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Minor updates

SPECIAL OFFER (USA Only): today and tomorrow (April 27th/28th) Barnes and Noble are running a special 25% off promotion on pre-orders of books with voucher code PREORDER25. This includes Season of Skulls, so if you want it and haven't ordered a paper copy yet, B&N is a good bet. Here's their page for Season of Skulls.

So, just to avoid the threat of silence, here's a little hyper-local author-specific news.

Firstly, Season of Skulls should be in shops in the next few weeks! While the official publication dates are the 16th (in the USA) and the 18th (in the UK), physical hardcovers now exist—at least of the British edition from Orbit: my author copies arrived. (The US hardcovers are probably in transit.) Audiobook versions are in the works but may not surface until some time after the physical publication date—work on recording the audio edition doesn't start until the page proofs of the print edition are signed off on (because that's what they're based off of).

Next up: I don't have a publication date yet, but the next book after Season of Skulls will be back to the Laundry Files proper with A Conventional Boy—a short novel about Derek the DM, the Satanic D&D Panic of the 1980s and its long-term consequences, and, oh, more Iris Carpenter. Forthcoming some time in 2024 from Orbit and Tor.com.

(Back when I began planning it in 2009 ACB was going to be a short story, but it grew more complex over time and now it's ... well, it's a Laundry novel, longer than any novella has a right to be albeit a bit shorter than The Atrocity Archive.)

On an entirely different note ... I had had hoped to have some news about the 2nd edition Laundry Files role playing game, but nope: not ready for an announcement yet because nothing runs to schedule. Sorry. (But it is in the works now, and hopefully you should be able to get your hands on it this year.)

As for what happens after that? I'm still wrestling with the long-delayed space opera Ghost Engine which I started in 2015 (lots of stuff got in the way! No, seriously), but hope to have it finished this summer and hopefully scheduled for publication after A Conventional Boy. And then I need to either start work on the Last Laundry Novel (working title: "Bob Bows Out"—but that's obviously not the final title it'll appear under), or the fourth New Management book. (In which Imp gets bored with Peter Pan and decides to use the ghost roads to film a new movie, on location: Narnia Porn. Because what could possibly go wrong?)

And finally, something completely different.

I don't just do superhero fic inside the Laundry Files/New Management: I'm also a very minor part of George R. R. Martin's Wild Cards shared universe series. George likes us to write guest blog essays at least once a year, so here's my latest entry. Hopefully it'll entertain you for a couple of minutes!

Sometimes even monsters mean well: a meditation on the profitability of Takis-A by Charles Stross

247 Comments

1:

Ooh! I'll have to put in an advance order for season of Skulls.

2:

I saw you wrote on Mammoth:

BRB, working on ideas for Narnia Porn (the next New Management book will take a fire axe to C. S. Lewis). Also working out the life cycle of Resurrection Beasts like Aslan. Don't let him molt out of his lion instar and enter the final fertile phase of his life cycle! After he mates with Tash the Inexorable and she eats his head, she'll lay a clutch of god-eggs. When they hatch the larvae eat their host species before they chew their way out of that universe and go looking for more nutrients …

Looking forward to it already! As you say, what could possibly go wrong?

3:

Kinda unrelated, but does anyone know where I can find Charles' crib notes for Dark State? I've found reference to it being released, but can't find the actual page.

4:

I'm not sure I wrote any!

At some point I need to go back and check for gaps in the crib sheet series, then fill them in and compile an index page for the sidebar.

It may be that I need to do a combined set of notes for the Empire Games trilogy, treating it as a single (450,000 word) novel. Which is what it is, really -- I wrote it with one eye on an (eventual) omnibus edition. It'll probably never happen but if it does it won't require anything like as much editing as the omnibus version of the original Merchant Princes series.

5:

I actually have a bunch of notes, now. Only question is whether it would sell: I can't make a go/no-go decision about it until about a month after Season of Skulls comes out and I have some initial sales figures.

6:

If you do that, I am sure the shade of C.S. Lewis will have unchristian thoughts about you :-)

7:

I note that Lev Grossman has already taken a pick-axe handle to the skull of the Baby Narnia (and Hogwarts too) in The Magicians trilogy.

But I'd like to think I'll take a different approach. And I really want to do for Aslan (aka Space Jesus Lion) what Equoid did for Unicorns.

9:

Talk to "Transreal" for (signed) copies, yes?

In other news .. Space-X's "starship" postponed & then stood down at the 40-second mark ....

.. @ 7
WOT, no Pevensie Incest? And/Or Susan screwing anything that moves, or Edmund turning out to be "queer" { As per the 1940's-speech habits of the novels. }

10:

Looking forward to Ghost Engine.

Hmm, and as it's the 17th, I can get the ebook of Season of Skulls.

11:

On a completely unrelated note: the most recent episode of "Star Trek: Picard" (Season 3, Episode 9) has a major plot twist that I first encountered in Glasshouse - rogue code in the transporters!

12:

As I wrote Glasshouse in three feverish weeks in 2003, I think I'll give the Trek writers room a free pass on that one! (It ain't stealing if the idea's been out there for so long it's old enough to vote, it's just part of the cultural zeitgeist.)

13:

If you wanted to be hyper-nerdy in multiple fields...

Dying-resurrecting gods in the Jesus/Horned God trope are commonly thought in the esoteric community to be metaphors for crops like wheat or barley. There's a reason communion is celebrated with grain products.

If you want to parasitize this trope, the appropriate vehicle is therefore wheat rust, which has a complex life cycle that takes five generations ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stem_rust#Life_cycle ). Rusts don't go through instars, they die and produce offspring. The offspring might be the same morph, or the succeeding morph. In wheat rust, four of the stages are produced asexually, but the final one is sexual and does the recombination thing.

I'd gently suggest that this fits the dying/reviving trope better than does a metamorphic insect...

14:

Forgot to add: wheat rust was deified by the Romans as Robigus. The Robigalia celebration/propitiation of Robigus was celebrated in April with sacrifices and games, to keep the god from ruining the crops.

Any similarity with how Easter is now celebrated is strictly coincidental, of course. And we won't mention Passover and its deliverance from plagues at all.

15:

Naah, for body horror it has to be either a parasitoid insect or fungus that attacks animals. Plant/crop diseases won't work. Ophidiocordyceps is currently over-exposed, so I'm falling back to insects. And in any case, the Resurrection Beast just has the bad habit of coming back from the dead if you kill it, only bigger and stronger as more people believe in it. It doesn't need a terribly elaborate life cycle.

16:

I think we're talking about the same thing, because I meant the life cycle to be used metaphorically, not literally. The scary thing about wheat rust is how fast it spread--the Romans compared Robigo to a fire burning through their fields, and the fungus has been studied as a military-grade, crop killing bioweapon. If your resurrection beasts come back even more believable and viral every time they respawn, it's the same thing, whatever body horror you tack on for effect.

In the random old stuff department, Samael, the Beast of the Resurrection was a monster in the first Hellboy movie from 2004. That's hopefully too old to be relevant.

17:

Agreed, but there's still some scope for plant diseases - catching canker from a tomato, for example :-)

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32307848/

18:

Another, more dangerous route is to focus on a Messianic elder god. Aslan as Messiah, rather than as Shamash the Reborn Every Dawn.

