Charles Stross was born in Leeds in England in 1964, but now lives in Edinburgh in Scotland, where he shares a flat with his partner, Feorag (a brewer in the local Fisherrow Brewery), and a large quantity of computers in various stages of age and functionality. He has degrees in pharmacy and computer science, and has previously worked as a pharmacist, technical author, software engineer, and freelance computer journalist. He currently writes articles on Linux, Perl, and open source software, amongst other things, for publications such as Computer Shopper, Linux Format, and other magazines, as well as doing quite an amount of writing for netzines.

Charlie also writes science fiction, though. He has a collection of stories titled Toast out from Cosmos Books, and his first novel, Festival of Fools is published in February 2003, as a trade paperback in the UK by Big Engine and in August as a hardback in the US by Ace books, who have re-titled it Singularity Sky. He also has a second novel, The Atrocity Archive, serialised in issues #7 to #9 of Spectrum SF, and to be published as a hardback by Golden Gryphon in early 2004. His novelette Lobsters has been nominated in the 2003 Nebula Awards, having previously been in the running for a Hugo.

In his spare time, Charlie enjoys drinking alcoholic beverages from small breweries and collecting weird gadgets and orphan computers. We might point him in the direction of a certain world famous brewery, which is directly across the river from the con site.