While waiting for the next installments of The Laundry and The Traders from Stross, let’s catching up on some old stuff
Equoid (2013) by Charles Stross
This novelette of is from the classic Laundry period, before things went so very, very pear shaped. Bob Howard is dispatched out in the country (to “Ruralshire” as he snarks), to deal with a potential outbreak.
Unicorns? Really? Is his boss pulling his leg? The case file is absurd, so what’s going on?
Unfortunately, it’s a pretty dangerous situation, and the unicorn manure definitely hits the fan. Bad stuff happens, and Bob and the hard boys of the military (very) special forces of SAS 21 (formerly The Artists Rifles) have their hands full.
As always, Bob’s report of these dire events is caustic and hilarious.
Toast (2002) by Charles Stross
Going even farther back, this book is a collection of short stories from the 90s. The title refers to just how fast change, especially technological change, eats up and ruins the futures created in science fiction. The theme is that the futures imagined here mostly didn’t happen, and in some cases are laughably off target.
In short, the stuff he creates is toast, sometimes a lot sooner than expected.
Indeed, a lot of these stories seem quite dated, to the point that you have to have gray hair to even know what they heck he is talking about. (It’s frightening to realize that college students today were born after the great Y2K scare.)
This is even more poignant, with our additional twenty years perspective.
But Stross is good, so good that even wild misses are interesting and highly readable.
Possibly the most dated aspect of this collection is the strange pre-9/11, pre-monopoly vibes. Stross is deeply cynical about institutions and power, and expresses his cyberpunk roots in 90’s style pseudo-libertarianism empitomized by the brainless slogan, “Information wants to be free”. (How can information “want” anything?) Yet, this cynicism is imbued with naïve pre-Facebook/Google/Apple ideas about the invincibility (and, indeed, morality) of free software and freely networking nerds.
In the ensuing decades, we have seen the surveillance state grow ever more capable everywhere. For that matter, we have seen the Internet evolve to be a mass surveillance system driven by advertising.
We have also seen non-state actors weaponize the Internet. In the age of mass identity theft, “hacker” is no longer an unambiguously positive cultural icon. And the motto “information wants to be free” would be a lot more meaningful if the information weren’t mostly fake and intended to enslave.
The things Stross wrote about in the 90s have come true, but not necessarily in the ways he, or any of us, thought.
Wasn’t the cyber world was so much more fun when it was just us kids fooling around in the basement!
And that’s the problem. Who wants to have to be a grown up, to pay attention to innocent bystanders and unintended consequences?
But never mind that. Relax and enjoy some of Stross’s wonderful (and scary) alternative worlds.
- Charles Stross, Equoid, Burton, MI, Subterranian Press, 2013.
- Charles Stross, Toast and other rusted futures, Holicong, PA, Wildside Press, 2002.
Sunday Book Reviews
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