‘I’ve had 15 years of total obscurity,” explains the pale, shaven-headed man with the extravagant black beard as he sits squinting at the sun outside an Edinburgh cafe.

“I feel like a dog that has been chasing cars for years,” he says. “Now I’ve finally caught one.”

Charles Stross, a former pharmacist, computer programmer and full-time dreamer about mankind’s future, is allowed to feel proud of himself. For more than a decade he has been labouring in literature’s version of a distant galaxy. Now it looks like he may be about to achieve major mainstream success.

Critics around the world are heaping praise on the Edinburgh-based writer, who is up for no fewer than three Hugo awards, the most prestigious prize in the world of science fiction. More impressive still, the three nominations are for different pieces of work. His galaxy-spanning thriller Iron Sunrise is nominated as best novel and two novellas are up for separate awards.

As literary prizes go, the Hugos are part Booker prize and part beauty pageant, nominated by science-fiction fans.

In August, when the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention comes to Glasgow, Stross’s output will be judged and voted on by a jury of his peers. If he wins, the critical acclaim could well see him join the ranks of Iain Banks and JG Ballard as a writer who commands mainstream respect as well as a cult following.

Stross certainly seems to have the makings of a star. It’s not just that his novels are packed with enough high technology and wild invention to satisfy the most abstruse tastes; his main theme is one which everyone in this sector of the galaxy should be interested in.

“I’m really fascinated by what it means to be human. The human condition is very weird, very wonderful, very wild and varied.

“A glimpse in a history book will tell you that things have not always been as they are now. The Aztecs were unimaginably strange psychologically. This was a civilisation that every 50 years executed thousands of people to make sure the sun rose the next day. Nevertheless, they were a stable human society.

“Science fiction is the mirror image of the historical. It allows us to show people in circumstances we haven’t experienced, in events that have not yet happened, might not happen or in their more fantastical form may well happen.

“What interests me is the idea that human beings are behaviourally plastic. This all means you can engineer the human condition, and that’s before you start to imagine the post-human.”

If it all sounds a bit abstract then it is not. In Stross’s novels men and women still drink, laugh, argue and make love. Teenagers are still recognisably teenagers.

It’s just that they wear cloned clothes and cleaner robots are afraid to enter their bedrooms. These human characters allow even readers who don’t have a grip on the technology to enjoy Stross’s books.

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