Charles Stross's Blog, page 130

Scared now.

Amazon sell some really weird stuff; for example, tins of uranium ore.

No, that's not the scary bit.

The scary bit is that customers who bought this item (the aforementioned uranium ore) also bought copies of Halting State and Volume Four of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming (insofar as extracts are available for purchase). I seem to recall writing about that here.

I think I'm going to go and hide under the bed now. (Yes, the bedroom is circular; not a right angle in it!)

Back to the Moon?

I was thinking I ought to be looking for something creative to say here — blogging gets old, after the first eight years — when a bright young thing at $PUBLISHING_COMPANY emailed me to say: "on the 20th, it's going to be the 40th anniversary of moon landing day, wanna blog about where you were and what it means to you on our corporate soapbox?"

To which I said "sure, but I was only four years old at the time ..."

I hope to live long enough to be four years old that way all over again, some day.

Wh

Business as usual

If you're wondering where I've gotten to since finishing the autobiography series, I'm back from a long weekend in London and getting back to grips with work: in this case, checking the copy-edits to the sixth Merchant Princes book, "The Trade of Queens" (due out next April in the US). (As an aside: if you're in the UK and waiting for #4, "The Merchants' War", to come out over here in paperback, I'm afraid I've got bad news: things seem to have vanished down a black hole. I don't know what's ha

How I got here in the end: my non-tech autobiography

For the last twelve major blog entries I've been writing up my non-writing work autobiography: the truth about what one writer had to do for a living before he finally switched to writing full-time. If you want to read them all laid out end-to-end in one convenient place, you can find the whole story here. (Warning: 25,000 words — about 80-90 pages.) Alternatively, here are the blog entries (and comment threads) in sequence:

Part One: How I got here in the end

Part Two: catching the bug

Part Three:

How I got here in the end, part twelve: the end of the beginning

The cyberpunk lifestyle reads a whole lot better in fiction than as a lifestyle manifesto. Take it from someone who's lived through it.

Picture this: you're a former drug dealer who has turned to hacking for a living. You're crashing in an apartment a bit older than Texas, surrounded by about seventeen computers, sleeping on a futon with a girlfriend with metre-long purple dreadlocks, and planning your defection from one net-based futuristic corporation to another over Korean take-away food. It s

How I got here in the end, part eleven: the music stops

I don't remember very much about 1999; it was all a bit of a blur.

I know I was there, physically: I remember 1998, and I wouldn't be here today if I hadn't lived through 1999. But 1999 itself is an enigma wrapped in a puzzle enrobed in a chocolate coating of darkest mystery. Lots of things happened in 1999 and I remember some of those things but I don't remember much about being there, probably because it was so intense ...

How I got here in the end, part ten: head-first into the Singularity

We human beings are not used to rapid change.

Let me qualify that remark. We may think we're used to rapid change, but for the most part we never see it, up close and personal. We're easily overwhelmed by events if they don't progress in a linear manner. As they spin out of control we find ourselves watching, feeling as if we're moving in slow motion — it's a commonplace in accidents such as car crashes, and what it betrays is a cognitive malfunction as we spend precious moments observing rather

Hiatus ...

There are a couple more chunks of the tech sector autobiography still to come. However, writing it is turning out to be a time-consuming process (17,000 words so far — about a fifth of a novel), and I'm off for an extended weekend in London on Thursday. (If I'd known about the ghastly heat wave when I booked the trip I'd have picked another week; as it is, I'm just glad I picked a hotel with air conditioning.) To add to the fun, when I get home I'm expecting to trip over the copy-edits to "The T

How I got here in the end, part nine: the little start-up that could

The Red Queen's Race: "you've got to run just as fast as you can to stand still," as the Red Queen told Alice. That's what it's like all the time when you're working inside a startup venture that's actually going somewhere, or so it seems to me.

In late 1997, I signed on as a contractor for Gavin and Dave's new venture. Little did I know just where it was going ...

I have a new Book!

I have a new book! Readers (in the UK) report that copies of WIRELESS, my first new short story collection in eight years, are showing up in bookstores and being mailed out from Amazon; the US edition is due out on July 7th, but is probably leaking into shops by now.

Contents include the Locus-award winning novella "Missile Gap", a bunch of other stories including "A Colder War", "Trunk and Disorderly", and "Down on the Farm", a collaborative novelette with Cory Doctorow called "Unwirer" (publis