansions that lead to distant pasts, evil tycoons, corrupt government officials, lethal curses, and her own moral qualms in order to make it out of this chase alive.

Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games. Expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travellers walk between parallel universes. The year is 2020. It’s seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commissioner in charge of the shadowy Ministry of Intertemporal Research and Intelligence–the paratime espionage agency tasked with catalyzing the Commonwealth’s great leap forward–has a problem. For years, she’s warned everyone: “The Americans are coming.” Now their drones arrive in the middle of a succession crisis, for their leader, First Man Adam, is dying of cancer, and the vultures are circling.

In another timeline, the U.S. has recruited Rita, Miriam’s own estranged daughter, to spy across timelines in order to bring down any remaining world-walkers who might threaten national security. But her handlers are keeping information from her.

Two nuclear superpowers are set on a collision course. Two increasingly desperate paratime espionage agencies are fumbling around in the dark, trying to find a solution to the first contact problem that doesn’t result in a nuclear holocaust. And two women–a mother and her long-lost, adopted-out daughter–are about to find themselves on opposite sides of the confrontation.

Regular readers of Charles Stross’s Laundry Files might have noticed Bob Howard’s absence from the events of The Nightmare Stacks, and his subsequent return from Tokyo at the start of The Delirium Brief.

Escape from Yokai Land explains what he was doing there.

Bob’s been assigned to work with the Miyamoto Group, checking the wards that lock down Japan’s warded sites–a task previously handled by his predecessor Dr. Angleton, the Eater of Souls. This mostly involves policing yokai: traditional magical beings, increasingly grown more annoying and energetic.

But then Bob’s simple trip turns into a deadly confrontation with the ultimate yokai. It’s massively powerful. It’s pink. And it says “Hello.”

Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross delivers “credible and bold SF” (Science Fiction Weekly) that continually pushes the boundaries of the genre. Glasshouse is a Kafkaesque tale in which a man, Robin, awakes in a clinic with severe memory loss. Finding himself targeted by a deadly opponent, Robin takes a calculated gamble and volunteers to be one of the subjects of an unusual study in the Glasshouse. But once there, he finds that the true terror has only begun. “One nightmarish panopticon.”-New York Times

In a starred review, Publishers Weekly calls Hugo winner Charles Stross’ novel Halting State a “brilliantly conceived techno-crime thriller.” The year is 2012, and China, India, and the United States are waging an infowar for economic domination. With innocent gamers mere pawns in the hands of electronic intelligence agencies, programmer Jack Reed is tasked with ferreting out the plot of those who would gladly trade global turmoil for personal gain. “The act of creation seems to come easily to Charles Stross . [He] is peerless at dreaming up devices that could conceivably exist in 6, 60, or 600 years.”-New York Times

The alternate timelines of Charles Stross’ Empire Games trilogy have never been so entangled than in Invisible Sun–the techno-thriller follow up to Dark State–as stakes escalate in a conflict that could spell extermination for humanity across all known timelines.

An inter-timeline coup d’etat gone awry.

A renegade British monarch on the run through the streets of Berlin.

And robotic alien invaders from a distant timeline flood through a wormhole, wreaking havoc in the USA.

Can disgraced worldwalker Rita and her intertemporal extraordaire agent of a mother neutralize the livewire contention before it’s too late?

A Macmillan Audio production from Tor Books

Not only is Charles Stross’ Iron Sunrise a “hard-science fiction masterpiece” (Library Journal), it’s also “a Hollywood thriller with a cyberpunk heart” (Entertainment Weekly). PlanetMoscow is vaporized by an unnatural star explosion, prompting those who escaped to counterattack the likely culprit-planet New Dresden of the neighboring system. But New Dresden wasn’t to blame, and as worlds go to war, an unseen enemy labors to destroy the universe itself.

Krina Alizond-114 is a bookish historian of accountancy practices and a metahuman in a universe where the last natural humans went extinct 5000 years ago. When a letter from her sister goes missing Krina embarks on a dangerous journey across galaxies and

A unique blend of espionage thrills and Lovecraftian horror, Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross’s Laundry Files continues with Quantum of Nightmares.

