Charlie's Diary

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Tue, 29 Jun 2004

On having a life

I spent the weekend visiting my parents in Leeds, and yesterday was my wedding anniversary. Not to mention the last bout of paintwork in the bedroom. So if you're wondering where I've been, I guess the answer is "having a life". And I'm having a life for the rest of this week too, I think. Off to London on Thursday for an interview, refurnishing the bedroom and getting everything out of storage, and generally recovering from submitting one novel before I begin a batch of scheduled re-writes on the next.

If I can spend just one week with my brain in neutral, I should be feeling much better by the end of it. But it's not exactly fertile blogging material, is it?

[ Discuss working too hard ]



posted at: 16:35 | path: /excuses | permanent link to this entry

Fri, 25 Jun 2004

Whew

I completed my final pass through "Accelerando" yesterday, and emailed it to my editor. It weighs in at 15 words short of 145,000, and it actually feels like a novel. One which has taken me since June 1999 to write, overlapping with several other, lighter, works along the way.

Today I'm about to head off for a weekend visit to my parents. Back Sunday night.

Hope you don't mind the slow pace of recent updates ...

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 23:21 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 24 Jun 2004

Who's that man on stage? Part 2

To coincide with the UK launch of Singularity Sky, I'm doing a reading and book signing on Wednesday 30th, at 7pm, in Ottakar's Bookshop, at 57 George Street, Edinburgh. Got that? It's next Wednesday at 7pm. Be there, or be sober.

Update: No I'm not. We're waiting for some material from Orbit; in the meantime, the reading's being rescheduled for some time in July. I'll post the new date and time here in due course.

[ Discuss writing ]



posted at: 16:34 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Wed, 23 Jun 2004

More from our sponsors

Iron Sunrise

The postman woke me up again this morning, with a big fat envelope containing the above: my first hardcover copy of Iron Sunrise (and a couple of copies of the paperback edition of Singularity Sky, too). Wow, my second new book of the year. I get the advance copies about a week before the big boxes go out of the warehouse -- you know what to do, right?

Oh yeah: the June 28'th issue of Publisher's Weekly ran a starred advance review. It goes like this:

Best known for his short fiction, Stross shows that he's a master of the novel form as well in this exciting sequel to 2003's acclaimed Singularity Sky, serving up compelling space opera and cutting-edge tech with a tasty dash of satire. In the 24th century, a McWorld ("bland, comfortable, tolerant ... boring") called New Moscow apparently has been destroyed by trade rival New Dresden -- but not before New Moscow launched its own Slower-Than-Light (STL) counterstrike: a massive ship accelerated to 80% the speed of light. The U.N., now central Earth government, knows New Dresden was set up. They need the STL's recall code, now known only to a handful of New Moscow's ambassadors -- but someone has been systematically assassinating them. U.N. special operative Rachel Mansour and her husband, engineer Martin Springfield, must protect the last living ambassador and find out who's really responsible for the whole mess. Stross skillfully balances suspense and humor throughout, offering readers -- especially fans of Iain M. Banks and Ken MacLeod -- a fascinating future that seems more than possible.

Which is not bad, for a summary that completely omits the major characters and main subplot ... not to mention the talking cat sidekick.

I'm now in the final pass through "Accelerando" and, if all goes to plan, I'll be emailing it to my editors before the end of the month.

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 13:29 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Sun, 20 Jun 2004

A taxing time

In this age of the interwebnet thingy, I'm revisiting my policy of not having anything to do with online banking, online utility bills, and indeed online anything to do with tax or business expenses or savings.

And you know what? I've decided to get even more serious about my everything-on-paper policy. Electronic statements are right out.

As Wendy Grossman observes, paperless phone/gas/electricity statements don't actually save you any time. What they save is expensive laser-printer time and postal charges for your utility company, which is another matter.

But a more subtle point occurs to me. The Inland Revenue, as a matter of policy, audit some folks at random every year pour encourager les autres. I'm no tax evader, but even so as a self-employed person there's a finite probability that I'll get a nasty letter one day saying "justify these expense claims for the trip you made to a science fiction convention in Burkina Faso in 1973". Well, not 1973 -- they only go back seven years, as I understand it. But you'd better be ready to produce the evidence if they ask, or else.

