Inkwell: Authors and Artists

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #0 of 63: Jon Lebkowsky (jonl) Mon 27 Oct 03 06:35

    
Inkwell.vue welcomes Charlie Stross, whose first novel, _Singularity Sky_,
was just published as an Ace hardcover. It's getting great reviews, of
course, and as you'll see from his bio below, he's got many more in the
pipe. This discussion's led by Charlie's pal and fellow science fiction
author Cory Doctorow, also known far and wide as the Outreach Coordinator
(evangelist) for EFF. ~ jonl

CHARLIE'S BIO

Writers are often boring people. They stay home and they, like, write for
hours and hours every day. Watching them write is really boring, because
believe it or not it takes much longer to write a book than it takes to
read it. So let's not go there.

Born in 1964, Stross knew he wanted to be a writer from the age of six, or
thereabouts, but didn't really get started until his early teens (when his
sister loaned him a manual typewriter around the time he was getting
heavily into Dungeons and Dragons); the results were unexpected, and he's
been trying to bury them ever since. He made his first commercial
for-money sale to Interzone in 1986, and sold about a dozen stories
elsewhere throughout the late 1980's and early 1990's before a dip in his
writing career. He began writing fiction in earnest again in 1998, and
that's probably why you're here.

Along the way to his current occupation, he qualified as a Pharmacist.  
(This is what he got for listening to people who told him "but you can't
earn a living as a writer -- get a career first!") He figured out it was a
bad idea the second time the local police staked his shop out for an armed
robbery -- he's a slow learner. Sick at heart from drugging people and
dodging SWAT teams and gangsters -- it's hard to do that when you're
wearing a lab coat -- he returned to university and did a postgraduate
conversion degree in computer science, the one technical field he was able
to get obsessive about. After several tech sector jobs, first in the UNIX
industry and then in web and dot com development, he made the mistake of
playing musical chairs in early 2000, just in time for the bottom to drop
out of the market. Luckily he was already writing the Linux column for
Computer Shopper (the UK rights to that name being owned by a much more
interesting company than Ziff-Davis), so by a hop, a skip and a jump he
managed to turn this into an exciting full time career as a freelance
journalist specializing in Linux and free software, with a helping of
internet civil liberties on the side. This, it turns out, was a perfect
environment for spending more time writing fiction -- and fiction is now
what he spends the majority of his time writing.

In 2000, he sold his first novel. Then his second and third novels. Then
his fourth and -- well, success came fast. Stross currently has eight
novels under contract and scheduled to appear over the next three years,
with Ace publishing his science fiction and Tor publishing fantasy. The
first of those novels, "Singularity Sky", is currently available in
hardcover from Ace; a sequel, "Iron Sunrise", is due out next July, while
October 2004 sees the publication of "A Family Trade" by Tor, and
April-May 2004 sees publication of a short technohorror novel, "The
Atrocity Archives", by Golden Gryphon. He's been shortlisted for the Hugo
award (twice), Nebula (once), Sturgeon (twice) and BSFA (once), and is
rapidly building up a track record for coming second in major genre
fiction awards.

When not writing, Stross lives in an ancient tenement flat in Edinburgh's
New Town (so-called because it was laid out in the 1760's) with his wife,
two cats, eighteen computers (none of which run Windows), and several
thousand books.

CORY'S BIO

Cory Doctorow is the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
(craphound.com/down), novel; and "A Place So Foreign and Eight More"  
(craphound.com/place), a short story collection. His next novel, "Eastern
Standard Tribe," will be published by Tor books in January 2004. He is the
co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net) and works for the
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org). He and Charlie have
collaborated on a number of stories, including last year's "Jury Service,"  
published on SciFi.com.

 
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #1 of 63: Life in the big (doctorow) Tue 28 Oct 03 06:40

    
Stross and I collaborate on a bunch of sf, and for better or for worse,
we're often singled out as "new voices in sf" -- whatever that means. I have
my own ideas, but I'd like to hear from Charlie.

Who are your peers? Who are your influences? What's the role of the Internet
and computers in today's sf? Hell, for that matter, what's the role of sf in
today's world?
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #2 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Fri 31 Oct 03 03:58

    
Whoa, that's four questions in one lump! I'm going to break it down a
bit and tackle them one at a time, and I suspect I'll still be tackling
them tomorrow ... and the day after ... and next week ...

Let's start with "who are your peers". That's a nice question that
sounds like it ought to have a clear-cut answer. Unfortunately,  for
various reasons it doesn't.

I'm 39. For some reason, when I was 8 or 9 years old I decided I
wanted to be a writer. As (like many of us) I was reading a lot of SF
at the time (E. E. "Doc" Smith! yay!) it sort of implicitly followed
that I would write SF. Unlike most such childhood fantasies this one
didn't go away, but hung around like a bad smell until in my early
teens I acquired and brutalized a manual typewriter and several reams
of paper that hadn't done anything to deserve such abuse. The idea of
actually publishing what I wrote was new and exotic and I think I first
encountered it at 15 or so when I began writing contributions for an
early gaming magazine, "White Dwarf" (because, again like many of my
contemporaries in the late seventies, I was a spotty D&D player by
night).

Around the time I was 17 I began to fancy my fiction-writing abilities
and sent a story to a magazine I'd heard of (and read, scratching my
head because it was pretty head-scratch-worthy at that age) called
Interzone. The editorial collective were remarkably tolerant, and about
five years and several dead trees later I sold them my first
commercial sale of an SF story,  "The Boys" (published in the December
1986 issue of Interzone). For something written by a 22-year-old nerd
who'd discovered William Gibson at roughly the same time as William
Burroughs it was about what you'd expect, and it won't be appearing in
any collections any time soon.

Over the late 80's and early 90's I wrote and sold quite a few short
stories and persistently attempted to write novels. I succeeded in
writing long texts that looked like novels to me, but other people (and
in particular editors) were unconvinced. It took me quite a while to
get my head around these important ideas like *plot* and *character
development* and *narrative structure* and I did it the hard way,
because I was too busy running in circles and flapping my wings to read
any writing books, because ...

A side effect of the British educational system is that it forces you
to specialize academically at 16. I was given the usual advice --
"don't be silly, you can't get an Eng.Lit. degree and earn a living as
a novelist, get a day job instead" -- and I listened to it. For reasons
that remain unclear I ended up at university studying Pharmacy,
qualified as a state-licenced drug dealer in 1987, and by 1988 had
discovered that I *really* *truly* was not suited to that way of life.
(I have difficulty sleeping when I suspect I may have accidentally
poisoned somebody.) Plus, it was eating into the writing hours. So in
1989 I got rid of the mortgage, the car, and the suit and went back to
university to do a postgraduate conversion degree in computer science.
Back then there was a shortage of CS graduates in the UK, and the
conversion degree basically amounted to having the content of an
undergrad CS degree dumped on you in twelve months. I'm not sure
whether I slept that year, but the end result was that by 1990 I'd
jumped career tracks from drug dealing to computing. I spent about four
years as a tech author (it's surprising how few people understand
algorithms and can write clearly) then when the web appeared around
1993 I began heading that way, and ended up moving to Scotland and
joining a succession of start-ups. The last one, Datacash, I joined as
programmer number one two weeks before the company was created, and
left two months after the successful IPO; it's still going, much to my
surprise.

Anyway, all of the last paragraph's contents amounted to a wee
distraction, and largely account for the paucity of my output during
the 1990's. (It's hard to write novels while you're working for a
start-up.)

I suppose you could say my second writing career dates to about 1998.
I took stock of myself and found (a) one unfinished novel (I was 12
months in to it), (b) one finished, unsold novel with structural
problems (bits of it have since re-surfaced in the form of "The
Atrocity Archives"), (c) one short story sale in 1998 -- and that was a
reprint of something I wrote in 1991. I was in my early thirties and I
realised that either I should give up, or I should get serious about
writing. I started by setting myself a goal of writing *and selling*
four stories a year, and a second goal of getting into the magazines
that get  name recognition -- Asimov's, Analog, F&SF. Somewhere in the
preceeding decade I'd cross-fertilized a chunk of ideas between the
biological and computer science, and I'd also learned a little bit more
about human nature -- enough to handle characterisation better than
during my late teens or early twenties. (Parenthetically: this is one
of the reasons why we often see new authors erupt on the scene aged
thirty-something -- they've finally learned enough about human nature
to have something interesting to say about it.) So in 1998 and early
1999 I finished and sold "Antibodies" and "A Colder War" (which got me
into the Year's Best SF anthologies), wrote "Lobsters" (which got  me
into Asimov's and onto the Hugo and Nebula ballots), completed the
novel now know as "Singularity Sky", and got serious.

