His popular Merchant Princes series is great entertainment, space opera with all the lights turned on but Stross’s strengths also lie in breaking boundaries and his hard science SF novels demonstrate his talent for ideas and innovative concepts. WIRELESS is a collection of outstanding short stories, a form that eminently suits SF, and is a veritable treasure trove of innovative gems that challenge the imagination.
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A well structured, funny and inventive novel. The human race is extinct and has left behind robots who were created purely to pleasure and please their human masters. This leads to some rather frustrated robots left to amuse themselves by travelling through the galaxy to ease their boredom. Of course there is much more to this funny and intelligent novel than just that but you’ll have to read it to find out more.
Freya Nakamachi-47 has some major existential issues. She's the perfect concubine, designed to please her human masters - hardwired to become aroused at the mere sight of a human male. There's just one problem: she came off the production line a year after the human species went extinct. Whatever else she may be, Freya Nakamachi-47 is gloriously obsolete. What’s more, the rigid social hierarchy that has risen in the 200 years since the last human died, places beings such as Freya very near the bottom. So when she has a run-in on Venus with a murderous aristocrat, she needs passage off-world in a hurry - and can't be too fussy about how she pays her way.
But if Venus was a frying pan, Mercury is the fire - and soon she's going to be running for her life. Because the job she's taken as a courier has drawn her to the attention of powerful and dangerous people, and they don't just want the package she's carrying. They want her soul …
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.