Now, it is possible that the banks and utility companies will keep your electronic statements on line for seven years, but I wouldn't bet on it. After all, you are the one with the responsibility to the income tax authorities; the utility companies have entirely different obligations which don't include acting as your personal amanuensis. Moreover, once the accounting system is online it becomes easier for some bright spark at Head Office to decide to enhance shareholder value (and their career) by dinking with the files delivered to the customers. The odds are that even if your statements of account are online in seven years time, the format they're in will have mutated radically. Say goodbye to any rational hope of being able to scrape the data out of the web pages and drag them into a spreadsheet -- you're still going to end up slaving over a hot calculator.

And it gets worse. In this age of enhanced consumer choice (which we're supposed to be grateful for and accept as a substitute for the defective, rusty democracy 1.0 that's subject to a product recall notice, it seems) we can change bank. And we can change gas supplier or change electricity company. Never mind the phone and cable bills, right? Now. Suppose I start getting my gas from a new company. Am I still going to have access to my old supplier's statements database? Am I buggery. They've deleted the account and giving me access would be a business overhead that doesn't benefit them.

All of this might be okay if the statements are made available in a friendly open file format and if all customers who receive online bills actually remember to download them and store them somewhere sensible. But most of us change computers every couple of years, and a five year old computer is very long in the tooth indeed: and data loss during a migration is one of those facts of life that even experts struggle to deal with. If your gas bills from GasCoPrime five years ago are in Excel 95 format and your current gas bills from GasCoSecundus are in XML and you don't have a copy of Excel, you're up shit creek. If you've also lost your Excel 95 gas bills from GasCoPrime you've probably lost your paddle as well. Proving the legitimacy of your archival expenses claims to the Revenue just got a whole lot harder.

In contrast, five years' raw receipts and hardcopy printed accounts for my self-employed occupation occupy a plastic box the size of a filing cabinet drawer that sits in the attic. (Yes, I live in a single-storey apartment with an attic.) And the most recent couple of years -- including the current unsorted stuff -- fills another filing cabinet drawer. And y'know something? I'm going to keep it that way as long as I can.

[Link] [Discuss politics]



posted at: 11:58 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 17 Jun 2004

I have a living room again

... much to my surprise.

To get it I near as dammit filled a roadside waste dumpster. But I now have a living room that actually feels like a living room.

Still to do: find somewhere sane to stash the bicycle and beer engines, strip the wallpaper left by the previous occupants (gosh, did I really move in nine years ago?), then plaster and re-paper. (This is rendered non-trivial by the wall of bookcases to empty, relocate, and re-fill during the exercise.) Then add new curtain rail and curtains, replace light fittings, add another thirty metres (minimum) of bookshelves, get the gas fire serviced, finish re-covering the sofa, and replace the fireplace surround. Finally, replace the (aged, decrepit and underused) A/V stack.

I think I know what my next advance is going to go on ... the trick is going to be not letting this chore list delay the book after that.



posted at: 16:10 | path: /excuses | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 15 Jun 2004

Apropos nothing

I just issued myself a new PGP (actually GPG) keyset.

In the unlikely event you need to send me confidential email, my fingerprint is:

39EC 8265 03D1 1511 8B51  6419 1244 9F1F 96C7 FAE2

And my full public key is:

-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Darwin)
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=cxjx
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----

(It's also available from the PGP keyservers.)

I haven't used PGP enough, historically. In these paranoid days it's every citizen's duty to do so ...



posted at: 19:26 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

So iTunes Music Store Europe just launched ...

I went and had a look.

79 pence for a DRM-locked track is pretty steep, about equivalent to US $1.20; this is one of the most objectionable things about the whole commercial download biz, they're just trying to soak us for a ludicrous amount of money. A 50-minute CD or equivalent, say 10 tracks, would cost the thick end of £8.00, or about US $14.00, and for what? Bandwidth? (Probably only a tenth of the cover price -- or less -- goes to the performers. And if you can find a telco who'll charge you even a tenth of that for half a gig of bandwidth, you're a mug. Basically it's solid profit, all the way to the stock ticker.)