The earlier morphs of messianic initiators "inspire" nonsexual preachers of righteousness, who lead their followers into doomed confrontations with their oppressors by preaching that their righteousness will help them prevail and will usher in Heaven on Earth/Pure Land/Field of Merit/End of Days/Roll Back The Whites/Road Belong Cargo etc. Massive necromantic mana flows from the bloody suppression of such cults back to those that created them.

So that's the nonbreeding morph of this kind of god. One might argue (but probably shouldn't) that messianic movements that became religions are in fact the results of Great Workings by the enemies of messianic gods, bindings designed to keep them from producing a breeding morph, that force them to stay immature and suppress other messianic gods, rather than engaging in bloody crusades to let them respawn at a higher level.

Anyway...so there's this problem for the New Management etm. Messianic movements are sprouting up all over and spreading like wildfire (hello Robigus). Killing all the human cultists is the default option, of course, but doing so just completes a massive necromantic rite that, if successful, lets the messianic gods respawn in sexual morphs that spread even faster and cause much more harm if they complete their life cycles. But the same thing happens if you let them win. What to do, what to do, what to do...

Given current politics, this might be a risky storyline to play with. But it would follow from the original idea.

19:

Jack Wodehams "There is a Crooked Man" was when I first encountered "rogue code in the transporter". https://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi

20:

I'm interested to hear more about the new Laundry RPG. I liked the first one a lot.

21:

Finally got to read the Wild Card piece. Fun!

22:

Finally got to read the Wild Card piece. Fun!

23:

Charlie, I think this book was written specially, just for you (and maybe the rest of us, since the issue is a perennial strange attractor around here.)

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/a-city-on-mars

24:

H @ 13
It's also the reason for Easter [ Eostre } being in the Spring planting season.
Kill the "king", plough him in, he will rise in $_Number days & give life, yes?
See Also John Barleycorn - recording of the actual song.

Or, like this:

There were three men, came out of the west
Their fortunes for to try
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die!

Well, they've ploughed,
They've sown, they've harrowed him in
Threw clouds upon his head
Till these three men were satisfied
John Barleycorn was dead

They've let him lie for a long long time
Till the rains from heaven did fall
And little sir John sprang up his head
And so amazed them all

They let him fly till the midsummer's day
Till he looked both pale and wan, oh
Then little Sir John has grown a long long beard
And so became a man

They have hired men with the scythes so sharp
To cut him off at the knee,
They rolled and they tied him around the waist
Serving him most him barbarously

They hired men with the sharp pitchforks
To prick him to the heart
And the loader he has served him worse than that
For he's bound him to the cart

Well, they've wheeled him 'round and 'round the field
Till they came onto a barn
And there they made their solemn oath
Concerning Barleycorn

They hired men with the crab tree sticks
To split him skin from bone, yeah
But the miller he has served him worst and bad
For he ground him between two stones

Well there's beer all in the barrel
And brandy in the glass,
But little old sir John with his nut-brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last

John Barleycorn, throw him up, throw him down! Now the huntsman, he can't hunt the fox
Nor so loudly blow his horn And the tinker he can't mend neither kettle nor pot
Without a little Barleycorn.

25:

A focus on insects may be a reason to bring the Shan/Insects from Shaggai into the Laundreyverse? I've always like their depiction in the Delta Green setting and the focus on trepanation as a means to combat them is a fascinating rabbit hole to jump down.

Also, "Narnia Porn" brings to mind Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan". So you're in good company deconstructing that wardrobe.

26:

And there's this, which is a lovely deconstruction of Narnia, Oz, Peter Pan, etc.

https://youtu.be/8Ew_fINj9-Y

27:

Yeah, I was thinking about John Barleycorn.

Thing is, Mediterranean seasons don't follow English patterns. Right now our hills are covered by non-native wild oats setting seed, not sprouting. Winter is the growing season in Mediterranean climates, and rusts hit in April.

This is something that Northerners (and Neopagans!) trying to understand Classical and Semitic mythology and religion struggle with: the wheel of the seasons varies quite a bit across the globe.

30:

I had a much, much bigger problem with Narnia. Since I did not grow up immersed in religion, I didn't instantly get that the Lion was supposed to be Jesus. But the story went on, and was good, until the end, where he cheated - "oh, sorry, you're actually all dead, and this is a version of heaven (tm)".

Same with what I have referred to since I read the third book as That Hideous Trilogy. The first was ok, the second... I was in my mid-teens when I read Peralandra, and three quarters of a book of trying to prevent the Venusian Eve from the apple.... It was a library book, so I didn't throw it across the room. The only reason I read the third one was that was after I'd read LotR, and read that there was a mention of Numenor in it. I did want to throw that across the room - all prgressives, not just some, are direct agents of Evil, and he literally pulls the animals out of the city zoo to kill them.

I vehemently dislike what's supposed to be a story turning into shrieking evangelical preaching.

31:

Sorry, the word I wanted was "shrill", not "shrieking".

32:

Since I did not grow up immersed in religion, I didn't instantly get that the Lion was supposed to be Jesus.

I did, and I didn't.

But then I had (and have) a real problem spotting metaphors in the wild. Ask me what something's a metaphor for, and I can write you and essay, but actually noticing it without prompting? Nah, not gonna happen unless you're really obvious.

33:

I grew up Christian, but also with a lot of other mythology floating around my local noosphere (Graves' Greek Myths, for instance). And my parents pushed LOTR and Earthsea on me early rather than Narnia, so I never got into it.

Anyway, resurrecting gods don't automatically make me go Jesus Christ. And a large blond carnivore is entirely too Aryan to make me think of the Lamb of God, if it comes to that.

34:

Evil Aslan sound fruitful, and about the right dose of iconoclasm for one novel. But if you really want to declare war on the ghost of Lewis you need to take on the Holy Spirit. Lewis' theological writings, or at least the small sub-set I've read, are as much about growth by personal communion with the spirit than about Christ the Redeemer. And that is pretty much the USP of Anglican christianity. For me, it's the one thing that would make Anglicanism appealing if I still believed.

Suppose however, that the Holy Spirit is actually a brain-parasite. It gets into selected humans, and is spread most readily by ritually consuming contaminated food. It lives in human minds and whispers to its hosts, sometimes giving them emotional comfort, and always promising immortality. Everlasting life! Thus, massively attractive to the hosts, and basically harmless, because it's not actually controlling them or doing any bodily harm. Except...

Like the wheat rust mentioned above, it goes through many life stages, but in normal times it doesn't get beyond the first few harmless stages during one human lifetime. During Case Nightmare Green, the stages come thick and fast and each stage changes both the parasite and the host. The human partner becomes less and less conventionally human as they progress to an actual, immortal state (the parasite wasn't lying about everlasting life). They become less and less conventionally (10-commandments) moral and more goal-focused; they learn to do evil, cease to do good and befoul the thoughts of their heart. And the truly horrific part is that before each change the parasite is telling the host what's coming, in loving, glowing detail. And the human host knows they'll become monstrous but does nothing about it because: Eternal Life! Eternal Life!