Now, as we all know the bottom fell out of the internet stock market
bubble at the beginning of 2000. Early 2000 caught me playing musical
chairs. I was burned-out with Datacash, and a local ISP -- which was
preparing to IPO in May 2000 -- made me an offer I couldn't refuse:
come on board and set up and run a software development division. I
said "yes", but midway through my notice period and *after* I'd burned
my bridges with Datacash's board the bubble burst, the new company's
IPO backers vanished, a cash flow crevasse yawned, and there was a
hostile takeover. My new job disappeared before I even started!

Luckily, I had an insurance policy. Since 1990 I'd been supplementing
my income by writing for British computer magazines -- specifically
Computer Shopper, which during the late 1980's and early 1990's was
about the nearest UK equivalent to Byte in editorial policy. I'd been
writing the Linux column in Shopper since 1998, making me the longest
established Linux freelancer in the UK computer journalism scene. And a
bunch of new Linux mags were springing up. So in June 2000 I switched
to being a full-time writer and freelance journalist -- about 10%
writing and 90% journalism at first.

This month, I'm filing my last column with Shopper. It's taken three
years to switch over to being a full-time author of fiction. But I'm
finally here, and I'm not 40 yet. (If I'd known how much trouble it
would be and how long it would take when I was 8 or 9 ...)

Now, back to the question:  who are my peers?

Coincidentally, my first story in Interzone came out in the same issue
as Paul MacAuley's first published SF story. (*I* got the cover
painting, but Paul got the subsequent critical acclaim and book deal.
Which is a good thing -- I couldn't have handled it.) You could make a
strong case for me being part of the Interzone Generation: the group of
writers based in the UK during the early to late 1980's who got their
start not via the cyberpunk wave in the US, but via the pages of
Interzone, which ploughed an eccentric and distinctly British furrow
through the fertile fields of what Simon Ounsley named "radical hard
SF" (a name designed as a provocative chimera, not a prescription or
manifesto mast-head). Numerous other authors came out of Interzone. In
fact, it's easier to say  who *didn't* -- Ian MacDonald. (As with  my
second career, he's an example of a British -- okay, a Northern Irish
-- author who suddenly appeared in Asimov's and sold books in the US
long before resurfacing in the UK.) But Interzone developed and
published the early writings of, if I remember correctly, Al Reynolds,
Liz Williams (those two more recently), Chris Fowler, Simon Ings, Kim
Newman, Iain Bans (at least in the short SF form), Richard Calder, and
a host of others.

Interzone wasn't the only influence, of course. At 19, I was
vulnerable to reading Neuromancer for the first time -- it warped my
own writing for years. I subscribed to "Cheap Truth", I was a late-teen
cyberpunk wannabe nerd-boy, you can fill in the other gory details
yourself. As with the *real* punk movement of the late 70's in the UK,
I was just a bit too young and unskilled to get into it and be part of
it.

And then there's the other peer group. From the inconveniently weird
second career that sort of began in 1998. 

British SF is currently fermenting like a weird yeast culture created
by a deranged genetic engineer in search of the ultimate grey goo. It's
positively scary this decade! Since the mid-nineties we've had *good*
new writers coming out of the woodwork every few months rather than
once or twice a decade. Names like Ken MacLeod, John Meaney, Liz
Williams, Al Reynolds, Neil Asher, Richard Morgan, Jon Courtenay 
Grimwood, Justina Robson -- there's been nothing like it since the
early 1960's and the British new wave. I'm not sure why it's happening,
but I suspect a generation that grew up reading Interzone has
something to do with it. I'm not some kind of isolated phenomenon, I'm
just the leading edge of a wave that's reaching the US publishing field
relatively slowly because first it has to cross the Atlantic. In my
case, it's because I decided to acquire an American literary agent back
in 2000, and she's sold my books into the US market;  most of the
authors I cited are on the UK bookshelves and in amazon.co.uk but their
books take some time to sell US rights and be reprinted by US
publishers.

You've got a treat in store.

Now, I think I answered not only "Who are your peers" but a good chunk
of "who are you influences" too. So  next time I post it'll be about
the internet and computers and SF in today's world. Or something. Watch
the skies ...
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #3 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Fri 31 Oct 03 12:02

    
Oh yeah, one addendum: Cory's jetting around the planet over the next
few days, so if anyone else has any questions to ask, feel free.
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #4 of 63: Gail Williams (gail) Fri 31 Oct 03 13:47

    
Wow, a new movement.  That's exciting!  Welcome, Charlie.  Always cool to
hear what people did early on.  Do you think the pharmacist training 
informs any of what you write?
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #5 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Fri 31 Oct 03 14:02

    
Gail: a little, insofar as various bits'n'pieces of the experience
stuck. It's not so much a matter of counting pills as of having a
background in biochemistry, pharmacology, and a bunch of various
related biomedical fields, though.

Incidentally, while the ferment in British SF has *some* of the
characteristics of a movement, it lacks one thing that people in the US
seem to expect: a coherent ideology. That's because it's more of an
emergent thing, with a bunch of talented new writers (and some older
ones) suddenly energized and bouncing new ideas off each other, rather
than marching in some kind of lockstep behind th banner of a manifesto.
This probably makes it healthier, if anything. (Recently a number of
folks were discussing something they called "The New Weird", using M.
John Harrison and China Mieville as referents, but by the time they got
through deconstructing it they'd thrown everyone else in the field out
of the basket and ended up with, well, China and Mike. Sort of the
opposite of the process the proto-cyberpunks went through with Vincent
Omniaveritas trying to pin the tail on any donkey who'd stand still
long enough  to sustain a puncture wound :) )
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #6 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Fri 31 Oct 03 14:03

    
Oh yeah, one other aside: in case it wasn't obvious, I'm in Scotland.
Scotland is currently running on GMT, and it is now past 10pm here (but
around 2pm WELL-time). So I hope you can forgive me if I duck out
before long and get some sleep. I'll catch up with any questions you
leave in the middle of the night ...
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #7 of 63: Life in the big (doctorow) Fri 31 Oct 03 14:28

    
Lots and lots of great stuff there, Stross, as per usual!

Have you come up with a high-concept pitch for Singularity Sky yet? How do
you describe it to the world?
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #8 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Fri 31 Oct 03 14:51

    
"Singularity Sky": when an irresistable force for communication meets
an immovable ideological object ...
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #9 of 63: Life in the big (doctorow) Fri 31 Oct 03 17:44

    
And when confronted by the blank look this yields, you say?
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #10 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Sat 1 Nov 03 03:02

    
Then I tell them it's a critique of conservativism. (Hey, I've got a
reputation as one of the revolutionary Scottish socialist SF  writers
to uphold, right?)

It's not, I hasten to add, about your ordinary day-to-day
conservativism, of the kind that focusses on personal concerns,
self-reliance, not meddling in your neighbour's business, and so on.
It's about a different *type* of conservativism, one whose most recent
proponent is the philosopher Leo Strauss, and which is at odds with the
entire Enlightenment program because it denies the key concept that
humans beings are of equal intrinsic merit and should be treated
equally before the law. If you like, call it "monarchism" -- but the
existence of a king, while implied by the logic of Straussian
conservativism, is by no means essential. Strauss was an admirer of
Plato and while I wasn't consciously aware of the details at the time
perhaps there's an ironic echo of this in the name of the New Republic.


There are actually people out there -- usually written off as the
barking mad fringes of the neoconservative movement -- who hold these
values: that the majority of people are worth little or nothing and
exist to be led by the enlightened philosophers, while those of greater
ability but less insight are to be trained up as "gentlemen", patriots
and warriors who will fight at the drop of a hat to defend the virtues
of intolerance and rigid hierarchical control upon which their society
is based.  An egalitarian, post-Enlightenment society in which people
are of equal worth (even if their abilities and wealth vary widely) is
by definition decadent because it provides opportunities for all and a
warm bath of culture in which the urge to strive for glory dissolves:
citizens of such societies as the liberal democracies are no better
than animals and a true Straussian society  must defend itself
vigilantly against this kind of rot from within.