I suppose there's always Hymn if, like me, you go through new Macs so fast that your three-copies licence would be toast before you can blink. That would soften the blow. And being able to buy individual tracks rather than having to pony up for an entire CD of forgettable padding is a minor improvement. But ...

What I really didn't like about the iTunes music store is quite simply the fact that if this was a real store three quarters of the shelves would be empty. The first six bands I searched for weren't available. Now, I'll freely admit that my musical taste is a little recherche, but c'mon ... no Nitzer Ebb? Or DAF? Or Danielle Dax (or Lemon Kittens) for that matter? Where are the Screaming Blue Messiahs when we need them? The Jesus and Mary Chain can't save you. Ministry -- a really big name band by these standards -- was represented by the two most recent of their major releases, and a "best of" album. What the iTunes store seems to excel at is Top-40 pabulum. I can do much better than that by just walking up the road to my local second-hand record store, never mind the huge Virgin Megastore (and rival HMV superstore) a mile away. And y'know something? I might run across something interesting by accident at the record stores. Hell, I can do better than this online by ordering CD's from Amazon.

Online music shopping via iTunes might work one of these days, but right now as far as I can see it's a dead loss. Overpriced tracks encumbered by a stupidly restrictive licence are bad enough, but the real killer is the corporatist monoculture that seeks to maximize profits by minimizing the range of options on offer.

[Discuss mp3]



posted at: 16:26 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Excuse of the week
It's pretty pathetic, I know, but not much is happening right now that makes me want to blow off steam in my blog. I'm doing my best to stand by my promise (to myself) to swear off politics in the interests of lowering my blood pressure. I've had a bout of RSI in both hands so I've been trying to keep the keyboarding down. Feorag's in Berlin for two weeks -- this is probably our longest time apart for several years -- and I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to do some decorating and interior redesign. Or maybe spring cleaning.

I'm up to about twelve large waste sacks so far, I'm having heavy duty shelves installed in one closet to take a load of stuff that needs sorting, and I've just swapped the dining table (which was doing duty as a desk in my study) for the weird 70's scandinavian desk (which was supporting kipple in the living room). Hopefully that'll fix the wrist pains; they almost always hit me when I've been doing something silly posture-wise: usually when I've been sitting in a broken chair, but a desk at the wrong height would probably set it off, too.

Tomorrow it's time to get a friend in to strip the bedroom wallpaper and re-paint it while I move stuff from the living room into the newly-shelved closet and start thinking about installing another three metres of bookcases. You get the picture.

Obligatory plug: I've just finished reading Maul by Tricia Sullivan. I don't have the stamina to write a review right now; let's just say I agree with David Kennedy's summary: it's a lot of fun.

[Discuss books]



posted at: 14:12 | path: /excuses | permanent link to this entry

Sat, 12 Jun 2004

Yee-haw!

The first UK hardcover copy of Singularity Sky flopped through my letter box this morning.

How I feel ...? Indescribable.

I've been writing and selling fiction for two decades. In the past decade I've worked as a technical author and freelance computer journalist (among other things), and sold ten books. But this is the first time an edition of one of my novels has appeared in book form from a British publisher.

I began working on this novel in, if I remember correctly, 1995. Reworked it heavily in 1996-97, and had it substantially complete by 1998. By 2000, I had a book deal with Big Engine, who subsequently went into liquidation one month before it could be published. In 2003 it finally appeared in hardcover in the US, where it has done well for itself. But it has taken nearly a decade for it to reach this point.

Luckily British readers won't have to wait as long for the next book. Iron Sunrise comes out next month in the US, and the UK hardcover's scheduled for next February, only six months later (rather than a year behind). By the time Accelerando comes out in July 2005, the British and American publication schedules should be synchronised, but I've effectively got three SF novels appearing in the UK over the next twelve months. (And something in me wants to snort, "typical -- you wait ten years and then three come along at once".)

[Discuss writing]



posted at: 12:01 | path: /writing | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 10 Jun 2004

Why did the [Iraqi] chicken cross the road?

Shamelessly cribbed from Juan Cole's blog:

Coalition Provisional Authority:

The fact that the Iraqi chicken crossed the road affirmatively demonstrates that decision-making authority has been transferred to the chicken well in advance of the scheduled June 30th transition of power. From now on the chicken is responsible for its own decisions.