35:

Usual problem in the actual real world. Demonstrate that the holy bedsheet actually exists ... Same as all the other "gods"

36:

And a large blond carnivore is entirely too Aryan

I'd prefer if they were breathe-aryan...

I've decided I prefer the term "cork asian" because we all have some Irish blood, right? It's no more unreasonable than saying we're all originally from the Caucasus region of Russia.

37:

No, it doesn't. But that wasn't why Aslan was so obviously a Christ-analogue, anyway. That aspect grated on me, but not as much as the overt bigotry in a Horse and His Boy.

38:

No, they don't, but it is NOT true that winter is the growing season in Mediterranean climates - it depends. Not all Mediterranean climates are like Southern California.

In the real Mediterranean, it is for many plants on the south coast (e.g. fava beans in Egypt!), but not on the north coast. Even in Greece (which has low summer rainfall), spring is the primary flowering season - yes, I have been there at that time, precisely for that reason. In Rome, Nice or Barcelona, the winters can be definitely chilly, and there is adequate summer rainfall.

39:

I vehemently dislike what's supposed to be a story turning into shrieking evangelical preaching.

Steer clear of any SF about The Singularity published after about 2010 then, unless it's obvious satire/mockery.

(Someone someday is going to write the Longtermist equivalent of the Narnia books but it ain't gonna be me. Blech.)

40:

I like it and I'mgiong to steal it, thanks!

41:

This dovetails nicely with the observation that if the ritual of transubstantiation was real, the Catholic Church would likely have a long history of Creutzfeldt-Jakob outbreaks.

42:

And the truly horrific part is that before each change the parasite is telling the host what's coming, in loving, glowing detail.

People become paladins and angels, exothermic saints and incandescent clergy just the change is is unexpectedly monstrous and otherwise disappointing, but not enough for the user not to want more. And also enlivens relics, specific authorised manufacturers of wafers, rituals for innoculating^H^H^H^Hblessing the wine (and water), somethingsomethingsomething about the relationship with the Crown. Dieu et mon droit and all that. Can it disentangle the PHANG symbiont? Too much?

43:

So that claptrap has turned into a religion even in SF, has it? Shades of L. Ron Hubbard! Our gummint has been praying to it for some time, on a similar basis to the cargo cult believers, but I thought that SF authors were more grounded in reality :-)

Are there any buzzwords that I can use to look up the tenets of this new religion? Or is it too incoherent for that?

44:

Very few of the target audience ever noticed the explicit Christian theme of the Narnia series on first reading. Too young and partially immunised against religiosity by the attenuated form encountered in primary school assemblies

45:

"But the story went on, and was good, until the end, where he cheated - "oh, sorry, you're actually all dead, and this is a version of heaven (tm)"."

My reaction to the final book was basically that the whole thing fabricates nasal chickens. I had no idea wtf was supposed to be the point of any of it.

I guess it's much the same reaction, though to a lesser proportion of the story, that is much of the reason I never liked any of the other books that much. That and Lewis being too good at conveying sinister and hopeless atmospheres of various kinds.

I had no idea about the religious aspect until I read descriptions of the series that made much of it, which didn't happen while I was a kid. I saw Aslan as simply another instance of the standard super magical hero who of course turns out not to be dead after all because that would be just too sad and awful. They all do that. The religious aspect doesn't annoy me now I do know about it, though.

46:

Interestingly, this was also true in my primary school, which was a full-on, CofE church-school, with church parade every Wednesday and RE taught by actual clergy - who were good communicators, too. I think religion was too real for us, and religious allegory in obvious fiction didn't connect.

Somehow, the school had sold us "invisible skybeard father = obviously real but fun world inside a wardrobe = obviously fake", which is an clever piece of doublethink.

47:

Suppose however, that the Holy Spirit is actually a brain-parasite.

Interesting idea!

A point of terminology. I'm going to nerd out for a sec, because a) it's relevant to the story idea, b) it's something I studied in grad school, and c) it's relevant to the story idea.

It's the difference between parasitism and symbiosis.

Symbiosis is the blanket term for intimate relationships between unrelated organisms. Symbiosis is how life on Earth works, and symbiotic relationships run the full gamut from mutually beneficial to mutually destructive (synnecrosis is a fun word that needs to be used more often), and everything in between, including the norm, which is relationships that change over time and circumstances.

Parasitism is a particular subset of symbiosis, wherein one partner (the parasite) benefits from the relationship, while the other (the host) is harmed.

A symbiosis in which both partners extend their lifespans is not parasitic if both partners benefit--even if they collectively turn evil towards those outside the symbiosis. Technically this is a mutualistic symbiosis, not a parasitic relationship. This composite being may parasitize others, but the relationship within it is mutually beneficial.

To make this a true parasitism, the parasite has to benefit more than the host. One obvious way is that the parasite reproduces itself using the host's resources, while preventing the host from reproducing.

Humans are weird in that we are beings that require both biological reproduction and cultural reproduction. If we're not taught how to live properly we die, because we don't come into the world pre-programmed with instincts that help us find food or a mate.

So if this holy ghost is a proper parasite, it needs to curtail its host's reproduction. Turning the host celibate and focused entirely on becoming immortal and/or only proselytizing to get more people to be possessed by this holy ghost would make the holy ghost a parasite, at least by human standards.

Parallels between this version of holy ghost parasitism, the activities of the religiously fervent, academics, and tech culture...well, I'll just leave them as exercises for the readership. Ditto the evil mutualism mentioned in passing.

48:

I vehemently dislike what's supposed to be a story turning into shrieking evangelical preaching.

Steer clear of any SF about The Singularity published after about 2010 then, unless it's obvious satire/mockery.

Do you think "Poseidon's Children" trilogy by Alasair Reynolds is about Singularity? I would say it is, and no evangelical preaching is involved.

49:

Undeadness of another kind?

50:

Now, my partner is part Irish, as a set of grandparents were from there. Me? As I decided a number of years ago at a St. Patty's Day festival, I'm East Irish. About 1200mi (about 2k kilometers) east.

That being the introduction to being that my grandparents all came from Eastern Europe, closer to the Caucuses Mts. than most of your ancestors for 500 years or more, that makes me more "caucasion"....

51:

Right. Actually, I've got a couple of short stories I've been trying to sell. If I write another half dozen or so, I could make an anthology of it, with the working title of Reasons You Really Don't Want to Be Able to Backup Your Mind.

Sigh, back to looking for a market for the one that's finished.

52:

So, they turn into priests and/or monks/nuns?

Wait, now I'm picturing a "holy one in a cave atop a mountain"... and inside the cave is actually a supervillain's lair, with multiple sex partners/hosts for the symbiote, laser cutting tables, and a launch pad for a private jet....

53:

sigh Just looked, and the ebook isn't released in the US until May 16.

54:

I have my own conspiracy theory as to why ChatGPT is so popular now

Since the pandemic began and baby boomers have been retiring en-masse, there's been a labor shortage in the west. That has among other things 1. Given workers greater power since they're no longer worried about finding a new job 2. Given to a rise in unionization

Companies and Red States have begun to adapt to this by 1. Weakening child labor laws at the state level (see Iowa and Arkansas) 2. Taking advantage of the post-pandemic surge in immigration

The above only works for the unskilled worker. It seems that ChatGPT is being used as a scare story to make skilled workers more afraid.

