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Charles Stross is a British SF writer, born in Leeds, England, and living in Edinburgh, Scotland. He has worked as a tech writer, a programmer, a journalist, and a pharmacist; he holds degrees in Pharmacy and in Computer Science. He has won two Hugo Awards for his short fiction, and his work has been extensively praised by, among others, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman.

Stross is sometimes regarded as being part of a new generation of British science fiction writers who use the devices of "space opera" and "hard SF" to innovative new ends; others of this cohort include Alastair Reynolds, Ken MacLeod, Peter Hamilton, Liz Williams, and Richard Morgan. His inspirations and influences include Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and Iain M. Banks, among other cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk writers, as well as older figures such as H. P. Lovecraft, Roger Zelazny, and Robert A. Heinlein.

Among Stross’s more recent novels are The Revolution Business and The Trade of Queens (in his “Merchant Princes” series), The Apocalypse Codex (part of the “Laundry” series of novels and stories), Rule 34, and, with Cory Doctorow, The Rapture of the Nerds.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/