Recently read: Wireless, by Charles Stross
Like Neal Stephenson, Stross is a much better novelist than a short story writer. Whereas his novels tend toward an exuberance leavened by a sensible amount of cynical humor, in his short fiction Stross has a much greater tendency to indulge a penchant for aggressive weirdness, structural determinism and, worst of all, polemicism. All of those tendencies are present in this collection, which is characteristically eclectic and of highly variable quality (to the point where “Unwirer” is basically unreadable, though that presumably has more to do with Cory Doctorow’s co-authorship). As with most of his short story collections, Stross’s sheer creativity makes this one worth reading, but it’s definitely not on the level of most of his novels.
