Charles Stross's Blog, page 124

Your name in lights

Ever wondered why sometimes the names of characters in works of fiction are ... familiar? In the SF field there's a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tradition called Tuckerization (after SF author Wilson Tucker), whereby authors sometimes use the names of friends or acquaintances in their stories.

There's another SF tradition, called the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund, "created in 1953 for the purpose of providing funds to bring well-known and popular members of science fiction fandom familiar to fans on...

Imbeciles: update

So, on Friday I got together with $LOCAL_FILM_DIRECTOR and we went round to visit our MP, Mark Lazarowicz, at his constituency surgery, and talk about the Digital Economy Bill. My particular angle was clauses 42 and 43 (perhaps better known as the "how to fuck every literary agency and publisher's rights department in the UK" clauses), but of course we covered other areas of interest too — the problems any attempts at bringing in "three strikes" anti-file sharing penalties will cause for the ...

It's a crime

There are some interesting structural differences between writing a police procedural novel (that sub-genre of crime that deals with how the police pursue the process of detection) and writing a science fiction thriller. I'm currently elbow-deep in the guts of a pantomine horse of a novel (SF thriller at one end, police procedural at the other) so this is a topic of some interest to me right now.

One of the features of genre crime fiction is closure: the natural order of things is out of...

Imbeciles: the second round

The Digital Economy Bill gets stinkier the longer it sits unflushed in the toilet of the parliamentary process.

Last week I was angry, but now it's personal:

The Digital Economy Bill, published on Friday, will bring in unexpected registration requirements and government control over authors' agents and some publishers, according to copyright experts at national law firm Beachcroft LLP. Such agents — along with certain picture libraries, software resellers, record companies, film distributors...

The myth of the starship

(NB: As starships do not in fact exist, no starships were harmed in the production of this essay. Also, this is just words. If they upset you, go lie down in a dark room for half an hour then drink a glass of water; you'll feel better.)

Actually, I tell a lie. There are five starships that we know of; Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1, Voyager 2, and New Horizons. But they're a far cry from the gleaming interstellar transports of science fiction. New Horizons is the most recent of them...

Climategate

Various folks are getting upset for one reason or another about the hacking and redistribution of internal emails from the University of East Anglia's climate research unit.

Frankly, I can't be arsed commenting on it — because marine biologist and SF writer Peter Watts has already said it for me:

The fact is, we are all humans; and humans come with dogma as standard equipment. We can no more shake off our biases than Liz Cheney could pay a compliment to Barack Obama. The best we can do-- the...

More holding patterns

If you're wondering what this week's excuse for scanty blog updates could possibly be, it might have something to do with me being 40,000 words into the (projected) 100,000 word first draft of 2011's novel, "Rule 34". It's a sequel to "Halting State", set some five years after the earlier novel, and focusing on the way our definitions of crime and morality (not to mention the practice of policing) change over time. (Yes, the title is an explicit call-out to you-know-what. The term "Hitler...

A message from our sponsors

Just in case you thought I'd given up writing novels for good to switch to blogging full time, a little bit of news: FedEx just delivered a box this morning, and it contains my author copies of the Ace mass market edition of The Jennifer Morgue. Which, according to Amazon, is officially published on January 9th ... but if I'm getting the copies it's already printed and in the publisher's warehouse, which means it'll be arriving in regular bookstores in the next two weeks.

I've pretty much...

Imbeciles

I was trying to think of something coherent to say about the Digital Economy Bill published this week, but I'm too damned angry right now.

I'm a self-employed media professional working in the entertainment industry, who earns his living by creating intellectual property and licensing it to publishers. You might think I'd be one of the beneficiaries of this proposed law: but you'd be dead wrong. This is going to cripple the long tail of the creative sector — it plays entirely to the interests ...

Bloody computers.

I spent most of Tuesday driving home. Checked my email before I left; there seemed to be a network issue with my server, but I didn't bother checking until the evening, when I got home.

Bad mistake.

The box this blog runs on threw a kernel panic some time late on Monday night/early on Tuesday, and panicked repeatedly on reboot. Diagnostics demonstrated that (a) the RAID array was hosed, and (b) the machine's memory had gone bad ... right as it was handling probably 30-50,000 emails and...