Glasshouse is great. I've enjoyed every Stross novel I've read, and Glasshouse was the first one, after stumbling across a newspaper review when it was released.
Both the Laundry Files & Merchant Princes / Empire games series are also great fun.
You can get a feel for Stross' Laundry Files series from:
For the longest time I didn't try reading the Merchant Princes series because it _appeared_ to be too much of a fantasy series for my tastes -- boy was I mistaken. It's less "Narnia" and more "what do you reckon would actually happen if a paranoid US administration discovered Narnia" with healthy doses of feuding and economics.
Merchant Princess started off as "secret royal heritage" fantasy - the first 3 books (which were later recombined into one larger book, IIRC) were closer to alternate-universe fantasy than the subsequent books, which are more sci-fi/[rot13-spoiler]nygreangr-uvfgbel[/rot13-spoiler]/wormhole-opera? Also, I need to catch up on the series
Stross's blog posts on the series are fascinating reads. The short badly paraphrased tale is that Stross wanted to diversify his publishers but was contractually obligated to give sci-fi books to his first publisher, so he pitched a "fantasy" book. Stross being Stross though, he can't actually write a fantasy novel so it was stealth sci-fi, because of course it was.
He wrote the first book in the 1000+ page "door stop" form common to a lot of "high fantasy" mega-authors like Stephen King, Neal Stephenson, GRRM, Robert Jordan, et al, because Stross wrongly assumed that was the intended form factor of a fantasy novel (because it wasn't his native genre and when you do look at bookshelves they are rather dominated by the mega-books), and the publisher did exactly what JRR Tolkien's publisher did for Lord of the Rings and said it was way too long for a first book in a new series, as that would be expensive if it didn't sell well, and chopped it (somewhat roughly) into three books. (So the combination of the first three books was actually recombination into something more resembling their original manuscript form.)
I read Neptune's Brood and was hooked. It's a fun surreal sci-fi adventure/romp with a heck of a lot of really interesting, geeky tech interludes. Who knew a novel about futuristic accountancy and forex could be so intriguing?
> The theory of interstellar trade is a well-understood topic, with an extensive literature consisting of one paper (pdf) I wrote in 1978. Interstellar finance, however, is less well covered.
> That’s all about to change, however. I’m reading an advance copy of Charlie Stross’s Neptune’s Brood. (Hey, I have connections!) And it is the best thing by far written on the subject to date, partly because it is, as far as I know, the only thing written on the subject to date.
> This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest charges on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer travelling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are derived.