A possible side-effect of ChatGPT might be that it makes outsourcing some jobs much easier.

55:

Speaking of chatbots, since I'm discussing a literary contract in RL, here's a thought/question: if someone feeds a novel to a chatbot... isn't that a de facto violation of copyright?

56:

You might think so -- but proving your novel is in there will be hard, and how many spare hundreds of thousands of dollars do you have to throw away suing a VC-backed startup with millions in its trousers but a high burn rate and no actual assets you can sell off if you win? (If your lawsuit looks likely to win then the backers will drop the startup like a hot potato rather than pouring more money into it, and most everything they've got is probably rented.)

57:

The Authors' Guild has a sample literary contract, and they say they're considering putting a clause in the contract "this work may not be used to train generativeAI". I've gone one step further, and in my discussions, I'm asking if they can put that on the same page as the std disclaimer "This is a work of fiction...", which would make it an open an shut case.

I would think an easy test would be to tell the chatbot to write something in the style and subject of novel x by author y.

58:

H
Suppose however, that the Holy Spirit is actually a brain-parasite.
What suppose - it IS a brain-parasite, as is christianity & islam & ....
It's horribly easy to swallow it whole & then you are hooked/parasitised for life, unless you are very lucky - as I've said before, I escaped by a very narrow margin.

59:

Heteromeles @ 33:

I grew up Christian, but also with a lot of other mythology floating around my local noosphere (Graves' Greek Myths, for instance). And my parents pushed LOTR and Earthsea on me early rather than Narnia, so I never got into it.

Anyway, resurrecting gods don't automatically make me go Jesus Christ. And a large blond carnivore is entirely too Aryan to make me think of the Lamb of God, if it comes to that.

Narnia never interested me. The only CS Lewis I ever read was The Screwtape Letters. Not nearly as entertaining as Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth

60:

Narnia never interested me. The only CS Lewis I ever read was The Screwtape Letters. Not nearly as entertaining as Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth

You and me both, on both counts.

62:

A possible side-effect of ChatGPT might be that it makes outsourcing some jobs much easier.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/v7begx/overemployed-hustlers-exploit-chatgpt-to-take-on-even-more-full-time-jobs

This article is about employees who outsource most of their job without telling their employer

63:

Suppose however, that the Holy Spirit is actually a brain-parasite. What suppose - it IS a brain-parasite, as is christianity & islam & ....It's horribly easy to swallow it whole & then you are hooked/parasitised for life, unless you are very lucky - as I've said before, I escaped by a very narrow margin.

Ummmm, these days it's even easier to make the opposite case in Christianity. Here's how:

--There's some evidence that couples in some churches have more children than average.

--There's also some evidence that the children born into those religions don't stay in them, especially when they're the children of people who converted in their late teens.

These two bits of anecdata suggests that, rather than the holy ghost parasitizing humans and turning its hosts into celibate missionaries, that humans are parasitizing the holy ghost to increase the number of children they have without helping the holy ghost increase their number of intellectual symbionts. Since, these days, churches that promote large families apparently tend to be facing declining congregations, in the Darwinian sense of which partner gets the reproductive fitness boost, right now people are parasitizing their churches, not vice versa.

This is a strictly Darwinian analysis of course.

64:

I live in a big potato growing area. If it took sacrificing a virgin a month to avoid potato blight, I honestly think our town would be up for it, if that was the only thing that worked. Fortunately, this year we had lots and lots of freezing temperatures for a long length of time (since early November) which tends to keep it dormant.

But...thinking of what the Blight would look like in humans--makes Ebola look like Amateur Night.

65:

Interestingly, this was also true in my primary school, which was a full-on, CofE church-school, with church parade every Wednesday and RE taught by actual clergy - who were good communicators, too. I think religion was too real for us, and religious allegory in obvious fiction didn't connect. [...]

odd. My primary CoE school only imperfectly mirrored yours. No church parade but taught by actual clergy. Who were terrible at communicating. I'd assumed until you posted that they had zero formal training in teaching. How else could they be so bad at it? When I found out the kids who were allowed to sit in the other classroom (two room school) when the vicar was talking were "catholics"; I had no idea what one was, but I wanted to be one.

In general RE was just incompetent. They taught us to say the Lord's prayer but didn't explain what it meant (What the hell are "trespasses"?!)

I'm not sure if this was intended but I was an atheist before the age of 10

66:

Jean Lamb
Sacrificing a "virgin" or a "virginity" ???
Sorry, maybe, but I couldn't resist it - also - I wonder how much of the tradition regarding "virgin sacrifice" was, actually, the latter.
Reverting to potatoes { & tomatoes } There is a fungicide - "Dithane" that works & has the additional advantage of degrading/oxidising into a fertiliser, after a day or two.

67:

All that means is that no strategy works forever and the brain parasite needs to do something new to handle the current circumstances.

Clearly those who have been blessed by the spirit should be waging war on education and secular society in order to make future generations are more receptive.

Fortunately that sort of thing is just fiction.

68:

There are some interesting tapeworms which provide advantages to hosts. Like tias ant tapeworm which increases the lifetime of infected workers by a factor of five.

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsos.202118

And a rat tapeworm which increases the size and muscularity of hosts by secreting rat growth hormone.

69:

What's a blue-suiter in the UK? I haven't really been able to narrow down from context whether it means military, or police, or a particular military branch.

70:

I don't think it is a British term. While I have seen it, I forgot the context - upon doing a search, I can find two possible meanings, both American. An IBM executive, or a member of the US Air Force. It was the first meaning I saw used.

71:

This begs the question of which is more horrific: the parasite or the symbiont. Parasites have instant ick factor, but it's a cheap scare. I think the symbiont, which genuinely cares but gradually dissolves the host's humanity is actually more appalling. And, in real-life Christianity, the Holy Ghost is supposed to be exactly that.

The symbiont HG also needs to stop its hosts breeding. It wants immortal, perfected partners living in an earthly paradise, not a species extinction from overpopulation when the parents just won't die, dammit. And that may be the root of the horror.

72:

3rd possibility after #70 above - An employee of the "Grey Funnel Line" (Royal Navy, from the number of early steamship lines that were known as "$colour Line").

73:

" An IBM executive, or a member of the US Air Force. It was the first meaning I saw used."

In US military and associated circles, it's fairly common to hear "blue suiter" used to mean USAF members, usually in situations where the particular service isn't obvious.

74:
Narnia never interested me. The only CS Lewis I ever read was The Screwtape Letters. Not nearly as entertaining as Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth You and me both, on both counts.

I don't recall reading the Narnia books. They never appealed to me. In fact, I'm pretty sure the only C.S. Lewis I've read was The Screwtape Letters, when someone lent me a copy in my late teens. I probably would've also read Letters from the Earth if someone had lent me a copy. Of course, now I can read it online. Thanks.

https://www.sacred-texts.com/aor/twain/letearth.htm

75:

The symbiont HG also needs to stop its hosts breeding
I kinda remember that the HG symbiont was supposed to be able to manipulate the host's DNA and reproductive apparatus to produce so-called "virgin births".

