January 2018 Archives

UK Labyrinth Index

Yes, this is the British cover for "The Labyrinth Index", the ninth Laundry Files novel, coming in the second half of this year.

The crazy years

Many, many years ago, in the introduction to my first short story collection, I kvetched about how science fictional futures obsolesce, and the futures we expect look quaint and dated by the time the reality rolls round.

Around the time I published "Toast" (the title an ironic reference to the way near-future SF gets burned by reality) I was writing the stories that later became "Accelerando". I hadn't really mastered the full repertoire of fiction techniques at that point (arguably, I still haven't: I'll stop learning when I die), but I played to my strengths—and one technique that suited me well back then was to take a fire-hose of ideas and spray them at the reader until they drowned. Nothing gives you a sense of an immersive future like having the entire world dumped on your head simultaneously, after all.

Now we are living in 2018, round the time I envisaged "Lobsters" taking place when I was writing that novelette, and the joke's on me: reality is outstripping my own ability to keep coming up with insane shit to provide texture to my fiction.

Just in the past 24 hours, the breaking news from Saudi Arabia is that twelve camels have been disqualified from a beauty pageant because their handlers used Botox to make them more handsome. (The street finds its uses for tech, including medicine, but come on, camel beauty pageant botox should not be a viable Google search term in any plausible time line.) Meanwhile, home in Edinburgh, eight vehicles have been discovered trapped in an abandoned robot car park during demolition work. This is pure J. G. Ballard/William Gibson mashup territory, and it's about half a kilometre from my front door. The world's top 1% earned 82% of all wealth generated in 2017 — I'm fairly sure this wasn't what Adam Smith had in mind — and South Korea has such a high suicide rate that the government intends to make organising a suicide pact a criminal offence.

Go home, 2018, you're drunk. (Or, as Robert Heinlein might have put it: these are the crazy years, and they're not over yet.)

Seriously: leaving aside the subject matter of "Accelerando" (half-baked singularitarianism), the technique I used to make it work has now been overtaken by our internet mediated news sources. It's not as if this sort of stuff wasn't happening before: history is full of utterly bugfuck, stranger-than-fiction source material. But these days we find out about it as it happens, and we find out about it happening in places our news agencies formerly had limited or no access to. Seven billion shaved apes generate a lot of weirdness in parallel, and these days it seems like they've all got keyboards: we shouldn't be surprised to get the Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Surrealist, delivered to our smartphones daily.

Which is why you aren't going to see me write another "Accelerando". Never mind the singularity, the basic storytelling mechanism I used is no longer viable in the post-smartphone broadband internet age. Stoning the reader with condensed, indigestible nuggets of future shock is no longer a viable worldbuilding method because social media have accustomed to it as the new normal. Guess I'm going to have to invent a new technique if I want to stay relevant ...

This is your cursory scheduled reminder that I have a new book out this week, on both sides of the Atlantic: Dark State (follow that link for purchase links and info on how to get signed copies).

Questions I get asked:

When is the next book coming out?: "Invisible Sun", the final volume in the trilogy, will be published at the same time next year, January 2019. (It exists: I'm polishing the final draft this month.)

I'm in the EU/UK; why can't I find the audiobooks?: If you're in North America, audiobooks are already available. Meanwhile, British editions of "Empire Games" and "Dark State" are being recorded and will be released via Audible in August. They're not listed for pre-order until six months prior to publication, so if you want to place a pre-order, check back in March.

What about audiobooks of [some other title]?: Read this FAQ.

I want to buy Empire Games/Dark State without DRM: All my publishes except Tor require DRM (the decision is not up to Amazon, it's made by the publisher). Happily, this means that the Merchant Princes and Empire Games books, which are published by Tor in North America and the UK, are free of DRM. In the USA, Tor also publish the short fiction in the Laundry Files and new Laundry Files novels, starting with "The Delirium Brief"; however, the Laundry files is published by Orbit in the UK, who require DRM. If/when Orbit's group-wide policy on DRM changes, I'll nag them to remove it from my books. (Don't hold your breath.)

I bought a hardback and it's broken/pages blank/wrong order! I demand my money back! Authors generally get asked this because they're the public face that readers identify with, but if this happens to you, you really need to get in touch with the bookstore who sold it to you. They should be happy to replace it with a fresh copy.

I spotted a mistake! Where do I go to crow about it? You post a comment in the thread below. (NB: I already know that I misplaced Tehran. Just once I don't look at Google Maps, and ...)

Some other question? Ask it in the comments below. Thanks!

This is the text of my keynote speech at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress in Leipzig, December 2017.

(You can also watch it on YouTube, but it runs to about 45 minutes.)




Abstract: We're living in yesterday's future, and it's nothing like the speculations of our authors and film/TV producers. As a working science fiction novelist, I take a professional interest in how we get predictions about the future wrong, and why, so that I can avoid repeating the same mistakes. Science fiction is written by people embedded within a society with expectations and political assumptions that bias us towards looking at the shiny surface of new technologies rather than asking how human beings will use them, and to taking narratives of progress at face value rather than asking what hidden agenda they serve.

In this talk, author Charles Stross will give a rambling, discursive, and angry tour of what went wrong with the 21st century, why we didn't see it coming, where we can expect it to go next, and a few suggestions for what to do about it if we don't like it.

Specials

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