I freely admit: I am a child of the Enlightenment. I'm not so much a
Trotskyite as a wooly liberal, and this sort of political philosophy
fascinates me at the same time as it creeps me out. I wanted to depict
it in fiction. I wanted to write a space opera (for purely cold-blooded
commercial reasons, of course -- that's my story and I'm sticking to
it :) ). I particularly wanted to take some pot-shots at conventional
space opera by throwing in a military campaign modelled on the voyage
of the Russian Baltic Fleet to Tsushima in 1904/05, which is one of the
most bizarre and tragic -- not to say funniest -- events in modern
military history. Once I'd tooled up the New Republic as an entity it
became obvious that I needed external viewpoint characters who are more
sympathetic to my readership (namely Martin and Rachel, who come from
a world that is at least vaguely related to  our own), and that I
needed an antithesis to put up against my  thesis: which was where the
Festival came in. A few other random factors got  thrown in the pot,
such as the existence of the Eschaton (which is simultaneously a
tap-dance around the yawning abyss of the Vingean singularity,  which
forms a perilous crack across the road forward for any writer of space
opera, and a mechanism for squaring faster than light travel with
general relativity's requirement that causality not be violated). And
there you have it.

Not all of this appeared at the outset when I began writing the novel.
There's a first draft somewhere with no Festival -- that didn't work,
but when I added the Festival to a subsequent draft things went more
smoothly. But then the Festival needed people to interact with on
Rochard's world, which is where the revolutionaries came in. (Creatures
of their Straussian society, even the radical revolutionaries want to
hold a revolution the way great-grandpappy ran one.)

I'm a bit disappointed with the way I handled the ending: with 20/20
hindsight I don't think I managed to tie the character-based denouement
in properly with the implicit dialectic between conservativism and
modernism (although the background ending works okay). Still, I'm going
back for more in the sequel, "Iron Sunrise", which is due out next
July and which shifts focus from Straussian conservative bad guys to
Neitzschean space nazi types.
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #11 of 63: Life in the big (doctorow) Sat 1 Nov 03 05:27

    
I very much liked the ending. In particular, (he said, sucking up to the
hosts), I liked the shingle emblazoned "Access to Tools and Ideas" that gets
hung out at the close of the book (further, deponent sayeth not, for fear of
spoliering).

What does "Access to Tools and Ideas" mean to you?
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #12 of 63: RUSirius (rusirius) Sat 1 Nov 03 11:37

    




What a coincidence. I just finished reading Singularity Sky.  It's big
 fun. I particularly enjoyed the parody of the extropians...  Limited
audience for that though I would imagine.   

...
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #13 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Sat 1 Nov 03 12:59

    
Hah ...

"Access to tools and ideas": I've read Whole Earth Review, on and off,
for twenty years. (More off than on, unfortunately, but it's not
exactly widely distributed in the UK.) It seems to me that "access to
tools and ideas" isn't, on its own, sufficient to guarantee freedom,
but it's a good start: Marx and certain comments about alienated labour
(labour that does not own the tools it uses to produce wealth, and
thus must labour in service to others) springs to mind. More
fundamentally, you also need various concepts such as legal equality,
and of course freedom to hold ideas however unpopular they might be,
before you can start talking about autonomy (which I see as one of the
key goals of the American libertarians, more so than of the left
anarchists). But "access to tools and ideas" is certainly important.
Without it, you can be kept as a serf down on the farm and you won't
even know something better is possible.

RUSirius: never underestimate the size of a potential audience. More
people know about the extropians than *are* extropians, and more people
associate with them than would be identified with the hard core. (I'd
have to call myself a fellow-traveller: I don't buy the complete
package and I think some of their proposed methodologies are pretty
dubious, but I've got no argument with their goals and principles.)

Funnily enough, I first met Ken MacLeod via the Extropians mailing
list. Small world ...
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #14 of 63: E M Richards (booter) Sat 1 Nov 03 13:21

    

Hi, Charlie. I just got my copy of Singularity Sky day before yesterday
and am trying to read it as fast as I can, so I can say something more
coherent than "Say hi to Feorag for me." Welcome to the WELL. I spend a
lot of time here. If you ever get bored with netnews, this is a great
place to be.

(Of course, if I read the book too fast, I won't remember anything.)
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #15 of 63: Life in the big (doctorow) Sat 1 Nov 03 16:00

    
This business of access to tools is at the core of a species of utopianism
that holds that the world's inequities would be solved if the right gadgets
(or the dlueprints for building the right gadgets) were in the right hands.
That's certainly at the core of your conceit in SS -- but do you buy it?
What does an appropriate tool look like? What's an inappropriate tool?
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #16 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Sun 2 Nov 03 04:07

    
(Hi Booter! Say hello to the cats for me ...)

Cory: I know about the tools/utopianism crossover and I don't
completely buy it. I think it's' based on a somewhat naive reading of
Marx -- whose analysis is still very much respectable even in the wake
of the collapse of the supposed workers paradises established by his
followers -- and I think there are a lot of other requirements that
have to be met before a utopia is possible -- like, for starters,
defining the parameters of human happiness!

I don't generally like utopias in fiction -- they tend to be static
and prescriptive, and even if they look as if they might be workable
they're the sort of place that 80% of the population could put up with
and the other 20% will be high-tailing it out of town to jointhe
resistance. I think different human beings define their goals in
different and often mutually irreconcilable ways. Flexible anything-box
tools (such as nanotech assemblers and a library of canned designs for
structures they can make given sufficient energy and mass -- including
copies of themselves) are a great idea, but if your idea of personal
fulfillment includes a hundred square kilometres of wilderness it's not
going to help much in a world with a population of 50 billion. 

I suspect that once you look at the idea, what access to tools means
to a lot of people is a dream of self-sufficiency. (Need a new car?
Grow one in your back yard. Need a bit more space? Light out for a
desert somewhere, wave your magic wand and make the desert grow you a
ranch house.) But humans are *not* self-sufficient, for the most part:
we're pack animals, we live in social groups, we are almost
magnetically attracted to centres of population density so seethingly
mind-blowing that nothing else like them exists on the planet except
for ant-hills and termite mounds. And despite Heinlein's saw about a
competant man needing to [insert list of random skills here] we tend to
specialize because life's too short to pick up all the abilities and
experiences we might desire. I'd like to be able to make my own shoes,
for example, for the most part I'm not very happy with what's on sale,
but learning to make shoes takes time and requires specialized tools
and of the two, it's the *time* that's the hard thing for me to find.

Intelligence Amplification, Dr Vinge's IA (as opposed to AI), is of
course the thing that could turn the equation upside down. But first we
need to know what the hell intelligence *is*, or at least how we can
go about making it more effective -- and in domains other than the ones
we're already good at. Google and a WiFi laptop do indeed enhance my
ability to do certain kinds of research, but it's completely useless as
an intelligence enhancer if you put me in front of a lathe or a sewing
machine and expect me to use the thing more efficiently, because
manual ability to operate machine tools simply isn't part of the domain
within which Google acts as an intelligence amplifier.

Finally,  there are cultural issues. Some tools are just not
compatible with some world-views. ("Singularity Sky" implicitly
explored this in the background on Rochard's World; bombing the place
with Von Neumann machines and nanotech provided transient wealth -- and
a lot of headaches and atrocities -- but it didn't fundamentally
change the nature or attitudes of the people living there, and after a
bit most of them gravitated back to what they knew and were familiar
with because the new stuff was unreliable and if you didn't know what
you were doing it could kill you.) It's not for nothing that one of the
first moves of most revolutionary Leninist (or Maoist) regimes once
they achieves power is to try and start a universal literacy campaign:
if people can't read, they can't receive your ideas. 

Oh yeah, your question: for my next birthday I want a pocket
Swiss-army bush robot. And a spray can of utility fog. And a brain
implant with a google-indexed copy of the Library of Congress. I don't
think it'll bring about the Singularity, but it would be cool and maybe
it would help me write better-informed stuff (if I didn't die of old
age while exploring the contents of my own head).
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #17 of 63: Thomas Petersen (sushi101) Sun 2 Nov 03 10:34

    
Google would seem to be a knowledge amplifier rather than an
intelligence amplifier.
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #18 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Sun 2 Nov 03 11:33

    
What is intelligence?

Google provides interesting links between disparate chunks of
knowledge, based on relevance (determined by how pages are linked to).
You can make a lot of interesting inferences based on what pieces of
knowledge you can connect, and goodle makes it easier to do that. It
won't help you thread a needle more effectively, or make you faster at
mental arithmetic (although of course it has a calculator built in :)
but if you're trying to get an overview of a field or examine the
intersection of a couple of fields it'll give you seven league boots.

