Charles Stross's Blog, page 116

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss ... not.

So we have a Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government (those words, I think, throw the difference between the British and American political weltanschaung into stark relief).

I'm really not a fan of the Conservatives; 18 years of ThatcherMajorism left deep scars. (If you're American and not a fan of George W. Bush, it was like this: Thatcher treated her foes with exactly the same contempt as Bush's people did. And eighteen years of contempt backed up by malice and a legislative...

PDF: Satanic horror from the abyss, or merely evil?

Ahem. It has just been drawn to my attention that the lovingly-compiled packet of Hugo nominated works, made available to the elligible voters by this year's worldcon committee, contains nothing but PDF (Acrobat) files. What can I say? I've been overseas, then I've been busy.

This is probably not the right place for my rant about why PDF is not an ebook file format (hint), but PDF is not an ebook file format. It's a page layout format, complete with margins, gutters, page numbers, and loads...

CMAP #9: Ebooks

There is no topic in the publishing industry this decade that is the source of as many misconceptions, superstitions, lies, plausible untruths, and idiocies as ebooks. Ebooks generate more email to my from my readers than just about any other topic. And the situation is only going to get worse over the next few years, so strap your safety helmet on tight ...

I am coming to this topic from two different angles. Firstly, I'm an author and some of my books are published through ebook channels...

We appear to have a hung parliament

Good.

While I'm disappointed by the evaporation of the Clegg effect, I'm really hoping that neither the Conservatives nor Labour have an outright majority (in the Conservative's case, a narrow enough shortfall to resort to the same pact with the Democratic Unionists that kept John Major's government running through its twilight years).

Let them learn how to negotiate again. And? A side-order of electoral reform, please.

(You might have guessed by now that I'm not an instinctive fan of...

FAQ: Fanfic

There is currently a debate/flame war/storm in a teacup raging in certain quarters of the internet over fantasy author Diana Gabaldon's recent declaration of war on fanfic. Seeing this is a topic of major concern to writers and readers of fanfic, I thought I'd better nail my own colours to the mast. If you know what fanfic is and you don't care, you might as well stop reading now.

If you don't know what fanfic is, well, wikipedia has this to say: "... stories about characters or settings...

Party Election Broadcast

It probably hasn't escaped your attention that we're going through a general election campaign here — and it's the most fascinatingly unpredictable one in a third of a century. British election campaigns are fast and furious; rather than happening on a regular cycle, an election is called at some point within five years of the previous one — either at the discretion of the prime minister, or in event of the House of Commons voting a motion of No Confidence in the government. The campaign...

The real reason why Steve Jobs hates Flash

There has been some ... interesting news from the tech sector this week.

Firstly, the Apple vs. Adobe vendetta gets even nastier, with a public letter from Steve Jobs explaining why Adobe's Flash multimedia format will not ever be allowed into the garden of pure ideology that is the iPhone/iPad fork of OSX.

Secondly, Hewlett-Packard are buying Palm, apparently for Palm's WebOS — with rumours of plans to deploy a range of WebOS tablets to rival the iPad — at the same time, they're killing their...

CMAP #8: Lifestyle or Job?

Misconceptions abound, and not only about the publishing industry. In this posting, I'm going to talk a little bit about what it is to be a commercial fiction author.

Most people have a very romanticized view of what it is that authors do. Firstly, there's a widespread perception that the workload involved is relatively easy — in modern western nations, the level of functional literacy is high enough that a majority of the population can read a book, and write (at least to the extent of...

Back home

I got home yesterday after a 25 hour journey, door-to-door, and am now merely fuzzy-headed with jet lag. Talking to fellow-passengers on the short-haul from Paris, it sounded like everyone had a horror story of volcanic disruption to tell. Anyway, my plan for the next few days is to take things easy, catch up on the domestic stuff that has been waiting for me for the past month (have you any idea how much junk mail a British general election campaign can generate?), and get back to work when ...

Lessons learned

I've just checked in online for my flight home; barring last-minute delays and cancellations, I should be home on Monday after just shy of an entire month in Japan. I will admit to being a bit frazzled. The effect of that damn volcano has been to cause the worst delays to the civil aviation industry since 9/11 — arguably, the worst ever, in terms of cancelled flights. I count myself lucky to be going home only six days late: I know other folks who've been delayed for a fortnight or more.

I...