Halliburton:

We were asked to help the chicken cross the road. Given the inherent risk of road crossing and the rarity of chickens, this operation will only cost the US government $326,004.

Muqtada al-Sadr:

The chicken was a tool of the evil Coalition and will be killed.

US Army Military Police:

We were directed to prepare the chicken to cross the road. As part of these preparations, individual soldiers ran over the chicken repeatedly and then plucked the chicken. We deeply regret the occurrence of any chicken rights violations.

Peshmerga:

The chicken crossed the road, and will continue to cross the road, to show its independence and to transport the weapons it needs to defend itself. However, in future, to avoid problems, the chicken will be called a duck, and will wear a plastic bill.

1st Cav:

The chicken was not authorized to cross the road without displaying two forms of picture identification. Thus, the chicken was appropriately detained and searched in accordance with current SOP's. We apologize for any embarrassment to the chicken. As a result of this unfortunate incident, the command has instituted a gender sensitivity training program and all future chicken searches will be conducted by female soldiers.

Al Jazeera:

The chicken was forced to cross the road multiple times at gunpoint by a large group of occupation soldiers, according to eye-witnesses. The chicken was then fired upon intentionally, in yet another example of the abuse of innocent Iraqi chickens.

Blackwater:

We cannot confirm any involvement in the chicken-road-crossing incident.

Translators:

Chicken he cross street because bad she tangle regulation. Future chicken table against my request.

U.S. Marine Corps:

The chicken is dead

[Link] [Discuss Iraq invasion]



posted at: 13:52 | path: /wartime | permanent link to this entry

Ronald MacDonald in armed nuclear bunker siege

You couldn't make this up. Honest.

(NB: the bunker is real. I've been there. It's a fun local tourist attraction if you're into cold war chills -- a sort of 20th century version of the Edinburgh Dungeon. Not so sure about Ronald MacDonald, though ...)

[ Link (thanks, Roy)] [Discuss bampots]



posted at: 02:16 | path: /weird | permanent link to this entry

Tue, 08 Jun 2004

Who's that funny man on the stage? And what's he doing to the monkey?

This Thursday, Writers' Bloc, the spoken word group I'm part of, is doing a reading in Leith, Edinburgh. I will be taking part. If you're in the area, consider this an invitation!

As the press release says ...

WHAT:"Writers' Bloc Versus the Yellow Café"-- live readings of original fiction and poetry at the Leith Festival

WHO: Writers' Bloc and the Yellow Café spoken-word performance groups

WHERE: Leith Docker's Club, 17 Academy Street, Leith

WHEN: 8.00 p.m., Thursday 10 June 2004

HOW MUCH: £5.00 £3.00 concessions)

WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE: Writers' Bloc have a website

For one night only -- and especially for the 2004 Leith Festival -- two of Edinburgh's finest spoken-word performance groups are going head to head. This is where poems with punch take on stories that sting in the literary heavyweight championship to end them all! The fabulous Writers' Bloc and the legendary Yellow Café are staging an evening of cutting-edge writing "from up the toon and doon the walk" with Gavin Inglis, Nickey Melville, Stefan Pearson, Rodney Relax, Andrew J. Wilson and others.

Writers' Bloc is a mix of professional writers and new voices. Several members have published novels in Britain and the USA. Others have placed stories in magazines and anthologies as diverse as "Year's Best Horror Stories", "Scottish Book Collector", "Interzone", "Pinball Player", "West Coast Magazine", "Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine", "Instant", "Markings", "Grunt and Groan: The New Anthology of Sex At Work" and "The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric and Discredited Diseases".

The Yellow Café crew return after their barn-storming show at last year's Leith Festival, and will include Rodney Relax, R. Kowalsky, Shu Lorimer and Nickey Melville. Rodney Relax, "the first poet in space", has recently appeared at the Bongo Club and Silencio. Nickey Melville, who has played the Jack Kane Centre for the Edinburgh People's Festival, offers challenging performance poetry.