(I'd argue that Google is hampered by our current copyright and
intellectual property laws -- huge amounts of data are *not* indexed
because they're proprietary, and I suspect that the benefits to society
of having a fully integrated knowledge base far outweigh the benefits
of allowing the creators of the data to profit from it, especially when
we're dealing with collations of information rather than creative
content.  But that's another argument.)

Cory: got anything to add? (Where were we, anyway?)
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #19 of 63: turing testy (cascio) Sun 2 Nov 03 18:05

    
Hey Charlie. I greatly enjoyed Singularity Sky; it had enough of what I like to 
call "plausible surreality" about it to really appeal to me. I look forward to 
the sequel.

You mentioned upstream a bit that the Eschaton was your hand-wave to get around 
the Vingean Singularity. I've seen it argued here and there that said 
Singularity is one of the root causes of the sharp decline in science fiction 
set in the near future (the next couple of centuries). It hasn't all gone away, 
of course -- Cory's DaOitMK is a good recent example -- but there does seem to 
be a real problem here. How can science fiction authors create plausible 
visions of the near future when we're running headlong into what Alex Steffen 
calls the "prediction horizon?"

So, my real question for you: to what degree are your stories set in what you 
believe to be a not-implausible version of the Future? Are you really writing 
about the present (as Gibson was supposed to have said about his own stuff), or 
do you see yourself as really writing about the future?
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #20 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Mon 3 Nov 03 04:55

    
The plausibility horizon really is a huge problem for near future SF.
But I don't think the singularity is the only reason for it. Put
yourselves in the shoes of someone who believes that artificial
intelligence is impossible and try to extrapolate forward 20 years.
Where do you get to?

We seem to be living through interesting times. The American Century
is either close to, or past, its peak. Moore's Law is close to topping
out, and the computer industry which drove the wheels of progress for a
couple of decades is threatening to go where the aerospace industry
went after 1968. The next obvious big fields are biotech and nanotech,
but we're still absorbing the implications of computing and its bastard
step-child, ubiquitous high-bandwidth communications. It's quite
obvious that some very  weird things are going to come out of the next
big fields. For example, take my mobile phone. It's also a palmtop
computer with more memory than all the mainframes in North America in
1970. Drop it in a time machine back to, say, 1960, and show it to a
computer scientist. They'll be able to understand the basic design
principles, although the user interface will surprise them quite a lot
(it's designed for *ordinary people* to use), but the thing I'd expect
them to have difficulty grasping is the social effect that phones like
this have had. I think the mobile phone is as socially revolutionary as
the automobile -- unlike land lines (which link geographical
locations), mobile phones link *people*, wherever  they are. And the
implications of always being in touch (or findable) are still giving us
some trouble after close to twenty years.

Futures are easy to extrapolate when there's a homogeneous mainstream
culture: when everyone wears a suit or a dress, then suits and dresses
with high shoulder pads don't sound too implausible. But we live in a
period where western culture seems to be pluralising: how do you
extrapolate 20 years in a society where burkas and body-piercing
naturists are also part of the culture? And how do you deal with groups
who feel threatened trying to exclude other groups? The recent
outburst of religious fundamentalism in the US (which, incidentally,
just ain't happening here in the UK) isn't something a rationalist
technophile SF writer in the 1950's would have found easy to predict. 

Part of the problem is that the world is shrinking and growing denser,
socially and intellectually. It is now about as easy for the average
citizen of a developed nation to cross the entire planet as it was to
cross Massachusetts in 1803 -- roughly the same proportion of monthly
wages and roughly the same time (by 747 as by stage coach). We get to
rub shoulders with people we've never rubbed shoulders with before, and
some  of them have very strange ideas about us, and us about them.
Meanwhile, we're drowning in a sea of informational pollution (boy, did
John Brunner get that right!). More Brits under 24 know the name of
the last Big Brother winner than of the deputy prime minister according
to a poll published today. What's relevant? What's irrelevant? How the
hell should I know? I'm just a wannabe barefoot futurologist!

So, am I writing about the present, or the future? Your $64K question
...

When I write SF (as opposed to horror or fantasy) I am *trying* to
write about the future, but my voice is unalterably the voice of the
present and when the future comes about it will look laughably quaint
and old-fashioned. The future is a mirror for our hopes and fears about
the present, as someone (Gibson?) said. I can extrapolate about
wearable computers, intelligent agents, gestural interfaces, new
business models descended from the open source community, the social
implications of the conservativism that seems to be in store for
generation Y ... and I will inevitably miss something enormous. In the
1970's, the enormous ommission in SF was the personal computer:
virtually nobody even noticed the things creeping into existence, and
although Murray Leinster famously predicted something not unlike the
internet and PC's in "A Logic named Joe" back in nineteen
forty-something, he was writing in a vacuum: nobody grabbed the concept
and ran with it. I have no idea what this decade's omission will be.
All I can do is try to write around it.

Here's a random example: go and read or re-read Bruce Sterling's
"Schismatrix". I assert freely that "Schismatrix" is one of the great
SF novels of the 1980's. It's better than "Neuromancer". It reinvented
space opera and was so revolutionary that half the reviewers didn't
understand what they were reading. Al Reynolds has got most of a career
out of building on what Sterling laid the foundations for in a single
pyrotechnic throwaway and a handful of short stories.

"Schismatrix" came out in, I think, 1984. If you read it,  it looks
like cutting-edge SF today -- except for one curious omission.  The
word "nanotechnology" does not appear in it once, because Eric
Drexler's book "Engines of Creation" still lay in the future and the
concept of mature nanotechnology simply wasn't on Sterling's radar,
*even though the seeds of it had already been laid* and Drexler was
working on his PhD on the subject at MIT.

So. I know damn well that I can't predict the future. But I can try 
to invent a plausible one. How plausible is "Singularity Sky"? I think
the answer has to be, "not very". It relies on a very strongly
anthropic force at large in the universe to hold things together, and
it insists on allowing FTL travel -- you can't really have that kind of
space opera without it, can you? That's two strikes. I'm not going to
award a third strike against it just yet, but I think in terms of
direct extrapolation it's one of the lower probability outcomes.

("Accelerando", the series of stories running in Asimov's SF right now
and the novel that is due out from Ace in summer '05, is a bit more
rigorous because it starts out much closer to our own time. It uses a
clock, calibrated in orders of magnitude, which I stole from Ray
Kurzweil's book "The age of emotional machines": it's the computing
power of the solar system in MIPS per kilogram. But then again, that's
the actual in-your-face novel about the singularity. And when I finish
writing it, it will be obsolete.)

All in all, this extrapolation makes my head hurt. I'm glad that I've
also got a fantasy series to work on ...
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #21 of 63: Life in the big (doctorow) Mon 3 Nov 03 14:56

    
Bloody hell, you're prolific, Stross. Boast for us. Make us cringe in futile
jealousy. Tell us how long it took you to write the fine essays you've
posted here thus far, then tell us about your stupendous feats of 100,000-
word weekends (and tell us about the metric fuckload of books you've got in
the pipe).
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #22 of 63: Yeah, but I'm a cute geek. (tinymonster) Mon 3 Nov 03 15:27

    
LOL!  So I wasn't the only one feeling slightly... intimidated.

-Christy, who Web-searched "Vingean Singularity" because she felt too
dumb to ask about it here
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #23 of 63: a meat-vessel, with soul poured in (wellelp) Mon 3 Nov 03 16:56

    
Hmm, here  I was thinking this might be a Bridget Jones kind of book
with "Single" in the title. ;-)
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #24 of 63: E M Richards (booter) Mon 3 Nov 03 18:35

    

Charlie is a prodigious writer, in terms of thought, care and sheer output.
The WELL population, from which this medium springs, tends to write in
a conversational mode, as if we were in conversation, where we will post
about the same amount of words as we would in our "turns" in a conversation.
So, it can be intimidating to deal with Charlie online. However, if we
barrage him with questions, we can tire him out (hee hee) and get him to
loosen his virtual tie and relax a bit. (Not that I've seen Charlie
with anything around his neck other than a cat or a scarf.)

Charlie, one thing I find interesting about your writing is that you
don't stoop to the lumpen reading level of (what is it?) grade 8 or
10 or whatever. I find it refreshing to read adult vocabulary, but I
wonder if this may affect your future market/readership.
  

inkwell.vue.199 : Charlie Stross, _Singularity Sky_
permalink #25 of 63: Charlie Stross (charlie-stross) Tue 4 Nov 03 03:28

    
Multiple questions!

