The first novel in Hugo Award-winning author Charles Stross's witty Laundry Files seriesBob Howard is a low-level techie working for a super-secret government agency. While his colleagues are out saving the world, Bob's under a desk restoring lost data. His world was dull and safe—but then he went and got Noticed.Now, Bob is up to his neck in spycraft, parallel universes, dimension-hopping terrorists, monstrous elder gods and the end of the world. Only one ...

Introduced to readers in the novels The Atrocity Archive and The Jennifer Morgue, the Laundry is a secret British government agency charged with preventing dark interdimensional entities from destroying the human race. Now, in "Overtime," the Laundry is on a skeleton staff for Christmas—leaving one bureaucrat to be all that stands between the world and annihilation by the Thing That Comes Down Chimneys. Written especially for Tor.com's holiday season, Charles Stross's nov...

Charles Stross's "Equoid" is a dark fantasy tale from the Hugo-winning author of Rule 34, Halting State, The Atrocity Archives, and many others.The "Laundry" is Britain's super-secret agency devoted to protecting the realm from the supernatural horrors that menace it. Now Bob Howard, Laundry agent, must travel to the quiet English countryside to deal with an outbreak of one of the worst horrors imaginable. For, as it turns out, unicorns a...

Sometime in the twenty-third century, humanity went extinct, leaving only androids behind to fulfill humanity’s dreams. And, having learned well from their long-dead masters, they’ve established a hierarchical society—one with humanoid aristo rulers at the top and slave-chipped workers at the bottom, performing the lowly tasks all androids were originally created to do.Designed as a concubine for a species that hasn’t existed for two hundred years, femmebot Freya Nakamichi-47—one o...

In a technologically suppressed future, information demands to be free in the debut novel from Hugo Award-winning author Charlie Stross.In the twenty-first century, life as we know it changed. Faster-than-light travel was perfected, and the Eschaton, a superhuman artificial intelligence, was born. Four hundred years later, the far-flung colonies that arose as a result of these events—scattered over three thousand years of time and a thousand parsecs of space—are be...

“Halting State [is] a near-future story that is at once over-the-top and compellingly believable.” – Vernor Vinge, author of Rainbows EndIn the year 2018, Sergeant Sue Smith of the Edinburgh constabulary is called in on a special case. A daring bank robbery has taken place at Hayek Associates—a dot-com start-up company that’s just floated onto the London stock exchange. But this crime may be a bit beyond Smith’s expertise.The prime suspect...

Charles Stross builds a new series with Empire Games, expanding on the world he created in the Family Trade series, a new generation of paratime travellers walk between parallel universes.The year is 2020. It's seventeen years since the Revolution overthrew the last king of the New British Empire, and the newly-reconstituted North American Commonwealth is developing rapidly, on course to defeat the French and bring democracy to a troubled world. But Miriam Burgeson, commis...

In Charles Stross's novel The Atrocity Archive and its sequels, the "Laundry" is a secret British agency responsible for keeping dark interdimensional entitities from destroying the cosmos and, not incidentally, the human race. The battles with creatures from beyond time are dangerous; however, it's the subsequent bureaucratic paperwork that actually breaks men's souls. Now, in "Down on the Farm," Laundry veteran Bob Howard must investigate strange doings at another obscure, moth-...

From the author of Rule 34 and Halting State, a tale of deception, engineering, and the most unlikely rocket propulsion technology imaginable."A Tall Tail" by award-winning science fiction author Charles Stross is a Tor.com Original set in a compelling alternative universe.At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

The year is AD 7000. The human species is extinct—for the fourth time—due to its fragile nature.Krina Alizond-114 is metahuman, descended from the robots that once served humanity. She’s on a journey to the water-world of Shin-Tethys to find her sister Ana. But her trip is interrupted when pirates capture her ship. Their leader, the enigmatic Count Rudi, suspects that there’s more to Krina’s search than meets the eye.He’s correct: Krina and Ana each possess half of the fabl...

“Stross’s work offers a potent reminder of why short stories used to be the preferred delivery method for science fiction.” – The A.V. ClubThis selection of speculative fiction runs the gamut—from “Palimpsest,” a decidedly nontraditional time-travel novella, to “Dawn on the Farm,” an adventure of hapless secret agent Bob Howard (star of the Laundry novels: The Atrocity Archives, The Jennifer Morgue, and The Fuller Memorandum). Also includ...

A bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, The Merchant Princes is a sweeping new series from the hottest new writer in science fiction!Miriam Beckstein is happy in her life. She's a successful reporter for a hi-tech magazine in Boston, making good money doing what she loves. When her researcher brings her iron-clad evidence of a money-laundering scheme, Miriam thinks she's found the story of the year. But when she takes it to her editor, she's fired on...