Four great sci-fi books you might not have read

My favorite sci-fi author nobody talks about is probably Charles Stross, Who is... interesting. Stross writes science fiction focused on technology, but from an insider's perspective and with a distinctly bizarre twist of his own. His science fantasy series, The Merchant Princes, explores a similar sort of concept to Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter's The Long Earth: infinite parallel worlds. But in this setting, they're inhabited by numerous societies at different levels of development, and only a small subset of people can jump between them... taking whatever they're carrying. Naturally, anyone who can jump between worlds has tremendous power: Drugs can be sent through a world where there's no DEA, they can charge through the nose for modern medicine in a feudal world, or similarly exorbitant rates to offer more primitive worlds the power of FedEx shipping. His novels Rule 34 and Halting State are about cybercrime in the near future. Other books of his take on themes of the singularity and transhumanism, like Accelerando, a dark family saga set during the development of the singularity told from the perspective of a robot cat, and Rapture of the Nerds, a decidedly surrealist work written in collaboration with fellow sci-fi author and digital rights activist Cory Doctorow.

But none of these are my favorite things he's done. That would be The Laundry Files.

The Laundry Files is series rooted in a few key observations. 1) Clarke's Third Law isn't and hasn't been theory for a very long time: Technology is magic, right now, and computing has more than its fair share of similarities to wizardry. 2) The natural fit for computing in magic is contract magic, which, as it involves making contracts with some kinds of magical entities, is inherently spooky, and a good fit for horror. 3) If there were, hypothetically, top secret government organization dedicated to occult intelligence and keeping knowledge of the occult secret, working for it would probably involve a lot of boring paperwork and annoying bureaucracy. Less Ian Flemming, more John Le Carre.

Thus was born The Laundry Files, an unholy mashup of Len Deighton, Neil Stephenson, and H.P. Lovecraft (and that's in the author's own words). The many-angled ones are at the bottom of Sierpinski triangle, Cthulhu is at the other end of your internet connection, and a group of underpaid civil servants are all that stands between England and tentacled monstrosities from another dimension. The novels, at least early on, follow Bob Oliver Francis Howard (a pseudonym of his own choosing: He wasn't allowed to take the codename ONFGNEQ(rot13) OPERATOR...), former network administrator, current Laundry field agent, and card-carrying geek. On of the many eventual strengths of the series is a huge and diverse cast that's strong enough to carry novels on their own: there are an increasing number of Laundry Files books where Bob's not even the protagonist at all. But from the start the series has a well-defined personality, with the grimy mundane boredom of working in IT written by someone who very much seems to have lived it: this isn't the kind of story that William Gibson, who more used computers for flavoring, would tell, because so much of it is rooted in the experience of actual computing and nightmarish office work. Oh, and equally boring spy work. The first novel even has a fairly clear explanation of the mechanics of Laundryverse "magic" in a short paragraph that is easily missable if you're not up on stuff (TL;DR: P=NP, Church-Turing is false, and solving the right equation can send information through the multiverse to powerful entities who will happily punch a hole in reality).

...Which is sort of an issue with the first Laundry novel (which is really a novel and an extra novella...). It's a little too technical for its own good, and might convince you that need to know all the technical and cultural references to get into the series. You emphatically don't. That's the rich sugary coating atop the fundamental storytelling, and you don't need any of it at all to enjoy the spy thriller, office comedy, or cosmic horror elements.

Just... read it. It's good.