Wireless By Charles Stross

Wireless is a short story collection by Charles Stross, with the cover having the subtitle “The Essential Collection”. I’ve found that I’ve really liked just over half of Stross’s novels that I’ve read, whilst the (just under) other half I feel remarkably indifferent about. I haven’t read any of The Merchant Prince series, but read all but Iron Sunrise of his other novels.

So, which side does Wireless fall?

I’ll review each story in turn.

Missile Gap is an alternative history Cold War story with a bit of twist and more Science Fiction than your average tweaked timeline story. The problem I have with historical stories is that history is not one of my strongest subjects (I dropped it as school as soon as I could!) and hence I continually feel that I’m missing the point/joke/clever twist. The story’s extra dollop of SF kept me interested for a while, but eventually I tired of waiting for the story to grab me. I’m sure if you analyse it it’s clever, and there are some classic SF references, but in the end I just didn’t care.

Rogue Farm is weirder than what I’ve come to associate with Stross. It’s the story of a couple defending their real farm against the amorphous blob like “Farms” that are trying to reach for the stars. After the Cold War story it was nice to have some warmer characters, and overall the story was okay, but a little forgettable. One of those stories that you read quickly, think about for a few minutes and then forget.

A Colder War is a proto Laundry story, think (the real) Cold War with Cthulhu.It’s a bit bleak and felt almost bureaucratic in tone. I didn’t like it much at all, nothing grabbed me and I was relieved to finish it.

Maxos is a quick story (might even be flash fiction length), with a quick and funny point. Short, enjoyable but nothing more.

Down On The Farm is a Laundry story, starring Bob Howard. Laundry fans will rejoice. However I’m beginning to tire of The Laundry. I really enjoyed The Attrocity Archives, but felt The Jennifer Morgue was just competent. None of the other stories in the Laundry-verse have appealed to me much, I feel it’s a one joke setting and I know the joke now. So we get Bob Howard in another nasty magical/maths situation and we get to watch him wriggle out.

Unwirer was co-written by Cory Doctorow and is my favourite story in the collection. It’s set in a USA where internet usage is illegal and “rogue” elements try to wire up point-to-point wireless networks to provide people with net access. I didn’t realise it was alternative history until I was into the story a little way. There’s a likeable hero, doing something worthwhile, and I found the story pulled me along whilst making me care about the characters.

Snowball’s Chance is a variation on the old Devil meets a person story, except this time the person is Scottish and you have to read their dialogue pretending you’re Billy Connolly (unless you’re actually Scottish I presume). Nothing appealed to me about this story, it felt like a long joke that I didn’t find funny.

Trunk And Disorderly is a SF tribute to Jeeves and Wooster, with robots and cyborgs and empires. Much of it’s success depends on whether you find it funny. I didn’t. There’s a reasonable action plot buried amidst the innuendos but the setting and characters put me off almost immediately. In the comments about the story Stross says that it ended up as a trial run for Saturn’s Children. I think Saturn’s Children is better, and I wasn’t amazed by that.

Palimpset is a clever story about a time agent, a member of the Stasis who look to preserve the future of the planet. It manages the difficult trick of combining a personable hero and story with a super long view of Earth and humanity. Very clever, intriguing and aiming for, but not quite reaching, for Primer levels of time travelling mind messing.

It’s interesting to note that a lot of my descriptions talk about how I felt when reading the story. Undoubtedly there are some interesting intellectual exercises in these stories, and maybe at another time I may have enjoyed that, however right now I needed something more emotional to grab me and that seemed to be lacking from many of these stories.

And in fact, if I felt like an intellectual exercise, I should read Accelerando again. Which may be the heart of the problem for me with Stross’s work: the first story I read of his was Lobster, followed by the rest of Accelerando. And whilst Accelerando is not the greatest novel it’s a quite amazing set of short stories. Something that will take a lot of topping.

In the end Wireless feels less like an essential collection and more like a diverse collection of stories trying to show that Stross can write more that just Singularity stories. Odds and ends even.

Instead I’d recommend reading some of Stross’s other work: Accelerando, Glasshouse or Halting State, all of which I thought were great.