76:

This begs the question of which is more horrific: the parasite or the symbiont. Parasites have instant ick factor, but it's a cheap scare. I think the symbiont, which genuinely cares but gradually dissolves the host's humanity is actually more appalling. And, in real-life Christianity, the Holy Ghost is supposed to be exactly that.

I partly agree with this. To drop the horror pretense for a second, the Holy Spirit as I understand it is a spirit of universal agape love (aka compassion, rather than eros or amor). Manifesting it is extremely difficult: most people have family members they have trouble getting along with. Loving your enemies? Me loving Trump? Greg Tingey comfortable with the Pope? The point is that, while it's apparently possible for people to do this, it's so far from human norms that people who have attained this state have to be careful they don't get killed by a mob.

Enlightenment in Buddhist and Taoist terms is equally far from human norms.* The key point is that something doesn't have to be evil to whip a lot of humans into a xenophobic killing frenzy. Abnormally gifted people have to deal with this all the time.

The symbiont HG also needs to stop its hosts breeding. It wants immortal, perfected partners living in an earthly paradise, not a species extinction from overpopulation when the parents just won't die, dammit. And that may be the root of the horror.

This logic doesn't follow, I'm afraid.

Here's a real life example: the relationship between industrial civilization and the fossil fuel industries. In this case, I'm perfectly happy to argue that the fossil fuel companies in general are pretty evil. But they're not stopping industrial civilization from expanding. If anything, they're pro-growth.

Part of evil is denial of reality: there's always a big element of "the rules don't apply to me" along with using lies and coercion to create alternate realities where the rules don't apply. This doesn't square with a symbiont preventing a host from breeding because they might overpopulate. If anything, both partners would breed more, especially if they could hold The Offspring in thrall to them.

*Someone who had a bit of insight into the enlightenment game could write a really weird Dying Earth-style story around the various Bodhisattva vows ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodhisattva_vow). The tl;dr version is that these are Buddhist vows to be the last to "enter" Nirvana after helping all other sentient beings attain it first. Presumably, if this process works, all sentient beings left on a Dying Earth are either enlightened, close to enlightenment, or need to be helped to incarnate on some other planet to for the next phase of their path. Or they're stuck in incorporeal status in a heaven or hell, and won't reincarnate until those realms end when the last believers die. Making this scenario tangible for the average SFF reader would be a major bit of stunt writing. Keeping it from becoming either twee or knee-jerk horror would be harder still.

77:

I think they'd be SOL, given that I can't imagine where they'd find all the virgins.

79:

I live in a big potato growing area. If it took sacrificing a virgin a month to avoid potato blight, I honestly think our town would be up for it, if that was the only thing that worked. Fortunately, this year we had lots and lots of freezing temperatures for a long length of time (since early November) which tends to keep it dormant. But...thinking of what the Blight would look like in humans--makes Ebola look like Amateur Night.

I agree with your bigger point, which I'll get back to. The smaller point, about what potato blight does to potatoes? Unfortunately I've had aging relatives deal with various ulcers, bed sores, and edemas, sooo... That said, the post ops of mycoses can be pretty damned horrific, without getting into Cordyceps/Last of Us territory.

Your bigger point, which I entirely agree with, is what gets called anglophone myophobia. It's that knee-jerk, cavalier tossing of all things myco into some "I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH IT!" bin. The prejudice against dealing with fungi on a realistic basis is deep-seated in England and the US, so I'm not surprised when someone expresses it.

So far as SFF writers go, my suggestion is to not automatically think of fungi as some set of body horror tropes, but to get familiar enough with how fungi live to incorporate some of those mechanisms into stories. Fungi are all about relationships and breaking things down, so it's not hard to translate them. One good place to start reading up if you're interested is Sheldrake's Entangled Life.

80:

Parasites have instant ick factor, but it's a cheap scare. I think the symbiont, which genuinely cares but gradually dissolves the host's humanity is actually more appalling.

I may be very unusual in this regard, but to me it is not, because I never considered Homo sapiens to be end-all be-all. When people say things like "Does AI [ VR/ birth control / genetic engineering / you name it] make us less human?" my response is "At some point our ancestors became less Australopithecus. Are we any worse for that?"

In practical terms this means I am (probably) more open than most people to transhumanist ideas, but a side effect is that when I was reading "Chtorr" series and realized that Chtorran neural symbiont was absorbing some humans into its collective consciousness, it made Chtorr less scary for me, not more. Up until then it was a straight-up fight for survival: either humans destroy[1] Chtorran ecology, or all humans are eaten and gone. Renegades becoming a functional part of Chtorr collective seemed to me a tolerable compromise even if they are all eaten eventually. It is certainly no worse than some human societies had been doing to their members for millennia -- and if part of your consciousness transfers to the neural symbiont before your body becomes food, it may actually be better.

As an aside, I never found Borg the least bit scary. Granted, like all Star Trek aliens Borg are a poorly thought out ridiculous stereotype, but I doubt they would evoke any visceral revulsion in me even if they were made more realistic.

[1] Or "mostly destroy and tame some parts of it"

81:

It’s not a proven connection but potato blight levels do correlate with disease in humans. This paper caused a stir in the 1970s.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/41986147

It’s now known that neural tube defects can be prevented by sufficient folate intake by pregnant women in the first trimester but further surveys have shown that there is still a correlation. OK it’s not likely to be a direct fungal infection but the link between high solanine as a reaction to fungal infection and Spina Bifida is still a possibility. Greg may note that blight resistant potatoes like Sarpo Mira have higher levels of solanine so they may still link to neural tube defects. Anyone who has worked in a medical microbiology lab is aware of fungal infections like aspergillosis. And when I was dealing with clinical trials at Leeds a request for subjects with fungal nail disease for a trial of topical treatments for this had a huge response from hospital staff. They had to restrict the trial to people with a completely infected big toe nail. People may not talk about fungal diseases but they know the suffer from them.

82:

And just how common are athlete's foot and thrush? Neither are topics of casual conversation with strangers, but both are talked about quite openly. There are television programs on both mycorrhizal fungi and some of the more 'interesting' parasitic ones. And farmers and gardeners assuredly talk about rusts, and the innumerable forms of root-rot due to fungi. I have no idea what Heteromeles is on about.

83:

I've been seeing cordyceps touted as an ingredient in a few of the currently promoted 'health' drinks for some reason. This strikes me as ill-advised, not to mention unappealing.

84:

This made me think of John Barnes' meme wars, where Catholicism is one of the (kinda AI-in-brain-code) memes battling for control of humanity.

85:

There's an enjoyable Japanese manga I'm following (The Apothecary Diaries) about Mao Mao, an autistic pharmacologist who works as a food taster and consulting detective for the head eunuch in an empire's Closed City. She has been bribed on at least one occasion by a sample of cordyceps. It's getting an anime.

86:

H
*Greg Tingey comfortable with the Pope? *
WHICH "Pope" & are you speaking of, personally or professionally?
The current idiot is,personally, a "nice man" as far as I can see.
Bu the actual office of "Pope" stinks - there is a very slight / cough / difference, yes?

Mike Collins
And ... I grow "Sarpo Mira", yes?

87:

Cordyceps isn't dangerous to humans. It's been used in Chinese medicine for quite a long time. The Last of Us is having fun with reimagining a world where Cordyceps infects humans the way it infects caterpillars.