Booter: I'm tending to write in essay-sized bursts because it's hard
to sustain a dialog with eight time zones in the way. I mean, I tend to
hit the web (and the WELL) when I get up (and I'm not a morning
person) but by the time most of you guys are waking up it's 5-6pm over
here. We're playing ping-pong across the dateline, which doesn't
encourage chattiness. (Maybe it's an indicator for how conversations
will go if we ever colonize interplanetary space, with long speed of
light lags to contend with?)

Writing grades ... if you look at the average Victorian novel, and
then at my stuff, I think my stuff is grammatically and probably
lexically a lot simpler. Those guys had an immense tolerance for
complex sentence structure. Looking in the opposite direction, you
could argue that we've dumbed our writing down way too far to cope with
the exigencies of real-time communications media like TV and cinema.
Can you imagine a Hollywood movie -- or even a modern stage play --
with the sort of five minute long soliloquy that Shakespeare and his
contemporaries enjoyed? If we lose the pleasure of using our language
to the full, we lose also the ability to communicate difficult or
non-trivial ideas.

Anyway. I don't think using long sentences will hit my sales *too*
hard because I suspect that those who're less able to cope with the
full adult vocabulary won't be able to cope with the ideas, either --
and I ain't going to write dumb. I've tried writing dumb and it brings
me out in hives. I am not writing fiction purely for the money: I'm
doing it because I enjoy coming up with wild and non-trivial ideas and
injecting them into other people's heads, and I'm not interested in
doing that with one hand tied behind my back. If I wanted to earn my
living by the pen I'd have stuck with technical writing or computer
journalism, both of which I can do reasonably well.

Cory: "Singularity Sky" took about three years to write, largely
because I was simultaneously  doing the alpha-geek programmer thing at
a dot-com. "Prolific" is a function of time -- I just didn't have
enough of it. I've seen the workload *you* sustain despite having a day
job as, what was it, grand high panjandrum in charge of internet civil
liberties? Lord supreme freedom fighter of the electronic frontier?
Something like that. Well, it can't possibly be the kind of job where
you get to scribble furtive chapters at work while dealing with the
sheer mind-numbing existential boredom of watching the paint on the
walls turn yellow, can it? I suspect if you turned your energy to
writing full-time I'd have to get out of the way ...

(Unfortunately, I have to confess that I've been writing these
comments online in a web browser window and, like, posting them on the
fly. First draft. So maybe I'm guilty as charged.)

You asked about the publication schedule?

"Singularity Sky" is available now in hardcover from Ace. It should go
paperback in July '04, at the same time as the sequel "Iron Sunrise"
comes out in hardcover (and a first UK hardcover of SS comes out). The
SF novel due out in July '05 is "Accelerando", the [[pravda-style
description follows]] novel from which the series of stories in
"Asimov's SF" was drawn [[explanation: Ace are institutionally allergic
to fix-ups, so "Accelerando" is officially *not* a fix-up, OK?]].
"Accelerando" is not connected to Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise. It also
took me five years to get through  the first draft and I sweated blood
over it. In contrast, the novel after "Accelerando", in July 2006,
will be "Glasshouse", which I accidentally burped up back in April this
year. "Glasshouse" and "Accelerando" share a universe, but
"Glasshouse" feels more like a short story that ran out to novel
length, while "Accelerando" is a multi-book series that's been through
a car crusher.

Anyway, that's four SF novels, due from Ace in the US (and now
creeping out from Orbit in the UK, and also various French and Spanish
and Czech publishers).

In addition to SF,  I write other stuff. A short novel of mine, "The
Atrocity Archive", was serialized in the obscure but brilliant Scottish
SF magazine "Spectrum SF" back in 2001-02. A hardcover edition, with
extra material, will be published in the US by Golden Gryphon as "The
Atrocity Archives" (note the trailing 's') next April or May. This
stuff is,  well, start by taking a traditional British spy thriller --
not James Bond glamour so much as Harry Palmer sleaze. Have a Neal
Stephenson hacker-geek hero fall in and flail around, trying to escape
from spook-land. Except it's not your normal spy agency:  it's the
division of SOE tasked with protecting the realm from extradimensional
Lovecraftian horrors. Because magic is a side-effect of applied
mathematics, computers are tools for doing lots of mathematical
operations very rapidly, Alan Turing discovered something very
unpleasant the month before he was assassinated (to shut him up), and
ever since then ...

I guess you'd call it horrror. But it's also masquerading as SF and
spy thriller and a load of other things.

Then there's the [[pravda-definition follows:]] fantasy series from
Tor. [[It's a fantasy series because Ace had an option on my next SF
novel and would have been very annoyed if I sold an SF series to 
someone else. Okay?]] 

Right after I sold "Singularity Sky" in 2001, my agent said, "you
realise it'll be two or three, maybe four, years before Ace publish
this?" (Yes, she was wrong.) "Why don't you take a year out to write a
big fat fantasy or alternate history series that'll make us lots of
money?" At the time, with a magazine in the process of messily going
bust owing me a chunk of money for work done, the idea of making lots
of money held a certain appeal. But I had to confess immediately that
I'd rather give cats enemas for a living than write Extruded Fantasy
Product. I used to play D&D in my spotty youth, and the cliches make me
itch uncontrollably and swear -- especially when I see them in print.
Besides, one Robert Jordan is enough.

Eventually, after some brainstorming, I came up with a cold-blooded
mission plan: pick a couple of dead authors (i.e. not current
competition) and colonize their turf. Hybridize, add some twists of my
own, and write *that*. The distinguished dead authors I picked on were:
H. Beam Piper and Roger Zelazny, and the turf I decided to pitch my
tent on was travel between parallel universes -- a collision between
Piper's Paratime stories and Zelazny's Amber (albeit with no goddamn
magic).

This seems to have worked alarmingly well, and the first volume, "A
Family Trade", is due out from Tor in October '04, with two subsequent
books due to follow at probably 8-month intervals. (Finishing the third
is the next big item on my to-do list.)

So. There's actually a list of eight novels now sold, which should be
appearing at a rate of three a year (from the beginning of next year).
Of these novels, five are finished, two are
finished-except-for-the-ending, and one is about 30% written. Which may
sound horribly prolific, except there's about a two-year lead time
when you first start selling novels, and I'm actually only writing
about two books (plus shrapnel) per year.

(I'm also doing some other stuff. Short stories for anthologies, a
collaboration with Cory, script work for a short Machinima movie, and
so on. But that doesn't count ...)

Hey, now look what you've gone and made me do! I burped an essay
again! I've got to stop doing this ...
  

    
I think my actualy titlee is "Internet civil liberties underling."

BTW, greetings from the WIPO meeting in Geneva, where they Trilateral
Commission of broadcasters is dividing up the world while we watch and fume.
  

    
Are you sure they're not the Bavarian Illuminati? Or the Ahnenerbe-SS?
  

    
Hey Charlie. Good points and lots to chew on. Great observations about
omissions, about Schismatrix and nanotech.

You know, a question I have goes something like this: Bruce Sterling
once said that writers having a "native decade" - a decade which they
really get, where they live with native fluency, but from which they
are unable to escape. Ever since he said that I've been trying to
stretch my native decade, which started at the fall of the Wall, the
Exxon Valdez and the near-simultaneous (for me) discovery of the
Internet. Yes, I'm an old fart, and my native decade is set to expire
at any minute.

Where would you put your native decade? What do you think it allows
you to see that perhaps slightly older writers aren't as interested in?
What do you do to stay abreast of the new?

Is it possible that native decades are getting shorter as things speed
up?

And given that it often takes writers at least until their 30s to
write anything really good - mature and nuanced and done with mastery
of craft - could one of the problems near-future SF is having be that
there are few people writing natively in this new decade, but much has
already changed since the last one? (Did that make sense? Too early to
be typing in public...)

Anyways, Bravo on Singularity Sky. Looking forward to the next.

OH, PS: regarding the whole access to tools thing, while I love Whole
Earth and all its works, the idea really goes back to the Enlightenment
and Diderot's Encyclopedie, which had the explicit goal of spreading
working knowledge of all the arts, crafts, and industries to all
mankind.
  

    
Native decade? It's a good idea. I'm not certain, but I think mine
probably began in mid-1986, when I spent a whole night sitting in front
of a university mainframe terminal playing MUD (yes, the *first* MUD,
over JANET, the UK Joint Academic Network) until the sun rose over the
back of the computer and I realised I was interacting with people
hundreds of miles away.

