As the short fiction season winds down for me, I’m slowly able to turn my attention to reading novels, which is a good thing. I love short fiction, but I need to switch back and forth from time to time, or I begin to get a little nutty.

So, the other day I picked up the galley of Charlie Stross’s new ‘fantasy’ novel, The Family Trade. To quote Damien Broderick, from his upcoming review of the book in Locus, it’s ‘a bold pretend-fantasy in the tradition of Peter Drucker’ that features ‘a sensible laptop-packing journalist grrl caught up in lethal problems of interdimensional best practice accounting and sophisticated business management restructuring.’

That’s about as good a description as anyone could come up with, except it overlooks the fact that the book is compulsively readable and totally engaging. I’ve read all of Stross’s books to date, and most of his short fiction, and you can see that he’s getting better and better with every book that comes out. Singularity Sky was good, but Iron Sunrise was a lot better. The Atrocity Archives was good, but its sequel will no doubt be better. Accelerando looks set to be a genuine contender as the best and most important SF novel of 2005, and in the meantime The Family Trade is the most immediately accessible and purely entertaining of Stross’s books, a kind of modern mix of Roger Zelazny and H. Beam Piper. It’s due out in December and you should check it, and Damien’s upcoming review of it in the November Locus, out.

And next? Well, there are many great things being involved with Locus. The best, for me, is the rare times I get to spend hanging out with Charles, talking and drinking his scotch. But, you also get to meet fascinating people, make connections and, occasionally, get things very early. So, next up for me is the sequel to The Family Trade, The Hidden Family. I could wait till next year to find out what happens next, but I really don’t want to.