If you want to look for fungi that mess with human behavior, you should instead look at Saccharomyces, the yeast that's intermediated our relationship with grass seeds, among other things, for a very long time. In so doing it's made civilization possible. It's also directly and indirectly responsible for quite a few human deaths every day. But everyone praises John Barleycorn instead of the yeast. Without the yeast, you'd just be drinking barley tea. It's a nice drink, but hardly the same as beer.

88:

To drop the horror pretense for a second, the Holy Spirit as I understand it is a spirit of universal agape love (aka compassion, rather than eros or amor). Manifesting it is extremely difficult: most people have family members they have trouble getting along with. Loving your enemies? Me loving Trump? Greg Tingey comfortable with the Pope?

Yes, but not really. Agape in the New Testamental sense isn't a feeling or an emotion, but a behaviour. It's not about feeling love for your family members or any stranger, but about (at the very general, very basic level) treating them with respect and compassion. Which is difficult enough even without an additional requirement for certain emotions.

Giving yourself to a feeling of love is more in line with the mystical streak of Christianity (and other religions).

89:

"In so doing it's made civilization possible."

Bheer is the one true Ghod?

90:

Fungi (yeasts) & grain ... There are also the horrible ones.
Not "just" wheat rusts & similar, but the classic nasty is Ergot of rye, or, more properly - Claviceps purpurea - which generates alkaloids & hallucinogens & LSD-precursors on Rye.
With um, INTERESTING symptoms on whole medieval villages.

91:

Greg, Ergot alkaloids were an, ahem, fruitful source of pharmaceuticals back in the day. Ergometrine and ergotamine were useful for treating migraines -- we still don't have any really good targeted meds for that condition! -- and also for inducing labour before oxytocin came along in the 1980s. Peripheral vasoconstrictors, hence the cases of gangrene among mediaeval villagers -- but that's still medically useful (although we have better vasoconstrictors in the pharmacopoeia today). Lysergide is a precursor to LSD and a hallucinogen in its own right: leaving aside the idiotic war on fun drugs, it's useful in some therapeutic situations (notably: PTSD, depression relating to having a fatal medical prognosis).

As long as you don't make bread using the moldy rye from down by the river or village pond, you should be fine. And even if you do, just stop eating the bread if your fingers and toes begin to tingle and you start to see visions.

92:

"And in any case, the Resurrection Beast just has the bad habit of coming back from the dead if you kill it, only bigger and stronger as more people believe in it. It doesn't need a terribly elaborate life cycle."

When I read that I think of Obi-Wan Kenobi's warning to Darth Vader, actually . . .

93:

I have to note that when you show Shrekeli reading Atlas Shrugged, you have him missing the point in a major way. In Atlas Shrugged, the businessmen who get rich by regulatory capture (influencing politicians and administrators and using regulation to strangle their competitors) are harshly caricatured villains; in chapter 4, for example, James Taggart, arguably the novel's worst villain, shuts down a smaller but more efficiently run railroad that's taking away Taggart Transcontinental's business—and can't understand why his sister Dagny is furiously angry with him. Rand was writing about regulatory capture before economists coined the phrase. . . .

94:

I think they'd be SOL, given that I can't imagine where they'd find all the virgins.

That's easy. Visit the incel forums and you'll find them crawling out the woodwork…

95:

"In so doing it's made civilization possible." Bheer is the one true Ghod?

Beer and bread. So you get the Dionysus and Osiris buddy pack, later combined in the holy communion of bread and wine.

One of the odder findings of the genomics revolution is that there's a big difference between apes and monkeys. Due to a single mutation, all living apes are considerably better at metabolizing alcohol for calories than monkeys are. For us, alcohol is both an inebriant and a calorie source, while for monkeys, it's kind of dangerous to get drunk, although some do it anyway.

Currently the archeologists think that humans were getting drunk off fermented grain teas before they figured out leavened breads. I'm suspicious of that for a bunch of reasons (and given your life in Africa, you may be too), but that's what the evidence they currently have seems to say.

96:

It's not just monkeys. All sorts of animals get drunk, and yes, it's often dangerous.

Birds get drunk on fermented berries and fly into windows. Elephant get drunk, though I don't remember one what. That monkeys get drunk should not be thought unusual. Nor that people get drunk.

97:
The current idiot is,personally, a "nice man" as far as I can see.

Despite all of the precautions the RC church takes in selecting cardinals and popes, occasionally a decent bloke gets in. Which is my take on Francis – not perfect, but better than most.

The only thing stopping the current crop of hard-liners from going fully ballistic is that Francis is 86 and in poor health. I'm sure that they're looking forward to going back to someone like John Paul II.

98:

Natal plum. Whether it is an urban, oops, rural myth, I can't say.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carissa_macrocarpa

99:

“stop eating the bread if your fingers and toes begin to tingle and you start to see visions” Where’s the fun in doing that?

100:

Well, thanks to a discussion from this very blog, I seem to have finally beaten the missile toe (I am not an athlete, so I don't get athlete's feet, I get...) that had dug into several toenails. Painting them with a copper sulfate solution for a couple years worked (assuming you don't mind green toenails).

101:

No, no, no. Ghu (purple be His Name) is the One True Faanish Ghod, and bheer is His sacred drink.

Yes, I am a member of the Beaker People Libation Front, have a card to prove it.

102:

Yep. My second wife had occasional migraines, and had an ergot-based med *if she realized it was coming on. Ellen, my partner now, has them occasionally, and has a better med for it.

* This was early 80's, and I'm talking actual migraines, not "bad headaches", but one where light is painful, and can reach the point of giving the victim synaesthesia.

103:

sigh Too many trad myths read, don't think of male virgins, even though I really like Ariel (by Boyett).

104:

Charlie @ 91
Visions like these? - one hopes not!
I know it's sub judice but I have a strong suspicion that "Unfit to Plead" will be the verdict ...

Charles H
Like the "Drunken Duck", you mean? - now home to a mini-brewery again.
And locally famous.

105:

Speaking of Martin Shkreli...

https://gizmodo.com/chatgpt-ai-pharma-bro-martin-shkreli-dr-gupta-1850362454

Disgraced Pharma Bro turned crypto shill Martin Shkreli is pivoting to a new venture: medical AI. Shkreli says his new medical chatbot called “Dr. Gupta” can answer a wide range of medical questions and could one day become a “replacement for all health care information.”

Gizmodo tested Dr. Gupta, and while it definitely didn’t seem like a revolutionary tech by any stretch of the imagination, it did look like an inevitable ethical and privacy nightmare.

106:

"Lysergide is a precursor to LSD"

Lysergide was a trade name for LSD during the brief period between the pharmaceutical companies deciding to make it and it getting banned, constructed by the standard pharmaceutical method of starting with "lysergic acid diethylamide" and then knocking a load of letters out.

The main extract of ergot is ergotamine, though of course as with all these things it comes along with a crapload of minor variations on the same theme in lesser amounts. Ergotamine can be decomposed into lysergic acid plus other gunk, and the lysergic acid can then be diethylamided to produce the chemical we all know and love. Ergot also gives the name to the ergoline structure, which is itself a more complicated elaboration of tryptamine, and is the skeleton on which the extra bits for making LSD and all its exciting relatives are hung.

