[extropy-chat] Stross in The Times

[Damien Broderick]

At 02:13 PM 6/6/2005 +1000, Brett wrote to Charlie Stross:

>So what are you a Canadian living in the US or what? I'm curious because
>I know that you are an observer of developments in ideas futures and I
>am wondering where in the world you are observing them from. I'm
>watching from Australia.

Charlie's profile just appeared in the Times:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/printFriendly/0,,1-1506-1639410,00.html

June 05, 2005

The geek taking over the galaxy

If imagination is the key to success for a writer, Charles Stross has it in 
spades. His own future is looking bright, writes David Stenhouse

'I've had 15 years of total obscurity," explains the pale, shaven-headed 
man with the extravagant black beard as he sits squinting at the sun 
outside an Edinburgh cafe.

"I feel like a dog that has been chasing cars for years," he says. "Now 
I've finally caught one."

Charles Stross, a former pharmacist, computer programmer and full-time 
dreamer about mankind's future, is allowed to feel proud of himself. For 
more than a decade he has been labouring in literature's version of a 
distant galaxy. Now it looks like he may be about to achieve major 
mainstream success.

Critics around the world are heaping praise on the Edinburgh-based writer, 
who is up for no fewer than three Hugo awards, the most prestigious prize 
in the world of science fiction. More impressive still, the three 
nominations are for different pieces of work. His galaxy-spanning thriller 
Iron Sunrise is nominated as best novel and two novellas are up for 
separate awards.

As literary prizes go, the Hugos are part Booker prize and part beauty 
pageant, nominated by science-fiction fans.

In August, when the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention comes to Glasgow, 
Stross's output will be judged and voted on by a jury of his peers. If he 
wins, the critical acclaim could well see him join the ranks of Iain Banks 
and JG Ballard as a writer who commands mainstream respect as well as a 
cult following.

Stross certainly seems to have the makings of a star. It's not just that 
his novels are packed with enough high technology and wild invention to 
satisfy the most abstruse tastes; his main theme is one which everyone in 
this sector of the galaxy should be interested in.

"I'm really fascinated by what it means to be human. The human condition is 
very weird, very wonderful, very wild and varied.

"A glimpse in a history book will tell you that things have not always been 
as they are now. The Aztecs were unimaginably strange psychologically. This 
was a civilisation that every 50 years executed thousands of people to make 
sure the sun rose the next day. Nevertheless, they were a stable human 
society.

"Science fiction is the mirror image of the historical. It allows us to 
show people in circumstances we haven't experienced, in events that have 
not yet happened, might not happen or in their more fantastical form may 
well happen.

"What interests me is the idea that human beings are behaviourally plastic. 
This all means you can engineer the human condition, and that's before you 
start to imagine the post-human."

If it all sounds a bit abstract then it is not. In Stross's novels men and 
women still drink, laugh, argue and make love. Teenagers are still 
recognisably teenagers.

It's just that they wear cloned clothes and cleaner robots are afraid to 
enter their bedrooms. These human characters allow even readers who don't 
have a grip on the technology to enjoy Stross's books.

In Iron Sunrise, the plucky heroine Wednesday Shadowmist has a virtual 
friend called Herman whose thoughts are beamed directly into her 
cerebellum. There is also an evil cult called the ReMastered (the Space 
Nazis) that have, as their name suggests, been given the kind of upgrade 
that eugenecists could only dream of.

So what has given 40-year-old Stross, who lives with his wife and two cats 
in a flat in Leith, Edinburgh, such a visionary view of mankind's future? 
Leaving aside the fact that as a small boy in his native Leeds he would 
devour all the science-fiction books in his local library, inhaling the 
dystopian visions of JG Ballard and Brian Aldiss, Stross's early twenties 
gave him all the inspiration he needed when he grabbed a ringside seat at a 
revolution.

In the 1980s, when most of us had not yet heard of the internet, Stross had 
one of the earliest e-mail addresses in the country. Taking part in what he 
describes as "possibly the biggest revolution in communication since the 
invention of language" blew his mind.

