Charles Stross

I enjoyed “Halting State” and “Rule 34” by Charles Stross. Believable near-future SciFi and explicitly exploring social media, augmented reality, 3D printing, distributed consensus algorithms, dark nets and similar concepts in a geopolitically informed way. What I like about Stross is that the near-future world he paints is full of concepts which you never thought of but seem stunningly plausible “in hindsight”. Stuff like “you hail a bus by bidding a certain amount of money on your mobile app to get to your destination. How fast you’ll get to your destination is then based on how much the other passengers bid and from the route the algorithm derives from that.” Tickles my nerd bone to no end. Aside from that, his earlier work “Accelerando”, while already slightly dated is still an excellent read. Over a thousand pages, starts in the near-future and moves through the technological singularity and out the other side. Many consider this to be Stross’ seminal work.


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