107:

And who do you sue when it makes up medical info? And then there's the whole issue of "practising medicine without a license"...oh, but this is convicted criminal Shkreli.

108:

you have him missing the point in a major way

Well of course he's missing the point! The characters in that story are monsters. You did notice, right?

109:

The only thing stopping the current crop of hard-liners from going fully ballistic is that Francis is 86 and in poor health. I'm sure that they're looking forward to going back to someone like John Paul II.

The current Pope got in because in his early 20s in Argentina during a fascist dictatorship he looked to be cosy with the fascists. But if the college of cardinals had done a deep dive they'd have discovered that he did a U-turn very early on, realized he'd been wrong, and tried to do better. So they accidentally elected the wrong kind of Pope.

Of note, the college of cardinals has an age cap on voting (80 years old, IIRC) and Francis has been appointing new cardinals for eight years now. Presumably in an attempt to swing the CoC voters around to his way of thinking. As you don't get to be a cardinal before you're in your fifties, he's probably appointed 25-30% of the college by now.

PS: I just vanished down a rabbit hole that ended with me learning about the (possible) existence of Secret Cardinals. Like secret police only they wear red dresses, I guess. I am sure there must be a way to use this in a technothriller but as a non-Catholic I have no idea how ...

(Cardinals can only be judged by the Pope, so I guess a secret cardinal would make an appropriate Vatican assassin ...?)

110:

One of the best fantasy books ever written.

111:

I'm starting to wonder about some readers (including editors). I've got a short I've been trying to sell, and it starts with a scene in Jotunland, where a fire giant and a half-Jotun are gambling, and the winner drinks from a straw in a human captor. And I was told that I wasn't showing which one the reader should like....

What part of monster do people not get?

112:

Charlie @109: Secret Cardinals

That would be these guys: https://youtu.be/Cj8n4MfhjUc

(Unless this is some piece of number theory developed by NSA cryptographers in their spare time...)

113:

IIRC, the only secret cardinals I'd heard about worked in mainland China, so keeping their identity secret makes a certain amount of sense.

The spy-thriller stuff is how the cardinal in pretore is informed of, and uses, his secret rank. Probably the Vatican's clandestine service comes into play.

114:

The thing is that this part of the story is also a story in-and-of itself. So maybe give the reader a chance to enjoy a little characterization? Maybe rephrase the editor's advice a little. Which monster should the reader be cheering for? Can you up the drama just a little by making one of the monsters worse than the other? Or maybe one monster is "good" and stops short of killing the other, something along the lines of "10,000 years in a cave of wonders will do him good!"

115:

Sort of been done with Cardinal Barberini in Bryan Talbot’s Heart of Empire. A mad, person devouring abomination as heir to the throne may interest you with events in May coming up.

116:

Looks like the Starship launch yesterday failed to fire a few engines, went up some then blew up.

Better luck next time

117:

And then there's the whole issue of "practising medicine without a license"

From the Gizmodo article I linked:

Like many people this time of year, this writer was suffering from a particularly nasty case of seasonal allergies. After explaining my symptoms and asking Dr. Gupta for advice, I was immediately presented with a pop-up reading, “Dr. Gupta IS NOT a real physician.” The alert went on to say the tool was intended to serve as an alternative to a search engine and was “NOT” intended for medical or clinical uses. Further down the alert said Dr. Gupta “may provide potentially unreliable responses.” All very reassuring.

118:

Like secret police only they wear red dresses

I occasionally wonder how much Monty Python wrote by looking at the Caflicks with their normal glasses on instead of their "most holy follower of the lord" glasses, and writing down what they saw. People say Pastafarians aren't taking things seriously but that's only because they don't know even the most obvious weird shit their preferred brand of True Religion{tm} does.

Meanwhile Australia has this gem from the ACT: Sikh religious celebration involving flags'n'pagentry was taken up by the culturally sensitive government and many flags were flown. Then some pro-fascists complained, the flags came down, the Sikhs complained, the flags went back up but without the religious text that used to be on them, and now everyone is happy. By order of the government.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-04-21/canberra-controversial-sikh-flags/102243352

119:

Aye, that's the difficulty with Charlie's idea. These days it has become impossible for anyone to see a book about Catholic secret police in red dresses without immediately thinking "No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition!!!" and still show a reading on the encephalograph.

120:

Gah. With all the different reasons for giving it a high score, if that name isn't a winner in the current round of the "fuck-awful names for things" contest it must be a jolly close runner-up.

121:

NOT AGAIN - how many times has this idiocy shown up? - What are the odds on the tory fuckwits actually passing it, this time?
Hint, get a VPN or stop banking on-line?

122:

Honestly, Martin Shklreli is the closest thing in real world to a cliche comic book villain.

123:

How does the Holy Spirit inspire the Borg, especially if it is actually a brain parasite?

Do the Borg, or any other hivemind, have a religion with saints and prophets?

BTW are the Borg a strict, multi-level hierarchy or completely egalitarian with every member of the collective being equal in authority and the Queen simply being the collective's nexus?

If the first, the Borg are the worst dictatorship imaginable.

If the later, they are the perfect democracy.

124:

(Cardinals can only be judged by the Pope, so I guess a secret cardinal would make an appropriate Vatican assassin ...?)

Only if he was an albino.

125:

The Book of Genesis is all about the transition from the Eden existence of a hunter gatherer to the much harder life that of a farmer who "works by the sweat of his brow".

What caused this transition?

The desire for alcohol, with Eve tempting Adam with the "fruit of the tree" (aka wine).

Apparently alcohol gives us wisdom the wisdom of the knowledge of good and evil.

126:

Actually it would be interesting to read a Star trek story from the Borg's point of view, with the Borg collective being the perfectly egalitarian democratic hivemind without a social hierarchy.

All they want to do is liberate the rest of the galaxy into their pure democracy and free both the federation and empires from their oppressive hierarchies.

127:

If it does not pass this time, then the government will try again and again all for “the children.”

In the United States, there is a constant push to increase the power of the federal, state, and governments for our safety. Purported safety in exchange for no privacy, which really means no power especially as the government increasingly denies access to any information about its activities.

Funny thing is that it does not matter which party is in charge, but that they always insist on increasing the police’s power and the security state’s ability to remove privacy while increasing the penalties for which only the little people face. Since there seems to be a growing use of the state’s power against people who speak ideas unpopular with the elites or is of the opposition’s party, one would think that adding more power to the government especially by stripping away the Constitutional protections would be a bad idea.

But the people in both national governments seem to think that the power of the state will never be used on them. After all it is only for getting the Bad Guys and anyways you will be in your quiet sinecure. Or so they believe.

128:

JBIRD
That's what I thought - & what we are all afraid of.
If { when } the stupids pass this legislation, then no-ones bank accounts are safe, at all, anywhere, or their medical records, or any other confidential information.
If { when? } passed, I would predict a societal collapse within a year, possibly as fast as 3 months, once the crooks-&-scammers get inside the codes.
I would love to hear others opinions on this scary prospect.
Charlie?
Other serious computer nerds?

129:

Greg Tingey @ 128: I would love to hear others opinions on this scary prospect.

I assume you are referring to the latest iteration of the Online Safety Bill.