Other writers appearing at this event include, among others: Charles Stross, author of "Singularity Sky" (already published in the US and coming out in Britain in August); Hannu Rajaniemi, the only Finnish member of Writers' Bloc; Gavin Inglis, winner of the Edinburgh International Book Festival Instant Book Prize; and Andrew J. Wilson, Scotsman book reviewer and one of "the world's masters of horror".

[Link] [Discuss writing]



posted at: 16:21 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

Mon, 07 Jun 2004

This dog is going to haunt my dreams tonight

Chow from hell

[Link (to jwz)] [Discuss ]



posted at: 22:09 | path: /weird | permanent link to this entry

So, one down, one to go

Ronald Reagan's body is finally dead.

This isn't unexpected -- he was, after all, very old and had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease for at least ten (and more likely twenty) years. And I find myself contemplating the situation with mixed feelings. I hate to think of myself as the kind of person who'd rejoice in anyone's death, but in this case my visceral reaction to the news could only be described as relief.

That man tried to kill me. And I take that personally, even though he neither knew nor cared that I existed.

Back in the years of his first presidential term, Ronald Reagan -- an actor as well as a politician, and a consumate sculptor of public opinion -- engaged in rhetoric so blood-chilling that he convinced the elderly, beleaguered, and somewhat paranoid incumbents of the politburo that he was actually willing to start a nuclear war. Their response, Operation RYAN, almost led to the outbreak of such a war during the Able Archer 83 exercises, when the Soviet planners became convinced that a NATO invasion of eastern Europe was in train. It was a major war scare, perhaps the closest the world has ever come to a strategic nuclear exchange, and it occured almost entirely as a consequence of Reagan's bloodthirsty rhetoric, typified by his speech about the evil empire.

Lest we forget, in 1981-83 the Soviet Union had achieved rough nuclear parity with the USA. Over ten thousand tactical nuclear weapons were in place in Europe. The UK, as one of the most heavily armed NATO members and the site of numerous ports, airports, munition factories and supply depots, was targeted by several hundred thermonuclear devices. Even the more optimistic government estimates predicted a mortality rate of 50-65% in the aftermath of a nuclear exchange; more realistic estimates were 60-70% dead within the first day, and 90-95% of the population dead within six months.

The cold war blighted the dreams, expectations, and lives of a generation that grew up in the UK between 1960 and 1986. We had nightmares; we didn't expect to survive to adulthood: the apocalypse loomed large, and every mindlessly jingoistic speech by this amiable sock-puppet of corporatism seemed to bring it closer. Never mind that the Soviet empire was undoubtedly a gray, unpleasant place, and the threat of Bolshevik expansionism very real in the wake of the Prague Spring and the Afghan invasion -- the phrase "better dead than red" posed a very real and immediate, not to say unpalatable, dilemma. It's very easy to trot out such a platitude when you do not face personal, painful extinction as a result of it. But it sticks in the throat when you contemplate its' immediate personal relevance to your own life, and that of everyone you hold dear.

It's true that Reagan moderated his tone sharply after the Able Archer incident, apparently genuinely shaken when he learned how close to the brink he'd stumbled. I don't believe he genuinely wanted to start a nuclear holocaust. But through his actions he demonstrated a remarkable blindness to the mirror-image concerns of his cold war rivals, a chilling lack of empathy that highlighted the emptiness behind the folksy mask. And, as Juan Cole notes, in his reckless pursuit of his goals Reagan was instrumental in the emergence of the Taliban and Al Qaida and in sponsoring fascist dictatorships throughout Latin America -- dictatorships which for the most part expired, once deprived of US support after the cold war ended.

So it's with relief rather than regret that I note Ronald Reagan's death. It closes a chapter and draws a line under the unpleasant nightmares of the eighties. But it is with some chagrin that I am forced to concede that he wasn't the worst president: as Patrick Farley put it, I now know what it's like to have a genuine moron in the White House.

[Discuss politics]



posted at: 19:57 | path: /politics | permanent link to this entry

Thu, 03 Jun 2004

Geektoys
I haven't updated my blog since last Saturday because I've been suffering from a surfeit of fin-de-siecle anomie left over from 2000 or thereabouts (not to mention the hangover from an SF convention in Glasgow). Not much has tweaked my sense of wonder in the past few days. While it's been fun to watch the White House lurching towards Watergate 2.0 (or Plamegate, as I suppose they'll end up calling it), there's a limit to how much foreign politics I can stomach. And I'm sure the news about Space Ship One's launch schedule has been blogged to the moon and back already. I haven't sold any novels this week (despite a couple of foreign rights queries), and I haven't written much, so I can't even throw in some advertising. Which leaves me short of things to write, except ...