And I can't help thinking that it actually ended on 9/11, when the
scriptwriters who plot the soap opera we call history handed over to a
new team consisting of the ghosts of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell, and
Franz Kafka. (I *don't like* this 21st century, and I would be very
grateful if whoever stole the real one would give it back. OK?)

Oh yeah. As a random aside: while I'm being interviewed here, my
alter-ego has handed over my weblog (at
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi) to the Evil Overlord
(Planetary). You may  find the EOP's opinions contrast interestingly
with my own ...
  

    
What the fuck is in the water in Scotland, anyway? Between you and Iain
Banks and Ken MacLeod, there's a regular literary revolution underway in the
highlands. You're a transplant to Scotland (albeit a proud one -- tell us
about Feorag and her brewery, please; and don't leave out your membership in
the whisky-tasting club -- also, exactly how many of your friends have been
on the receiving end of a plush nessie with tartan feet with a be-tam-ed
scotsman sat astride her?) and you complain about London like a proper
Edinburrouvian. What makes Edinburgh the place for you?
  

    
Edinburgh is basically a pocket-sized capital city. Population of
about six hundred thousand, but it's got a parliament, airport,  two
major railway stations, several major theatres, a couple of specialist
art cinemas along with the usual horde of multiplexes, and so on. It's
the location of the biggest performing arts festival in Europe, if not
the world, every August. It's at one end of Silicon Glen, so there's a
lot of high-tech startups round about town. What it *doesn't* have so
much of is endless miles of boring tract suburbs, and although it
*does* have some infamously sleazy and dangerous housing projects, as
depicted in "Trainspotting", they're on the edge of town rather than in
the centre. Which means you can live in an apartment right in the
centre of a capital city which is small enough to get around by walking
and where there's a load of stuff happening.

I came up to Edinburgh in '95 to join an early web startup, and I sort
of stayed because it's civilized. Can't say too much about Feorag and
the microbrewery because, er, it went out of business earlier this year
(due to the untimely death of one of the directors), but you can still
get a decent pint in many pubs and unlike England they don't have to
close at 11pm.

But I'm a transplant. Ken and Iain are natives -- they live just up
the coast from Edinburgh, in South and North Queensferry respectively.
(In a US city, they'd be in the suburbs; in Scotland that's way the
hell out of town, in fact, in another town.)

Now, there *is* something in the water in Scotland. A lot of outsiders
underestimate the extent to which Scotland is another country from
England, because for nearly three centuries they were ruled from the
same parliament in London -- but the cultural difference is at least as
pronounced as that between, say, California and the Carolinas, or
Texas and Massachusetts. The political difference is even greater.
Scotland was the great seething seed-bed of the reformation in the
British Isles if you go back to the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, and was run as a theocracy for a couple of hundred years ...
which is perhaps why it is considerably less religiously-inclined than
England (which in turn is a hotbed of atheism compared to just about
anywhere in the States), and also has a strong literary tradition: the
Kirk was extremely keen on teaching the masses to read (so they could
read the Bible, of course). The political culture also differs from
that of England, although you can blame Margaret Thatcher for that: she
specifically pursued policies that alienated the whole of Scotland,
leaving the Left to pick up the nationalist vote. (Which is not where
you'd normally expect it to go.) 

Oh yeah: the plush Nessies are just the local equivalent of maple
syrup and plush mounties in Toronto, or cuddly lobsters in Boston.
  

    
Parenthetical aside: over here, it's Wednesday. Tomorrow, Thursday, is
the last day I'll be available for questions for a while because I'm
flying down to Birmingham (UK, not AL) on Friday morning at zero dark
o'clock for an SF con. I'll be back Monday night (my time), meaning
I'll be able to start posting again in the middle of Monday night (WELL
time). I'm not taking a laptop and I don't fancy trying to read and
post on the WELL from a palm pilot ...
  

    

I'm bereft that Feorag's brewery's gone under. Shows me for not staying
in touch. As for the Nessies, I've always preferred the ceramic ones that
look like they are surfacing from the desktop. I wonder where I can get
a plush Mountie. Oh never mind.
  

    
Hm, if Steffen's an old fart, then I'm grisly with age... and sorry to be 
late to the party, and late starting the book, which I'm thoroughly 
enjoying!

I hear the pubs in England, when they close, just lock everybody in and 
they drink all night. That true of Scotland?

As for the 4 day lapse of the interview, there's no reason you 'n Cory 
have to stop when the next discussion starts, so you can just make up the 
lost time. Or you could do the Neil Gaiman thing, and move in here 
permanently with a jammin' flock o' fans.

(Meanwhile, I'm off to finish SS!)
  

    
Lock-ins are highly variable. Basically, there's a legal loophole that
allows private parties to keep on drinking. But it depends on the
publican being willing to risk losing their licence -- tends to happen
more often in pubs that are drinking dens for the local police, if you
follow me.

Licencing hours in the UK in general are still in the process of
getting over the first world war, when they were introduced to stop
munitions workers getting drunk at lunch-time. The result of
restricting drinking hours is that people don't drink less -- they
drink faster, with predictable results. (You don't win any prizes for
guessing what my position is on the war on drugs, either ...)
  

    
Very much enjoyed *Singularity Sky* although I didn't find the writing
style as complicated as has been implied here.  Mainly, I just thought
it was good.  I thought the setting was very believable and the
characters plausible.

Upon reading it, I was very interested in what you had planned for the
fantasy books; I tend to think, unfortunately, of fantasy and science
fiction as somewhat cliche-ridden genres.  To find an author who could
make a book like *Singularity Sky* feel new and cram it full of
interesting ideas was terrific, and I wondered what you might do in the
fantasy genre.
After reading your post, I'm looking forward to the TOR stuff even
more.
  

    
Cole sez, "Earlier in this interview, you [CS} spoke of "the conservativism
that seems to be in store for generation Y." Did you mean that generation Y
is likely to embrace conservativism (if so, what version and why)? Or did
you mean that, as young adults, gen Y will live in a world shaped to a
considerable degree by the policies of today's conservatives?
"
  

    
You get plush Mounties in Canada of course!  It's the
not-so-completely-foreign-that-they-speak-another-language country
that's right on top of us.  "Go North Young Woman!"

Whoa, Charlie, talk about another country heard from.  Must achieve
book!
  

    
I believe you said you don't use Microsoft.  How about Tao-Group
products from England or QNX from Canada. What Editor do you favor?  I
like to use VEDIT on QNX4.
  

    
Just back from Novacon, in Birmingham. (Believe me, the WELL doesn't
seem to be too accessible on a Treo 600 :)

Catching up: Will Entrekin -- on the subject of fantasy, the first and
most important thing to note is that fantasy is a publishing category
as well as a genre. Publishers can put whatever they like on the spine
of a book and frequently do, for a variety of reasons connected with
(bluntly) what they perceive as being the best way to maximize the
book's revenue-generating potential.

"A Family Trade" and its sequels are closest -- in terms of ideas --
to H. Beam Piper's Paratime stories, including the novel "Lord Kalvan
of Otherwhen". Piper was one of those science-fictional prodigies who
vanished from the landscape before they demonstrated their full
potential, in his case tragically; it's a sign of the quality of his
work that a series of stories and a single short novel from the 1950's
and very early 1960's are still in print today, having outlived about
95% of their contemporaries. 

Piper's paratime stories were set in a multiverse of coexisting
parallel universes, through which his characters who worked for an, er,
paratime patrol, moved at will. They were products of the first
civilization to have developed paratime travel, and they exploited
other time lines for their own benefit. (They were also triumphant
colonialists to the n'th degree, and indeed his heroes were the kind of
people I'd pick if I wanted some off-the-shelf bad guys.) Piper was
sold as SF; forty years later, with a not entirely dissimilar premise,
I'm getting marketed as fantasy. Go figure -- maybe it's the
quasi-mediaeval castles in the background, or something. Certainly I'm
*not* writing Extruded Fantasy Product of the "humans, elves, and
dwarves go out to play" variety that has become so tiresomely popular
in the wake of the great Tolkein boom.

(Now, I'm just back from a con,  more or less awake, but I haven't
managed to ingest enough caffeine this morning to respond coherently to
the next question ...)
  

    
>Piper was sold as SF; forty years later, with a not entirely
>dissimilar premise, I'm getting marketed as fantasy. Go figure --

Very good point, and, yes, another good point about fantasy being a
publishing category as well as a genre.  Perhaps it's because I'm not
yet published, I still have a difficult time with the difference
between what one writes and what one sells as (if that makes sense).
Jonathan Carroll, for example, I think a fine writer; it's always a
crap shoot if I try to look for one of his novels in the book store.

