Missile Gap

[balder]

Current Rob's Plug is Missile Gap, a free novella by Charles Stross. I found it creepy as hell and equally awesome. Discuss!

[DevilDan]

By chapter two I was intrigued; by chapter four I felt chills*. I was quite hooked after that. Chapter 10 and we're back to chills. The rest is a not-unexpected denouement. Lovely piece of straightforward, traditional science fiction with well-crafted parallel narratives.

*The phrase "MacNamara administration" might've had something to do with that.

[balder]

*The phrase "MacNamara administration" might've had something to do with that.

Oh I know, right? Stross played some wicked, wicked games in there.

[DevilDan]

Some parts of the story are reminiscent of George R. R. Martin's Sandkings, a very memorable story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandkings_(novelette)

[SteveMB]

Oh I know, right? Stross played some wicked, wicked games in there.

"Does a termite mound negotiate with a nuclear superpower?"

Another angle to the story that gave me a chill when I realized it was

Spoiler: show

the most obvious reasons for putting the disks so close to a blue supergiant was to insure that they get scrubbed by the supernova fairly soon, cosmically speaking.

[DevilDan]

Excellent thinking on the reason behind the location. I just thought of it as unattractive real estate, as it were.

[KiltedNinja]

Hey, this is really good. Started reading it, and have just noticed that I've been reading it for about 2 hours now.. ..luckily my boss isn't in the office today

Some parts of the story are reminiscent of George R. R. Martin's Sandkings, a very memorable story.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandkings_(novelette)

Yeah, those mock-termites.. Sandkings was pretty frickin good. I never read the story though, just watched it when it was on Outer Limits - (I always remember the part where the little guys make the image of the dude's face.. "I'm like a god.." (or words to that effect) - very cool.)

So yeah, this dude has a really nice style. It's got that creepy "wtf...." feeling that crawls from your toes and tries to be stealthy while making every single hair on your body stand up. *shudder* - awesome.

Plus, I think I have a couple of new signature-worthy quotes (Wrapped in a spoiler, even though it's probably not necessary..)

Spoiler: show

"A toast! To making good communists out of little purple lizard-bastards with blowpipes who shoot political officers in the arse!"

And; "We’ve found the new world and the new world is just like the old world, except it glows in the dark."

Edit : Just finished reading it, tis very good. I think I'm gonna have to read it again though - seems to me like there were a few occasions where I didn't quite get exactly what was going on, but decided to keep going and let it happen. A second read should sort that out though.

Cheers for the head's up mr Balder man

[Whet Lunkhoff]

It was a bit of a wake-up to realise that

Spoiler: show

humanity, despite its apparent aptitude for technology and warfare, was of very little importance and couldn't even hope to keep up with the insectoid races.

Stross is a great writer, just read Halting State, it's about an MMORPG that gets robbed.

There's more of his stuff online, including A Colder War:

http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/stories/colderwar.htm

He's even released one of his novels, Accelerando, under a Creative Commons license:

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

Lots of stuff:

http://www.freesfonline.de/authors/Charles_Stross.html

[SteveMB]

Stross has a story collection "Wireless" with this story and several others ("Palimpsest" in particular ought to appeal to you if you liked this one).