Charles Stross Knihy

The father of modern computer science, Alan Turing paves the way for esoteric mathematical computations that, when used by Nazi Germany

His most ambitious novel to date, ACCELERANDO is a multi-generational saga following a brilliant clan of 21st-century posthumans. The year is some time between 2010 and 2015. The recession has ended, but populations are ageing and the rate of tech change is accelerating dizzyingly. Manfred makes his living from spreading ideas around, putting people in touch with one another and leaving a spray of technologies in his wake. He lives at the cutting edge of intelligence amplification technology, but even Manfred can take on too much. And when his pet robot cat picks up some interesting information from the SETI data, his world - and the world of his descendants - is turned on its head.

The fifth novel in the continuing saga of the Merchant Princes—SF adventure at its finest!

Miriam seeks refuge from the machinations of both the Clan and their opponents by escaping to yet another world, only to discover that there is a nasty war going on in the Gruinmarkt world of the Clan and that unexpected perils await her.

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 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 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. Miriam, a hip tech journalist from Boston, discovered her alternate-world relatives with explosive results that shook the worlds. Now, as the prodigal Countess Helge Thorold-Hjorth, 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 . . . Praise for The Family Trade: 'Quirky, original and entertaining. . . could be The Godfather of all fantasy novels' Kevin J. Anderson 'Light, loaded with tongue-in-cheek humour and deftly plotted' Guardian

Boston reporter Miriam Beckstein receives a locket left by the mother she never knew, which transports her to a parallel Earth--a world where her true family runs things.

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.

Brilliantly disturbing and funny at the same time Ben Aaronovitch, author of RIVERS OF LONDON

In The Atrocity Archive, English hacker and government agent Bob Howard, seconded to field-work with no training, tangles with a Nazi death-cult with access to parallel dimensions. In The Jennifer Morgue, a billionaire businessman, obsessed with a certain series of spy novels and movies, has concocted a fiendish scheme to raise a cyclopean entity from the ocean floor, and only Bob--in an ill-fitting tuxedo and a gimmicked econobox car--can stop him. Also includes the novellas "The Concrete Jungle" (a Hugo winner) and "Pimpf," along with an introduction by Ken MacLeod, afterwords by the author, and an extensive glossary of spy terms.