I don't like computer viruses.

Well, that probably goes for you, too. But my way around the problem is to simply not run the Virus Incubation Platform, Windows. Being a smug, bearded old-time UNIX hand I use a Mac. OS/X is sort of like traditional MacOS, with gnarly programmable bits underneath that you don't have to use a can opener to get at -- and sort of like Linux, only with a user interface that isn't brain damaged at birth from having been delivered into the world by a cabal of surgeons squabbling over the forceps. It just works, most of the time. And it is nifty, although some aspects of it are not as friendly as advertised. In particular, I'm thinking of AppleScript.

OS/X is scriptable. You can, in principle, send a stream of commands to any OS/X application with a user interface that make it do things as if you were running it with a keyboard and mouse. Unfortunately the chosen human-readable language for scripting OS/X applications, AppleScript, is too human readable. It tries to look like English. Which is just plain dumb: computers do not speak English, and syntactic sugar that makes a language look familiar is more likely to mislead than to assist. AppleScript is as verbose as COBOL, as regular as Perl, and as irritating as that goddamn talking paperclip. If I want to add two plus two, I do not want to have to say something like Let result equal 2 + 2, when result=2+2 is just as understandable and easier to type. This might sound trivial, but when you get into things like this:

try
    tell application "Finder" to set the source_folder to \ 
       (folder of the front window) as alias
on error -- no open folder windows
    set the source_folder to path to \
        desktop folder as alias
end try

... it becomes obtrusive. (NB: Those backslashes replace a weird character that's frankly not available in the web ISO-8859/15 codeset, as far as I know. They mean "continued on next line". See what I'm getting at?)

Anyway, I've just [re-]discovered a cute tool called PerlPad. I stumbled across PerlPad a year or two ago, but back then it was rather less usable -- now it works on Panther, and it seems solid. Panther comes with a recent (release 5.8) Perl installation. Perl is the Swiss army chainsaw of scripting languages; and I've earned a living coding in it before now. PerlPad is a tool that lets you write arbitrary snippets of Perl code in any editable window provided by an OS/X application, select it, then hit a magic key combination that either feeds the clipboard contents through your code, or evaluates it and replaces it with its own output, or a bunch of other cool tricks. Text mangling, in other words. It's one of the more useful applications of CamelBones, a framework for binding Perl code to Objective-C to let you write Aqua interfaces for Perl scripts (hands up at the back if you understand that).

To get PerlPad running on a Mac running Panther (OS/X 10.3), just grab the latest CamelBones runtime, and the latest PerlPad download. You'll also need to install Devel::Symdump (just open a Terminal window and type sudo perl -MCPAN -e "install Devel::Symdump;" -- then answer the questions about which FTP site to get it from, and so forth). Terse instructions are here -- if you need blow-by-blow instructions then you probably aren't familiar enough with Perl that running PerlPad is sensible.

Then once you run PerlPad, getting a complete word count of whatever's in the clipboard is as simple as scribbling:

my $x; foreach (<$IN>) {$x += split}; print $x;

In a TextEdit window, highlighting it, and hitting command-shift-E.

Well, maybe not, but if you're a Perl geek it makes sense, okay? Just take it from me.

Now to explore the manual. It says I can write Perl snippets and add them to the System Services menu, making them available in most any application on my Mac. Let's get to work ...

[Link] [Discuss toys]



posted at: 14:37 | path: /misc | permanent link to this entry

specials:

Is SF About to Go Blind? -- Popular Science article by Greg Mone
Unwirer -- an experiment in weblog mediated collaborative fiction
Inside the MIT Media Lab -- what it's like to spend a a day wandering around the Media Lab
"Nothing like this will be built again" -- inside a nuclear reactor complex


Quick links:

RSS Feed (Moved!)

Who am I?