It’s a brave new Britain under the New Management. The avuncular Prime Minister is an ancient eldritch god of unimaginable power. Crime is plummeting as almost every offense is punishable by death. And everywhere you look, there are
people with strange powers, some of which they can control, and some, not so much.

Hyperorganized and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. Now she’s in charge of the Bigge Corporation–just in time to discover the lethal trap Rupert set for her long ago.

Wendy Deere’s transhuman abilities have gotten her through many a scrape. Now she’s gainfully employed investigating unauthorized supernatural shenanigans. She swore to herself she wouldn’t again get entangled with Eve Starkey’s
bohemian brother Imp and his crew of transhuman misfits. Yeah, right.

Mary Macandless has powers of her own. Right now she’s pretending to be a nanny in order to kidnap the children of a pair of famous, Government-authorized superheroes. These children have powers of their own, and Mary Macandless is in way over her head.

Amanda Sullivan is the HR manager of a minor grocery chain, much oppressed by her glossy blonde boss–who is cooking up an appalling, extralegal scheme literally involving human flesh.

All of these stories will come together, with world-bending results …

Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross takes listeners into the near future for this breathtaking thriller. As head of the Rule 34 Squad, Detective Inspector Liz Kavanaugh keeps a close eye on Internet activity, monitoring whether people are participating in harmless fantasies or engaging in illegal activities. When three criminal spammers are murdered, it’s up to Liz to determine how the victims were connected. If she can’t figure it out, more people will surely die. “Stross sizzles with ideas.”-Denver Post

The Hugo Award-winning author of numerous best-sellers, Charles Stross crafts tales that push the limits of the genre. In Saturn’s Children, Freya is an obsolete android concubine in a society where humans haven’t existed for hundreds of years. A rigid caste system keeps the Aristos, a vindictive group of humanoids, well in control of the lower, slave-chipped classes. So when Freya offends one particularly nasty Aristo, she’s forced to take a dangerous courier job off-planet.

Season of Skulls continues Hugo Award–winning author Charles Stross’s
Lovecraftian Laundry Files series.
Welcome to the sunlit uplands of the 21st century! Britain’s avuncular Prime
Minister is an ancient eldritch god of unimaginable power. Crime is plummeting as
almost every offense is punishable by death. And everywhere you look, there are
people with strange powers, some of which they can control, and some, not so
much.
Hyperorganized and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche
magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to
the death. At least, she has reason to hope he’s dead. But though she’s now in
charge of the Bigge Corporation, she’s not free of him yet. Through the
fecklessness of her brother Imp, combined with the intricate feudal law of a tiny
Channel Island, it would appear that unbeknownst to her, she was married to
Bigge—and that proving his death and releasing herself from his arcane bindings
will take years and cost millions.
Then an emissary of the Prime Minister arrives with an offer that she absolutely
can’t … well, you know.

Hugo Award winner Charles Stross delivers a brilliant space opera replete with groundbreaking concepts and energized by an imaginative vision of the future. In the 21st century, the perfection of faster-than-light travel and the rise of a prodigious artificial intelligence known as the Eschaton altered the course of humankind. Now, far off in the vastness of space, the technology-eschewing New Republic is besieged by an alien information plague. Earth quickly sends a battle fleet-but is it coming to the rescue, or is a sinister plot in motion?

Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross presents the next case in The Laundry Files, “a weirdly alluring blend of super-spy thriller, deadpan comic fantasy, and Lovecraftian horror” (Kirkus Reviews). Dominique O’Brien-her friends call her Mo-lives a curious double life with her husband, Bob Howard. To the average civilian, they’re boring middle-aged civil servants. But within the labyrinthian secret circles of Her Majesty’s government, they’re operatives working for the nation’s occult security service known as the Laundry, charged with defending Britain against dark supernatural forces threatening humanity. Mo’s latest assignment is assisting the police in containing an unusual outbreak: ordinary citizens suddenly imbued with extraordinary abilities of the super-powered kind. Unfortunately these people prefer playing super-pranks instead of super-heroics. The Mayor of London being levitated by a dumpy man in Trafalgar Square would normally be a source of shared amusement for Mo and Bob, but they’re currently separated because something’s come between them-something evil. An antique violin, an Erich Zann original, made of human white bone, was designed to produce music capable of slaughtering demons. Mo is the custodian of this unholy instrument. It invades her dreams and yearns for the blood of her colleagues-and her husband. And despite Mo’s proficiency as a world class violinist, it cannot be controlled.