>Certainly I'm *not* writing Extruded Fantasy Product of the "humans,
>elves, and dwarves go out to play" variety that has become so
>tiresomely popular in the wake of the great Tolkein boom.

You hit the nail on the head; that's exactly the kind of cliched I
mean.
Regardless, can't wait for *Family Trade*, especially after
*Singularity Sky*.
And how was the Con?
  

    
William H. Dailey: I edit files using Vim, on whatever platform comes
to hand -- typically OS/X or Linux (SuSE for preference). I'm an old
UNIX-head ... I used to work for a company called the Santa Cruz
Operation, back before they sold the name to a bunch of sharks in
suits.

Oh, and as I'm an old Perl-head, I use POD as a document markup
language and a bunch of filters glommed together with a makefile. And
RCS for version control (you don't need anything more sophisticated for
a novel). But to my shame I have to import the results into Word for a
final reformat-and-save-as-Micro$oft-files step before sending them to
publishers -- they all seem to insist on Word files as the input stage
for their typesetters.

Will Entrekin: you may want to read China Mieville's rant on Tolkein.
It's at: http://www.panmacmillan.com/features/china/debate.htm

The con was great, but my memories are somewhat fuzzy -- the quantity
of alcohol that flows at a regional British SF con would likely induce
disbelief in most American fans. It's a big cultural difference between
US and UK fandom: the two poles around which a Novacon revolves are
the program (one stream) and the bar (one decent real ale). There's no
fan room as such -- the bar doubles as one, kids are allowed in, food
is served, etcetera. It's astonishing how much alcohol fans can get
through during a weekend when they set their minds to it and the bar
stays open as long as there are customers standing!  I'm on the wagon
for the rest of the week, having exceeded my normal monthly alcohol
consumption in the space of about 72 hours without either getting drunk
or succumbing to a hangover.

(Hint: drunkenness ensues when people drink too fast to eliminate the
alcohol. The laid-back environment of an SF con contributes to a kind
of friendly mild inebriation rather than outright drunkenness. And
panels are much livelier when all the panelists have had a beer or two
and are looking forward to getting down to some serious drinking in the
bar afterwards. And Dead Dog parties go further when they're run on a
"contribute five pounds of three bottles of exotic beer" basis. I'm not
sure just why US cons have such a down on alcohol -- it's one of the
main fannish food groups, after all. But that's by the by ...)
  

    
Heh... sounds like a kind of IV drip!
  

    
I wouldn't go that far. But a friendly bar full of fans with a hand
pump dispensing Black Sheep Bitter in good shape (not pasteurized,
gassified, or otherwise tampered with) at ordinary pub price (about
2.15 a pint -- pounds, not dollars, and imperial pints, not your wimpy
colonial short
measures :) makes for a fun atmosphere. (Caveats: it helps that the UK
the drinking age is 18 or 14 with food, you aren't asked for ID unless
you appear to be under age, and the place isn't under seige by 21 year
olds going wild because it's their first ever drop of alcohol.)

In general, getting uptight over people drinking e-v-i-l alcoholic
beverages only seems to make the problems worse, while removing much of
the fun ...

(Y'all going to think I'm some kind of alcoholic now, aren't you?)
  

    
We think you're our kind of alcoholic, Charlie.
  

    
Yeah, the BEST kind.

Back to thinking space opera, though, I've always wondered about alcohol 
in space vs the difficulty of using zero-grav toilets...
  

    
Hmm. I gather that Mir used to have a bottle of brandy for celebrating
major triumphs, but in general alcohol and current-day space tech
don't mix (except as fuel) ...

I keep thinking, every so often, about a non-fiction book I'd like to
pitch around (or maybe an article in BIZARRE magazine, come to think of
it): "TO BOLDLY BLOW: a history of human bodily fluids in orbit".
Everything from the Mercury astronaut who made a sub-orbital flight
lying in a suit full of cold urine after a 3-hour launch pad hold, to
the effects of space-sickness, the way the Mir waste recycling system
works (way more efficiently than the Shuttle or ISS), and Gemini 7 (two
adult men sitting in a capsule the size of a SMART car for twelve
days, shitting into polythene bags and stashing them under their
seats). The thought of adding alcohol to the mess is just too much to
bear!
  

    
Cole writes:

1. What is the literal English translation of the name "Aineko" (the moniker
of the artificial cat in the Accelerando stories)?

2. Does the story "Jury Service" take place in the Accelerando universe?

3. Earlier in this interview, you [CS} spoke of "the conservativism that
seems to be in store for generation Y." Did you mean that generation Y is
likely to embrace conservativism (if so, which version and why)? Or did you
mean that, as young adults, gen Y will live in a world shaped to a
considerable degree by the policies of today's conservatives?
  

    

I think the booze thing is cultural. I've noticed the British and Irish
drink a lot more than the Yanks.

The Re-Search series of books each cover some oddball topic, and
would be a good group to approach regarding Pee in Space.
  

    
Was Mir more efficient because the Russians are less squeamish?

I enjoyed Singularity Sky a lot, but I really, really loved "A Colder
War".  More than anything I read in the last few years at the very least.
Growing up in the UK in the 80s I at least always felt the shadow of the
insane US/Russian military confrontation hanging over us.  I always felt
that nuclear weapons were like something from another planet -- orders of
magnitude more destructive than anything prior, a product of weird science,
like something designed for interplanetary war rather than useful on our
national scale.  So the literal militarization of the Lovecraft monsters
fit perfectly.  In everyday (rather than scientific) terms it's no stranger
to me to have a Lovecraft servitor as a weapon than having a single warhead
of a few hundred pounds that can destroy an entire city.

Hmm, do I have an actual question here.  Not on that subject, I think.  I
am curious about your politics though, politics obviously being an
important part of Singularity Sky.  Left, very left, crazed commie left?
  

    
Cole:

1: It turns out to be a pun. Originally I took "Aibo" and turned it
into "Aineko" - AI Cat - but I'm also told it would translate as
"beautiful cat". Serendipitous, no?

2: No, "Jury Service" is not set in the same universe as
"Accelerando". (Which, incidentally, is now due out in book form from
Ace in July '05.) However, another novel, "Glasshouse", is set several
hundred years after the events in "Accelerando". (And if you want more
of "Jury Service", Cory and I are working on a sequel, "Appeals Court",
which the new ARGOSY magazine should be running next year.)

3: The latter. It seems pretty clear that, in the United States at
least, the forces currently in power are extremely reactionary and
ultra-conservative. They've got a death grip on the mass media, they're
trying to shut down the alternative media, grab control of the
electoral system, and institute what looks like an ultra-conservative
one party state. This isn't going to be a fun society to grow up in, if
they succeed (and they appear to be doing so: even the more liberal of
the current crop of Democrat candidates are pretty reactionary, when
seen from outside). Obligatory literary reference: "Outlaw School" by
Rebecca Ore seems to say it all, far as I'm concerned.

Jacob: dunno if this is going to disappoint you or not, but I tend to
vote Liberal Democrat in elections. Which makes me a boring middle of
the roader in UK political terms, although just where our political map
is going is an ... interesting ... question. (New Labour seems to be
efficiently stealing the Conservatives clothes, the Conservatives have
just elected the Transylvanian prince of darkness as their
parliamentary leader in the hope that the voters have forgotten his
track record as an ultra-conservative and will mistake him for a
centrist, and the Lib Dems seem to be sitting tight while the other
parties re-arrange things so that the Lib Dems are presented as the
party of the Left. Weird!)

Incidentally, if you liked "A Colder War" there's a sort-of-related
novel due out around April (hardcover from Golden Gryphon) titled "The
Atrocity Archives". More Lovecraftiana, more spies and nukes, more
black humour. (If you try to imagine "Declare" by Tim Powers, but
running a Neal Stephenson hero through an intelligence agency designed
by Len Deighton, rather than playing orthodox Le Carre riffs.)
  

    
How do you write a story? When we collaborate, we tend to have some tension
between your urge to outline and mine to pick our way along as we go -- when
you're going it solo, how do you do it?

(btw, how's your collaboration with Rudy Rucker coming?)

What's your philosophy of prose? You get a lot of eyeball kicks in on a
sentence-by-sentence level -- are you consciously doing the
Gibson/Rucker/Sterling thing there, or is it something else?
  