Contact me


Buy my books: (FAQ)

Missile Gap
Via Subterranean Press (US HC -- due Jan, 2007)

The Jennifer Morgue
Via Golden Gryphon (US HC -- due Nov, 2006)

Glasshouse
Via Amazon.com (US HC -- due June 30, 2006)

The Clan Corporate
Via Amazon.com (US HC -- out now)

Accelerando
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB -- due June 27, 2006)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB)
Free download

The Hidden Family
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)

The Family Trade
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)

Iron Sunrise
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB)

The Atrocity Archives
Via Amazon.com (Trade PB)
Via Amazon.co.uk (Trade PB)
Via Golden Gryphon (HC)
Via Amazon.com (HC)
Via Amazon.co.uk (HC)

Singularity Sky
Via Amazon.com (US HC)
Via Amazon.com (US PB)
Via Amazon.com (US ebook)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK HC)
Via Amazon.co.uk (UK PB)

Toast
Via Amazon.com
Via Amazon.co.uk


Some webby stuff I'm reading:


Engadget ]
Gizmodo ]
The Memory Hole ]
Boing!Boing! ]
Futurismic ]
Walter Jon Williams ]
Making Light (TNH) ]
Crooked Timber ]
Junius (Chris Bertram) ]
Baghdad Burning (Riverbend) ]
Bruce Sterling ]
Ian McDonald ]
Amygdala (Gary Farber) ]
Cyborg Democracy ]
Body and Soul (Jeanne d'Arc)  ]
Atrios ]
The Sideshow (Avedon Carol) ]
This Modern World (Tom Tomorrow) ]
Jesus's General ]
Mick Farren ]
Early days of a Better Nation (Ken MacLeod) ]
Respectful of Otters (Rivka) ]
Tangent Online ]
Grouse Today ]
Hacktivismo ]
Terra Nova ]
Whatever (John Scalzi) ]
GNXP ]
Justine Larbalestier ]
Yankee Fog ]
The Law west of Ealing Broadway ]
Cough the Lot ]
The Yorkshire Ranter ]
Newshog ]
Kung Fu Monkey ]
S1ngularity ]
Pagan Prattle ]
Gwyneth Jones ]
Calpundit ]
Lenin's Tomb ]
Progressive Gold ]
Kathryn Cramer ]
Halfway down the Danube ]
Fistful of Euros ]
Orcinus ]
Shrillblog ]
Steve Gilliard ]
Frankenstein Journal (Chris Lawson) ]
The Panda's Thumb ]
Martin Wisse ]
Kuro5hin ]
Advogato ]
Talking Points Memo ]
The Register ]
Cryptome ]
Juan Cole: Informed comment ]
Global Guerillas (John Robb) ]
Shadow of the Hegemon (Demosthenes) ]
Simon Bisson's Journal ]
Max Sawicky's weblog ]
Guy Kewney's mobile campaign ]
Hitherby Dragons ]
Counterspin Central ]
MetaFilter ]
NTKnow ]
Encyclopaedia Astronautica ]
Fafblog ]
BBC News (Scotland) ]
Pravda ]
Meerkat open wire service ]
Warren Ellis ]
Brad DeLong ]
Hullabaloo (Digby) ]
Jeff Vail ]
The Whiskey Bar (Billmon) ]
Groupthink Central (Yuval Rubinstein) ]
Unmedia (Aziz Poonawalla) ]
Rebecca's Pocket (Rebecca Blood) ]


Older stuff:

June 2006
May 2006
April 2006
March 2006
February 2006
January 2006
December 2005
November 2005
October 2005
September 2005
August 2005
July 2005
June 2005
May 2005
April 2005
March 2005
February 2005
January 2005
December 2004
November 2004
October 2004
September 2004
August 2004
July 2004
June 2004
May 2004
April 2004
March 2004
February 2004
January 2004
December 2003
November 2003
October 2003
September 2003
August 2003
July 2003
June 2003
May 2003
April 2003
March 2003
February 2003
January 2003
December 2002
November 2002
October 2002
September 2002
August 2002
July 2002
June 2002
May 2002
April 2002
March 2002
(I screwed the pooch in respect of the blosxom entry datestamps on March 28th, 2002, so everything before then shows up as being from the same time)



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