A Hugo Award winner and best-selling author, Charles Stross combines the best elements of science fiction and fantasy. In The Atrocity Archives, a lowly computer geek working for a secret British intelligence agency gets promoted to field service after accidentally saving lives in a disaster. Now he’s faced with saving the universe using only his smarts and a disembodied hand that renders him invisible. Stross’ award-winning novella, The Concrete Jungle, is also included.

The third book (after The Family Trade and The Hidden Family) in the saga of the Merchant Princes by Charles Stross, in which Miriam gets into deadly trouble.

Miriam Beckstein has gotten in touch with her roots and they have nearly strangled her. A young, hip, business journalist in Boston, she discovered (in The Family Trade ) that her family comes from an alternate reality, that she is very well-connected, and that her family is a lot too much like the mafia for comfort. In addition, starting with the fact that women are family property and required to breed more family members with the unique talent to walk between worlds, she has tried to remain an outsider and her own woman. And start a profitable business in a third world she has discovered, outside the family reach (recounted in The Hidden Family). She fell in love with a distant relative but he’s dead, killed saving her life. There have been murders, betrayals.

Now, however, in The Clan Corporate, she may be overreaching. And if she gets caught, death or a fate worse is around the bend. There is for instance the brain-damaged son of the local king who needs a wife. But they’d never make her do that, would they?

The eighth case in Charles Stross’ Laundry Files, the Hugo Award-winning series described by Kirkus Reviews as “a weirdly alluring blend of super-spy thriller, deadpan comic fantasy, and Lovecraftian horror.” Bob Howard’s career in the Laundry, the secret British government agency dedicated to protecting the world from unspeakable horrors from beyond spacetime, has entailed high combat, brilliant hacking, ancient magic, and combat with indescribably repellent creatures of pure evil. It has also involved a wearying amount of paperwork and office politics, and his expense reports are still a mess. Now, following the invasion of Yorkshire by the Host of Air and Darkness, the Laundry’s existence has become public, and Bob is being trotted out on TV to answer pointed questions about elven asylum seekers. What neither Bob nor his managers have foreseen is that their organization has earned the attention of a horror far more terrifying than any demon: a British government looking for public services to privatize. There’s a lot of potential shareholder value in the Laundry’s “knowledge assets.” Inch by inch, Bob Howard and his managers are forced to consider the truly unthinkable: a coup against the British government itself.

A bold new fantasy, The Merchant Princes is a sweeping series from the hottest new writer in science fiction!

Miriam Beckstein is happy in her life. She’s a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine in Boston, making good money doing what she loves. When her researcher brings her iron-clad evidence of a money-laundering scheme, Miriam thinks she’s found the story of the year. But when she takes it to her editor, she’s fired on the spot and gets a death threat from the criminals she has uncovered.

Before the day is over, she’s received a locket left by the mother she never knew-the mother who was murdered when she was an infant. Within is a knotwork pattern, which has a hypnotic effect on her. Before she knows it, she’s transported herself to a parallel Earth, a world where knights on horseback chase their prey with automatic weapons, and where world-skipping assassins lurk just on the other side of reality – a world where her true family runs things.

The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between the worlds makes them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently-ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious.

Taken in by her mother’s people, she becomes the star of the story of the century-as Cinderella without a fairy godmother. As her mother’s heir, Miriam is hailed as the prodigal countess Helge Thorold-Hjorth, and feted and feasted. Caught up in schemes and plots centuries in the making, Miriam is surrounded by unlikely allies, forbidden loves, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. Her unexpected return will supersede the claims of other clan members to her mother’s fortune and power, and whoever killed her mother will be happy to see her dead, too.

