Author Biography and Bibliography

Charles Stross was born in Leeds, England, in 1964. He studied in London and Bradford, gaining degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has worked in a variety of jobs, including pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance computer journalist. He currently lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he writes full-time.

At least, that's one way of putting it.

Another: after a Yorkshire-gothic upbringing and a rather boring sojourn at university in London, Charlie realized that he wasn't cut out to be small-town pharmacist the second time the tactical firearms squad staked him out for an armed robbery. So he shifted career track to hacking (which seemed like an obvious choice, this being the late 1980's). In retrospect this wasn't a smart move, because it exposed him to any number of half-baked computer industry start-ups, in a career that took him from the world's smallest supercomputer manufacturer (based in the attic of a Victorian girl's finishing school in Hertford), to a successful dot-com in Edinburgh (which IPO'd and made lots of managers rich) as perl hacker numero uno. Burning out after a decade of insane deadlines, product planning meetings, bug reports, and hacked servers, he decided to downshift and switch to writing full-time. An even worse mistake …

A selection of older short stories and bibliographical information, can be found at: Charles Stross Fiction Intro





Photograph by Sandy McKenzie.