Halfway through an exchange of emails with the science fiction writer Charles Stross - a virtual meeting in cyberspace which might have had something of the exotic as little as five years ago - it strikes me that our text-based communication feels almost archaic now.

It's a realisation that might have come straight from the pages of one of Stross's novels. These days, email tennis feels almost boringly routine, and the rapid normalisation of the technologies which are changing people's lives is a recurrent theme in his fiction. Despite their hard-edged technological focus, Stross's worlds are often as quotidian as they are fantastic.

But for all the consistency of his intelligence, he has always made a point of working in as many of science fiction's diverse sub-genres as possible, resisting the pressures of a commercial genre to repeat a formula. "I decided a long time ago that I wanted to write full-time," he explains. "But because I get bored easily, I kicked back pretty hard against the demand that I do more of the same." Alongside space operas like Singularity Sky, he has published a series merging Lovecraftian horror with British cold war thrillers, and what he describes as a "fantasy series that isn't" with echoes of Roger Zelazny and H Beam Piper.

Stross's most acclaimed works to date have been his pure science fiction novels, Accelerando and Glasshouse, but he's still not comfortable being labelled purely as a "science fiction writer".

"Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas, rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition," he says. "I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description." But with a background in biomedical and computer science rather than literature, his fiction always returns to science. "I just can't help myself," he explains. "I have a compulsive urge to use that background to build baroque laboratory mazes for my protagonists to explore, rather than being content to examine them in their native habitat."

But isn't the written word a decidedly old-fashioned media to explore such cutting edge ideas? Why not screenplays, or video games? What makes the novel so compelling? Aside from having been a compulsive reader from early childhood, Stross has two words - creative control. "Novels are one of the few remaining areas of narrative storytelling where one person does almost all of the creative heavy lifting." That autonomy allows written SF to explore sophisticated ideas often absent from films and games.

That sophistication is evident in his latest novel, the Hugo-nominated Halting State, a story set in a future so close that most of it is already on the drawing board, if not in the marketing brochure. Halting State features a real bank robbery conducted by orcs and a dragon inside a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG).

According to Stross virtual reality became a cliché soon after William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in his novel Neuromancer, but we're now seeing the first great flowering of virtual realities in the non-fictional world, and they're taking the form of MMORPG's such as World of Warcraft.

"It turns out that the killer application for virtual reality is other human beings," he says. "Build a world that people want to inhabit, and the inhabitants will come."

Stross's best effort has gone into predicting the 10-year outcome of MMORPGs and other tech depicted in Halting State, but he is sure there are things he's missed in his predictions. All he'll say is that "the future is always a lot stranger than we expect - probably it's stranger than we can expect".

Perhaps the strangest future predicted by science fiction writers is the Singularity - an idea that is already "old hat" for Stross. This concept was more or less invented by scientist and author Vernor Vinge, and started with a simple insight: If an artificial intelligence can be created on computers, it can in turn design more powerful computers to create more powerful artificial intelligence and so on at an ever accelerating rate until we arrive at the Singularity - a point where technological change happens so quickly that it irrevocably alters human existence. A powerful idea, but as Stross is the first to point out, not one that science fiction has always treated with the scientific rigour it deserves.

"A whole bunch of extra cruft accreted rapidly around Vinge's idea, which was misappropriated and misunderstood by many writers," he explains. "Along with the idea of nanotechnology, the singularity became a substitute for magic pixie dust that could do anything, and a placeholder for what author Ken McLeod dubbed 'the rapture of the nerds'."

But as Stross makes clear, these ideas are already shaping our world. Nanotechnology today is a billion-dollar industry. Artificial intelligence may still be remote, but augmented intelligence - of the kind any user of Google can tap into at will - is already facilitating ways of working and living that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.

These changes have yet to make an impact on the way he writes. "The novels I write are still works of fiction in a tradition that goes back a couple of hundred years," he says. "Their structure wouldn't pose too many challenges to a Victorian reader." According to Stross, the revolutionary changes in technology are more likely to affect masintream fiction.

"I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction," he says, "it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever. If it was, we'd still be living in caves rather than worrying about global climate change. To the extent that writers of mainstream literary fiction focus on the interior landscape exclusively, they're wilfully ignoring processes and events that have a major impact on our lives. And I think that's an unforgivably short-sighted position to take."

Many will object vehemently to his diagnosis of the problem with mainstream fiction. But as his readership grows, Stross is reaching not just a hard core of science fiction fans, but also people who find themselves living in the online, socially-networked and virtual worlds his stories explore.