Charles Stross is a computer programmer and writer living in Edinburgh, Scotland. On his webpage, he describes his salient characteristics in a compact form of Geek code:

GTW/CS/L/MD d-- s:+ a? C++++$ UL++++$ UC++$ US+++$ P++++$ L+++$ E--- W+++$ N+++ o+ K+++ !w--- O- M+ V- PS+++ PE Y++ PGP+ !t 5? X-- !R(+++) tv-- b+++ DI++++/++ !D G+ e+++ h++/-/--- r++ z?

He is also a mind-bogglingly talented science fiction and fantasy author. He is currently in the midst of publishing a series of nine tales in Asimov's magazine. Collectively titled Accelerando, these stories chart humanity's coming transhuman evolution across the decades of the 21st Century.

Debuting in the summer of 2001 with "Lobsters," his stories begin in the early 21st Century, at a time when Stross says "extropianism collides with the open source movement." "Lobsters" (nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novelette) introduces us to the permanently wired Manfred Macx, a youthful, self-assured (and self-doubting) cultural purveyor, the world's first "Venture Altruist," out to prove the validity of Win-Win synergistic scenarios while engaging in exotic drugs and sexual experimentation against a near future socio-political backdrop. Fleeing his dominatrix ex-wife, shifting world economies, trading his image on the "reputations market," and inventing extropianistic technologies are all in a day's work. Manfred features in the first three tales, which then skip a generation to pick the story up with his daughter, Amber, for the next trilogy.

While Accelerando makes use of staple cyberpunk concepts like uploads, A.I., and singularities, Stross employs them with a startlingly sharp level of insight into current geo-political trends, and his words are informed by a deeply-embedded knowledge of the current technological landscape. The result is not so much another iteration of post-cyberpunk as it is a brand new and unique speculative voice, charting new territories far in advance of any other writer of hard SF. Stross' talents have already been lauded loudly by the likes of Gardner Dozois and Michael Swanwick, and it is my personal opinion that he will swiftly emerge as one of the "important" writers of the present decade.

Lou Anders: A bio run in a recent Asimov's points out that you are not a "new Scottish writer," as sometimes described. Well, then, to begin: If not a "new Scottish writer," what are you?

Charles Stross: I'm a bit of an anomaly.

Firstly, I live in Edinburgh, Scotland, but I'm not from Scotland—I was born in Leeds, Yorkshire, have lived in a variety of parts of the UK, and just happen to have settled in Edinburgh for a while. These days there seem to be two cultures—people who stay where their roots are, and those who move around. I'm part of the second.

(If you go back further, to my great-grandparents' generation, you get on the one hand a bunch of Jewish wool merchants who roved all over Eastern Europe but settled briefly in Poland—and on the other side, well, I don't know: my family tended to marry late, and all but one of my grandparents died before I was born. Maybe it's no surprise that I feel a little rootless.)

As for "new" ... I sold my first short story in 1987, to Interzone. From 1987 to 1995 I think I probably sold upwards of a hundred thousand words of short fiction. However, I only broke the surface in the US with my first sale to Asimov's in 2001. Which is why everybody seems to think I'm a new writer.

LA: You've been compared to Bruce Sterling. How do you feel about the comparison and how do you contrast your work with his?

CS: I'm flattered—I'm a great fan of Bruce's work—but I'd like to think I'm a bit different from him. The comparison seems to be coming from those people who've read the Asimov's stories. You'd get a broader picture of what I write from the short story collection Toast (Cosmos Books, out now, available from Amazon.com and elsewhere), my forthcoming novel Festival of Fools, and so on.

Without wanting to pin myself down too tightly, I think Bruce's work is informed by his other activities—he's a damn fine journalist, with a deep and abiding interest in the way environmental changes lead to cultural change in human societies. I'm simply not in that field, at least not to the same extent.

Back when I was young (in the early eighties), a couple of silly career choices led me into some rather strange head-space; the ideas that you need a science degree to write science fiction, and that maybe Neuromancer was an aspirational future, were a lot more appealing at eighteen than at thirty-seven. I outlived my mistakes, but they left me some interesting perspectives on the nature of personal change. In particular, I've been privileged to live and work for most of a decade inside an industry that really did seem as if it was slouching towards a singularity, with exponential change and an outlook that said 15% growth per year is stasis. I think I'm still assimilating some of those implications—and also the realization that core human personality types persist even if you change the environment so far that they're hopelessly ill-adapted.

LA: So how did you come up with the character of Manfred Macx? How soon after envisioning him did you come up with the 9-part story arc of Accelerando?

CS: I wrote "Lobsters" in September 1999 or thereabouts. At the time, I was (a) writing the open source column in Computer Shopper (Brit magazine of that name, tends to run challenging editorial matter along with more or less the same recipe as the Ziff-Davis Computer Shopper), and (b) being senior programmer for a dot-com startup called Datacash. Datacash processes credit card payments via the British credit card system; at one point about 30% of the ecommerce transactions in the UK were flowing through the servers I'd written. Which had a psychotherapist wired into the public interface because I felt I needed the debugging more than the program did. By September my to-do list was eight years deep, Y2K was sneaking up on us, the company was preparing to go public, and I was heading for a nervous breakdown.

(I avoided the nervous breakdown by writing "Lobsters" and quitting to go freelance. The company went public and promptly hit the collapsing bubble—but they're still going and actually profitable. And I got shafted over stock options, as is often the case. But that's someone else's story—probably Douglas Coupland's.)

When you're making a revolution in cyberspace, things look rather different from the way the 1980s cyberpunks wrote it. So after doing "Lobsters," which obviously wasn't the entire story, I thought, "Hang on, why not do cyberpunk again? Only this time, do it the way it really was, with a Vingean singularity thrown in?" Hence the sequence of stories I'm trying to write around Manfred and his posthuman descendants.

(The C*punk tropes are either cliches or reality these days. I mean, when you've led a bunch of six developers trying to defect from one corporation to another ...)

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