Nowadays just about every cafe in town is full of people tapping away on 
their laptops. But Stross is a hardcore computer user, more interested in 
code and programming than in fancy gadgets. It's not hard to imagine him in 
a cubicle in Silicon Valley happily feeding endless lines of digital code 
into a computer mainframe.

Sometimes it makes him seem like an ubergeek. At one point he says 
"regrettably I'm monolingual in human tongues. I deal with computers but 
not foreign languages".

He's not joking. His website contains diatribes on the state of science 
fiction and attacks on internet censorship. He is a regular on newsgroups 
and bulletin boards and his site features nostalgic hymns of praise to 
obscure computer languages.

At one point he presents a lighthearted description of himself in "geek 
code", a mock furmula invented by himself.

Once decoded, he says, it reveals he is a "geek of technical writing", that 
his T-shirts tend to bear political slogans (though today he is wearing 
standard goth black, which seems to have gone a bit purple in the wash) and 
he'll "be the first in line to get the cybernetic interface installed into 
my skull".

Even without the interface, Stross believes in networking. Send him an 
e-mail and he will be happy to send you the electronic manuscript of 
whichever book he's working on. And he'd welcome your comments.

It's a million miles away from the touchy, self-protective way most writers 
behave.

"Of course I become defensive if someone doesn't like my book," he says. 
"That is a natural reaction, but you must be careful not to take it too 
far. Stephen King had a very good piece of advice for would-be 
storytellers. If there's something you really really like but several test 
readers don't get it, you had better look at taking it out. Investing too 
much of your ego in the work is going to drive out the work and leave only 
the ego."

But for all Stross' success, it is important to realise that, at least 
once, he got left behind by the technological revolution he now admires.

In 1994, Stross had a brilliant idea. Working as a young computer 
programmer and filled with excitement at the possibilities of the internet, 
he began to write The Web Architect's Handbook, the first guide to 
designing a personal website.

The dot com boom was a few years in the future, but there was a hunger for 
information on how to exploit the resources of the internet. Stross's 
knowledge could have made him a fortune. But he got sidetracked by other 
projects and by the time the book appeared in 1996 it had been swamped by 
other titles on the same subject.

It seems like a classic missed opportunity, but though the guide came to 
nothing, he learned a vital lesson from it. The future comes quicker than 
you think.

More than 10 years on, the bewildering speed of scientific progress is the 
theme behind Stross's new book, Accelerando, a novel made up of nine 
interconnecting short stories that one critic has described as his 
"renaissance cathedral", another says it is "destined to change the face of 
the genre".

Accelerando describes a universe that, starting the day after tomorrow, 
accelerates in technological know-how so fast that before long human beings 
are downloading their personalities and uploading new talents at the press 
of a button.

At its heart the novel is a comic, sprawling family saga. The first chapter 
begins a few years from now with a gadget freak called Manfred Macx. Within 
a few chapters it has spun forward into the far future, following the 
adventures of his extended family. Oh, and some of the book is narrated by 
a robot cat.

"My job is to entertain people," explains Stross. "If I don't entertain 
people they're not going to read it. I am competing in an economy of 
information with the movies, the internet and the new Dr Who series, so I 
have to keep people amused."

That mixture of human comedy and cutting-edge technology clearly pays 
dividends. Even leaving aside the Hugo nominations, critics of science 
fiction are falling over themselves to praise Stross's work.

Andrew Wilson, the editor of Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction 
(an anthology of new Scottish sci-fi to which Stross has contributed an 
original twist on the Faustian pact), sees Stross as being in the vanguard 
of a new wave of Scottish science fiction writing "It used to be that if 
you spoke about a Scottish spacecraft, people just laughed. But now we are 
the country that produced Dolly the sheep, the country that develops 
artificial intelligence," says Wilson. "You don't need to pretend to be 
American to write science fiction. Charlie is clearly a massive talent. 
Rather like taking a broken down old car and sticking a fusion engine in 
it, he has the capacity to transform material that was looking old and give 
it new life.

"I think Accelerando is a crowning achievement. And this will be his year."

The 63rd World Science Fiction Convention is held in Glasgow from August 
4-8. Accelerando is published in Britain by Orbit on August 4