by Charles Stross. Here's a review of it I posted on Amazon.It's the worlds he creates. Layered, fascinating worlds. In stories like Missile Gap, A Colder War and Palimpsest, he creates strangely familiar yet utterly cold and different realities from our own, worlds so textured I wanted to spend more time exploring them. This was my first Stross book and it's a mixed bag. I loved the world-building stories mentioned above, but felt left out of some others due to my utter lack of knowledge of Lovecraft. And one story, Trunk and Disorderly, never pulled me in at all - I finally just skipped over it. Stross plays with some wonderful recurring themes - cold war angst, "meta" character names, slide presentations and terraforming - throughout the collection that kept me engaged and, sometimes, smiling. Other conventions, such as the Lovecraftian nature undergiding some of the stories, completely put me off. And his favorite words seem to be caul and lour. Overall, I'd recommend this book. It's, as the cover blurb brags, "a lively collection" and makes me want to seek out more of his work. Though I'll definitely be skipping the "laundry" novels, if the story here is any indication of their general nature. Just not my cup of tea.
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