    
I don't outline much; in fact, my tendency to outline during our
collaborations is an anomaly. For me, an outline is a map -- something
to refer to so that I know where I've been (what I've already written,
scene by scene) and a rough idea of where I might be going. The forward
outline can get torn up and re-designed if the actual story goes
somewhere else; the backward outline is useful if I've got a story
that's diverged from the direction I wanted it to flow in and I'm
looking for the scene where it kinked so that I can patch it up. I've
written whole novels without an outline -- and others where 10% of the
writing work went into designing the outline.  It's just a tool, in
other words, and you use it on those jobs it's appropriate for.

Normally when I write a story I have a bunch of ideas and a general
direction to write in. Sometimes it's really specific -- novels often
begin with me brain-dumping a load of background into a note file --
and sometimes it's vague.

The reason for outlining when working on a collaboration is that
collaboration is Different -- because we aren't a group mind.

I know of three ways for two authors to collaborate. In one, an author
writes a story and their partner then re-drafts it, rewriting some or
all of it. In the next, an author writes an outline and the other one
expands it, turning it into an entire story --  this may be a subclass
of the first technique, but it's more often used in sharecropping,
where a junior author takes a novel plan from a big "name" and develops
it. The third technique, which *we* use, is to play ping-pong,
bouncing a file back and forth and adding a chunk more text at each
exchange. This is in some ways more economical of writing effort, and
can produce unexpected and better results (both authors get to exercise
their imagination maximally),  but the drawback for me is that I'm not
a mind-reader; if I don't know what you're thinking of for a story, I
can end up driving in a completely different direction and defeating
your attempts at steering the plot (and vice versa). This is where an
outline comes in handy -- not as a rigid prescriptive guide, but just
so we both know roughly what the story is meant to achieve. Working
without one we end up with a picaresque, cute, jump-around-the-map
travelogue with no beginning,  middle, or end, and probably no plot.

As for theory-of-prose ... I don't think I have one. I go on
autopilot. I have an instinctive preference for
first-person-present-tense narrative, which some people find odd: to
me, it makes it easier to get inside a viewpoint character's head and
to deliver a sense of tension. And I don't like to get bored, to have
the narrative bog down in pedestrian detail, so I throw in lots of
eyeball kicks to keep the reader alert. I suspect if you stripped the
eyeball kicks out my writing would feel a bit dull and pedestrian; I'm
not exactly the world's greatest literary  stylist.

(NB: Rudy Rucker and I have discussed the possibility of
collaborating, but we're not actually doing so right now -- we're both
a bit busy on other projects. Like, oh, this here novella I'm working
on with some guy called Doctorow :)
  

    

(LibDem is about where I was thinking of "left" actually, and probably what
I would vote if I still did, sad to say.)

I look forward to the Atrocity Archive then!

What sort of non-science-fiction do you read (books, journals, newspapers,
blogs)?
  

    
Sorry about the brief absence -- I've just had to turn around the
copy-edits on a novel at short notice. (It's funny how publishers don't
seem to factor in a couple of extra weeks for intercontinental postage
in their schedules ...)

These days I have the attention span of a stimulant-OD'd weasel. I
used to be able to read books, but the web -- and broadband access in
particular -- has absolutely destroyed my ability to focus for a long
period on any one thing. This is not, you understand, a good thing.
Despite that, I try to expose myself to a whole bunch of information on
a routine basis. I usually start each day by skimming the online
edition of The Guardian, and checking some large websites -- slashdot, 
BoingBoing (big surprise there), The Register (the tech journalist
instinct dies hard), and some other usual suspects. I hop onto
LiveJournal, where a surprising number of my friends have diaries --
it's a better way of keeping up to date than usenet these days, the
latter being overrun by spammers and trolls -- and bounce around
various blogs (to which you can find a bunch of links in the blogroll
on my own blog, at http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi).

Magazines: New Scientist, usually every week. Scientific American:
yes, but it's turned kind of crap in the past couple of years, losing
the technical edge of its articles. Whole Earth Review (when it's
around). And just about anything that catches my eye via the web.

I have a serious book problem, namely, I buy books faster than I can
read them. When I was young I used to speed-read, but following a
detached retina -- which required emergency surgery -- fifteen years
ago, I've been unable to reach my previous speed, so I plough through
text at roughly 350wpm, or a page a minute. Combine this with a poor
attention span and a tendency towards 500-page novels, and I can spend
a week reading one book in my spare time. Not Good. Of late I've been
trying in a desultory sort of way to incorporate history books into my
diet, but it's so easy to get behind ... I've been reading Simon
Schama's "Citizens" for about 18 months now!
  

    
Ditto with <jacob> on "A Colder War".  I was sorry not to see you at
the last Eastercon; I'd just happened to have finished reading _Toast_.
I liked a lot of the stories in that collection, but it's "A Colder
War", with the blend of horror and alternate history and secret history
and just plain banality of evil, that really stuck with me.  The
combination of Lovecraftian horror and precise military jargon was
disturbingly plausible.

(And yes, of course, I'll be buying _The Atrocity Archives_ as soon as
it appears.)
  

    
I should add: "The Atrocity Archive" (the short novel in the book --
there's also a sequel novella) was originally conceived of as the first
volume of a trilogy. Plans change, but volume #2, "The Jennifer
Morgue", is already plotted out and ready to roll as soon as a
publisher throws money at me, and there may be more than one subsequent
volume ... but given my existing schedule, even if a publisher offered
me a contract tomorrow, I couldn't write it before late 2004/early
2005 and it wouldn't see print before 2006. 

The original idea of "The Atrocity Archive" was to take a Neal
Stephenson hero and drop him into a secret service out of Len Deighton,
with Lovecraftian horrors in the background. "The Jennifer Morgue", if
it happens, will be the Ian Fleming remix -- and I've got vague plans
for #3, "The Fuller Memorandum" (in the style of Adam Hall) and #4,
"The Nightmare Stacks" (in the style of Christopher Hodder-Williams,
the brilliant and now mostly forgotten inventor of the British 1950's
techno-thriller). All of which is likely to prove hopelessly recherche
and hard to explain to an American publisher, who will probably insist
on John LeCarre, but what the hell.

(As a point of reference for "Atrocity Archive", while I was writing
it a friend and critic was yelling at me, "for god's sake, don't read
DECLARE by Tim Powers until you finish it!" Luckily I listened to him
... or I'd have read DECLARE, gone "oh shit", and abandoned my own
novel. Which, in the end, turns out to be *nothing* like DECLARE,
except for the small matter that both novels centre around rogue
divisions of SOE that deal with occult nightmares, special ops SAS
teams in operations against said nightmares that go horribly wrong, a
misfit hero who has trouble with women, and sundry other trivial
coincidences. Erk. Except in tone they're *completely* different books,
which is weird ...)
  

    
>American publisher, who will probably insist
 on John LeCarre<

Who? Oh, you mean Tom Clancy.
  

    
Cascio: we're talking about publishers here, not Hollywood: I think
they're maybe smart enough to grasp that a British writer is probably
going to be better at writing a pastiche of other British writers, and
that they can get better Clancy imitators locally. 

Publishing, being an industry that for the most part has narrow
margins, doesn't seem to attract the kind of rapacious corporate greasy
pole climbers who, being narrowly focussed on expanding their personal
bottom line, can make working in other media a real pain for people
who're in it for the art. Indeed, almost all the editors I know are
smart, clueful people who are in the field because they fundamentally
believe that literature is a good thing in and of itself. 

(Working with people like that is one of the rewards of being a
freelance fiction writer, as opposed to, say, a technical author
working for corporate middle managers.)
  

    
I wasn't sure how long Charlie and Cory wanted to go with this, but 
realize there's been no posts in a week, and we failed to say THANKS to 
Charlie for staying on a bit longer, and to Cory for leading the charge! 
Onward!

Of course, if you want to wander back and talk some more, the topic's open 
and you're always welcome.
  

    
I'll second the thanks.  Good discussion on all counts.  I haven't had
anything to add for a week, though, and, unfortunately, don't now,
either.  But good talking to you, Cory and Charlie.  Good luck with
your writing and publishing endeavours, too.
  

    
I'm back, I'm back!

Reason for silence: a five-day shopping trip to London. Where I bumped
into none other than Cory (which was odd, because I thought he was in
San Francisco :)

Oh, and as a side-note, following a meeting with my editor at Orbit, I
now have UK hardcover dates: "Singularity Sky" will be out in May next
year, with "Iron Sunrise" (due out the same time in the US) following
it in February '05.
  

    
Congrats, Charlie!