Behind all this lie deeper secrets still, which threaten everyone and everything she has ever known. Patterns of deception and interlocking lies, as intricate as the knotwork between the universes. But Miriam is no one’s pawn, and is determined to conquer her new home on her own terms.

Blending creativity and humor, and the rigor and scope of a science-fiction writer on the grandest scale, Charles Stross has set a new standard for fantasy epics.

Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross is renowned for his cutting-edge science fiction. This third entry in his “edgy . spoof of Cold War spy thrillers” (Booklist) finds covert agent Bob Howard learning about a top-secret dossier that vanishes with his boss. Determined to discover the contents of this memorandum, Howard runs afoul of Russian spies, ancient demons, and apostles of a hideous cult planning to raise the Eater of Souls from the undead.

The Merchant Princes is a sweeping new series from the hottest new writer in science fiction!

The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between their world and ours make them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious.

Miriam, a hip tech journalist form Boston, discovered her alternate-world relatives with explosive results that shook three worlds. Now, as the prodigal Countess Helge Thorold-Hyorth, she finds herself ensnared in schemes and plots centuries in the making. She is surrounded by unlikely allies, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. With her modern American attitudes, she’s not sure she can fit in, or if she even wants to, but to stay alive, she really has no choice.

To avoid a slippery slope down to an unmarked grave, Miriam must build a power-base of her own. She started applying modern business practices and scientific knowledge to a trade heretofore dominated by medieval mercantilists-with unexpected consequences for three different timelines, including the quasi-Victorian one exploited by the hidden family.

Blending the creativity and humor, and the rigor and scope of science-fiction on the grandest scale, Charles Stross has set a new standard for fantasy epics.

Charles Stross is one of the big new SF writers of the 21st century, and the saga of The Merchant Princes is his most ambitious work yet.

Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross continues to make a name for himself in the sci-fi genre. The Jennifer Morgue is an extension of Stross’ award-winning novella The Concrete Jungle. Bob Howard is a special operative for the British agency called The Laundry, and his task is to stop a rogue billionaire from using an artifact, known as Gravedust, with the power to reanimate the dead. The U.S. Black Agency sends the lethal Ramona Random to aid Bob’s mission, but she seems to have a different agenda.

The ninth case in Stross’ Hugo-winning Laundry Files, described by Kirkus as “a weirdly alluring blend of super-spy thriller, deadpan comic fantasy, and Lovecraftian horror.” The Lovecraftian Singularity has descended on the world, beginning an exciting new story arc in the Laundry Files series! The arrival of vast, alien, inhuman intelligences reshaped the landscape for human affairs across the world, and the United Kingdom is no exception. Things have changed in Britain since the dread elder god Nyarlathotep ascended to the rank of Prime Minister. Mhari Murphy, recently elevated to the House of Lords and head of the Lords Select Committee on Sanguinary Affairs (think vampires), finds herself in direct consultation with the creeping chaos, who directs her to lead a team of disgraced Laundry personnel into the dark heart of America. It seems the Creeping Chaos is concerned about foreign relations. A thousand-mile-wild storm system has blanketed the midwest, and the President is nowhere to be found. In fact, for reasons unknown the people of America are forgetting that the executive branch ever existed. The government has been infiltrated by the shadowy Black Chamber, and the Pentagon and NASA have been refocused on the problem of summoning Cthulhu. Somewhere, the Secret Service battle to stay awake, to remind the President who he is, and to stay one step ahead of the vampiric dragnet that’s searching for him.

The story of the worldwalkers just got stranger in Charles Stross’s The Merchants’ War. More worlds, more surprises. And there’s a war going on …

Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in The Family Trade and The Hidden Family that her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a family trap in The Clan Corporate and betrothed to a brain-damaged prince, and then all hell broke loose.

