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Blood-sucking bankers! Sometimes you think that Charles Stross is just too damn clever for his own good, too hip and caught up in the hyper-reality of the superficial technology and buzz-word obsessed world we live in, but the truth is that what he writes about is relevant and bang up-to-date. There's a recognition that things tend to go badly wrong when the real world doesn't quite manage to keep up-to-date with the speed of change in the new, and not just badly wrong, but hilariously wrong. The Rhesus Chart , the latest Laundry Files novel (no previous reading required) is an outstanding example of just how funny and clever this writer can be. Stross's Laundry novels are a satire of the handling of regulations and procedures that have to be navigated when a secret department set up to protect the world from aliens, zombies, demons and otherworld threats run up against government bureaucracy, business processes, tech-speak and good old-fashioned British character traits. I...

A collection of the author’s short stories, there’s nothing if not plenty of variety and imagination in the collection, which is reflective of Stross’s range in his varied science-fiction novels and series. If there’s any commonality it’s in the longer stories allow the author more room to explore Cold War themes in a futuristic context, but if there’s one thing that unites them it is the uniqueness of the imagination at play, the stories fresh, humorous, unpredictable, often surprising.

Halting State has an interesting and topical subject for a science fiction novel - an interactive web-game has been hacked by an unknown organisation who have stolen all of virtual weapons and spells from their holding bank. Although the "bank robbery" is virtual, it nevertheless has serious repercussions for the product and the company who have developed it, since it is evidently going to affect sales of the game. It's a brilliant idea and the story flies along with plenty of incident and invention, Stross having a great deal of fun with gaming culture and those wrapped up in its worlds, while realising at the same time that it is a serious business.  The writing is quite dazzling, sparkling with sarcasm and humour (although bafflingly and for no good reason it is rather annoyingly all written in second-person - "you go here, and you do this" etc.), but it does become a bit heavy with tech-speak and eventually start playing out like a virtual game itself.  It...