Now, in The Merchants’ War, Miriam has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and their opponents. There is a nasty shooting war going on in the Gruinmarkt world of the Clan, and we know something that Miriam does not; something that she’s really going to hate–if she lives long enough to find out.

The Laundry Files’ “fast-paced blend of espionage thrills, mundane office comedy and Lovecraftian horror” (SFX) continues as Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross assigns a day trader to a permanent position on the night shift… After stumbling upon the algorithm that turned him and his fellow merchant bankers into vampires, Alex Schwartz was drafted by The Laundry, Britain’s secret counter-occult agency that’s humanity’s first line of defense against the forces of darkness. Dependent on his new employers for his continued existence-as Alex has no stomach for predatory bloodsucking-he has little choice but to accept his new role as an operative-in-training. Dispatched to Leeds, Alex’s first assignment is to help assess the costs of renovating a 1950s Cold War bunker into The Laundry’s new headquarters. Unfortunately, Leeds is Alex’s hometown, and the thought of breaking the news to his parents that he’s left banking for civil service, while hiding his undead condition, is causing more anxiety than learning how to live as a vampire secret agent preparing to confront multiple apocalypses. Alex’s only saving grace is Cassie Brewer, a drama student appearing in the local Goth Festival who is inexplicably attracted to him despite his awkward personality and massive amounts of sunblock. But Cassie has secrets of her own-secrets that make Alex’s night life behaviors seem positively normal…

Things are going badly for the Clan in this new SF novel of the Merchant Princes, the immensely popular series by Charles Stross. Locked in a vicious civil war for control over the kingdom of Niejwein, their army is bottled up inside a fortress under siege in two parallel universes at once. Duke Angbard, the Clan’s leader, has been laid low by a stroke: plotters are already conspiring in readiness for the deadly dance to come.

Miriam, rescued from a tight spot in New Britain, finds the hopes of the young, progressive faction focused on her. But do they want her as a leader or a figurehead? She soon finds herself thrown into a desperate struggle for power. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the Clan, researchers working for the US government have achieved a technological breakthrough. The War on Terror is about to go transdimensional.

As a newly appointed junior manager within the Laundry – the clandestine organization responsible for protecting Britain against supernatural threats – Bob Howard is expected to show some initiative to help the agency battle the forces of darkness. But shining a light on things best left in the shadows is the last thing Bob wants to do – especially when those shadows hide an occult parasite spreading a deadly virus. Traders employed by a merchant bank in London are showing signs of infection – an array of unusual symptoms such as superstrength and -speed, an uncanny talent for mind control, an extreme allergic reaction to sunlight, and an unquenchable thirst for blood. While his department is tangled up in bureaucratic red tape (and Buffy reruns), debating how to stop the rash of vampirism, Bob digs deeper into the bank’s history – only to uncover a bloodcurdling conspiracy between men and monsters….

A dissident faction of the Clan, the alternate universe group of families that has traded covertly with our world for a century or more, have carried nuclear devices between the worlds and exploded them in Washington, DC, killing the President of the United States. Now they will exterminate the rest of the Clan and keep Miriam alive only long enough to bear her child, the heir to the throne of their land in the Gruinmarkt world.

The worst and deepest secret is now revealed: behind the horrifying plot is a faction of the US government itself, preparing for a political takeover in the aftermath of disaster. There is no safe place for Miriam and her Clan except, perhaps, in the third alternate world, New Britain–which has just had a revolution and a nuclear incident of its own.

Charles Stross’s Merchant Princes series reaches a spectacular climax in this sixth volume. Praised by Nobel laureate Paul Krugman as “great fun,” this is state of the art, cutting edge SF grown out of a fantastic premise.

In this collection of short stories, novelist Stross moves the U.S.-U.S.S.R. conflict onto a massive disk in another galaxy in “Missile Gap,” offers a spam-filter solution to the Fermi paradox in “MAXOS,” suggests clever bargains with the devil in a newly frozen Scotland in “Snowball’s Chance,” and sets the stage for appearances by Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould in “The Colder War.”