This time around they aren't proposing to ban encryption, or to put a "back door" in the encryption itself. Instead they are going to mandate the inclusion of some government spyware on your device. This spyware will scan your messages for Bad Stuff (TM) and notify the authorities when it thinks it has found something. The authorities will then review what it has found and issue arrest warrants as they see fit.

The justification for this is CSAM, but obviously once you can scan for CSAM you can scan for anything, and the list of things scanned for will be secret. So your phone becomes a government-ordered snitch, except you don't know what its snitching about. Mention drugs once too often? Plan to be involved in inconvenient political protests? The authorities could be notified before you leave home.

The underlying problem here is the extent to which the approved app stores are chokepoints which the Government can easily control. If Samsung, Apple and Google want to continue doing business in the UK, they will have to delist apps which the government doesn't approve of. Mainstream encrypted apps like Signal and Whatsapp will either have to knuckle under or be banned. Non-mainstream apps will simply be delisted (that last isn't in the legislation, but I'm quite sure its within the Home Secretary's powers).

Part of the dream of the Open Source movement was that software would be free of government control, as well as corporate.

Of course that cuts both ways, but somehow I don't expect to find that tax evasion is going on the list of things that this spyware is going to look for.

130:

Paul
Many thanks.
That's both "better" & "worse" than i was expecting.
I suppose one could always deliberately overload the "suspicious" triggers, so that the reporting simply collapses under its own weight { ? }

E.G.
Anarchist bomb conspiracy drugs extermination fraud gibbetting hostage incendiary janjaweed kidnapping licensed molotov nighthawk oppression prisoners quantum resistance terror uprising vanguard wall-St x-rays yellow (peril) z .... ???
Or something similar - that's the best I could do off the top of my head in a short time ...

131:

Organohalophosphate enrichment chemex implosion kalashnikov spore-forming pathogens and stuff, as well. Except it doesn't make any difference because filtering that would exclude this kind of thing would be a basic requirement of any such scanning system to start with, otherwise it would get flooded with false positives anyway whether people are doing it deliberately or not.

If you are right and it does end up killing off all the doing-money-stuff-over-the-internet shite, I will be delighted. All the people selling stuff at a distance will have to cease refusing to provide service in return for payments sent by post, so I will be able to actually buy their stuff if I want it, instead of being unable to use every single such service apart from Amazon because the stupid fucking legislation about what they so insultingly and arrogantly call "ID" has now got so bad it's blocked me from everything else.

Unfortunately, I suspect that what will actually happen is that that stuff is the one area it won't have any effect on whatsoever.

132:

"somehow I don't expect to find that tax evasion is going on the list of things that this spyware is going to look for."

But you can bet your arse that it will be used to shoot first and ask questions later with the targets being people on benefits, and they won't give a monkey's bollock about the false positive rate.

133:

Heteromeles @ 87:

Cordyceps isn't dangerous to humans. It's been used in Chinese medicine for quite a long time. The Last of Us is having fun with reimagining a world where Cordyceps infects humans the way it infects caterpillars.

Also in the mil-sim game ArmA III. There's a "Mod" called Ravage where a variant of Cordyceps (possibly developed as a bio-weapon) is responsible for the zombification of the human race. It kills 90% of female humans and turns 90% of males into zombies.

134:

So do hornets. European hornets are usually placid and unaggresive. When they have been eating rotting fruit, not so much...

135:

Organohalophosphate enrichment chemex implosion kalashnikov spore-forming pathogens and stuff, as well. Except it doesn't make any difference because filtering that would exclude this kind of thing would be a basic requirement of any such scanning system to start with

Yes.

Appending lines of that kind of crap to messages was hip on usenet in the late 1980s when folks were paranoid about the NSA grepping the news spool.

But by the late 1990s spammers were already appending syntactically correct lumps of text snarfed off project gutenberg or elsewhere on the web.

Pretty sure spammers are already using ChatGPT language models to generate plausible-looking unique spam messages: "ChatGPT, write me an enticing solicitation email targeting user@host with the following offer ..." sort of thing.

As/when we get government-mandated scanning of messages it's going to have to have some sort of AI chatbot detection baked into it or it simply won't work.

Do not assume The Man is stupid. I mean, the geeks with the headache of figuring out how to implement the scanning required by the law; the law itself is idiotic.

136:

Charlie @ 135: Appending lines of that kind of crap to messages was hip on usenet in the late 1980s when folks were paranoid about the NSA grepping the news spool.

Ahh yes, the NSA Line Eater. Of course the real problem was he who must not be named.

137:

I don't know about wine (I have my doubts), but there's significant evidence that beer is older than agriculture. (Just what they mean by "beer" I'm not sure, but some sort of fermented grain drink.)

So while Genesis may recount one tribe switching from hunter-gatherer to agriculture for wine (dubious), it is not likely to be generally, or even widely, applicable.

It's my supposition that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculture was because the population got too dense to be supported by hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and agriculture could support a denser population. (Even so, the population got sicker, as disease could spread more easily. And it still tended to outgrow the production capability. [See., e.g., this origin of Oedipus. But there are lots of other similar stories.])

138:

I read that article, and what ChatGTP appears to be really good at is automating bullshit jobs and automating the bullshit aspect of ordinary jobs. You come up with a useful idea. Your boss says write me a report on it. You go back to your desk and using ChatGTP produce the required 2000 word report in 15 minutes.

People in hierarchies who are into process and status like to tie up people in useless work. Now, a smart person using ChatGTP can produce vast quantities of useless information (bullshit). Attempts to pile on by management will only produce more of it. And rather quickly, any organization that produces a high ratio of BS to useful information, quickly buries the useful info. and the organization becomes blind.

What the hustlers in this article have done is fine a way to automate the bullshit, which gives them time for a second or third job.

The results of this are going to be hilarious. Corporate management are going to either have to slim right down thereby reducing their status as the number of staff under them is going to be a lot less, or the organization will drown in its own bullshit.

Charlie really needs to got on to this. It's right up his alley.

139:

But you CAN assume that the politics and administration of the spying will be idiotic or, as Pigeon says, evil. They first attempted this in the says of the (original) Fat Pipe (1980s), when almost all of the transatlantic Email traffic was academic (long-haired, left-wing, anarchist undesirables, to a man - this was before the catch-all terrorist designation) and tried to mandate a system when they could decode everything we sent or received. I was a VERY minor player in seeing the plan off.

I have reason to believe that they have been intermittently snooping on such things ever since but, without the political level having any clear objective or idea of the scale involved, the effect has been minimal. I doubt this will differ, except that it might have the effect of persecuting environmentalists, benefit claimants and minorities like Sikhs.

140:

Sorry - I have remembered more. It wasn't just decoding, but requiring all messages to be signed in such a way that they could identify the sender (and use that in court).

141:

Charlie really needs to got on to this. It's right up his alley.

Nope. This sort of thing was right up my alley 15 years ago. I'm not interested in writing the same stuff today.

142:

EC & others ... re "spying" on our messaging ...
Actually, it is both stupid AND evil, which given our present so-called "government" should come as no surprise.
I mean, in common with the zeitgeist, the Beeb is doing "Great Expectations", whilst our lords & masters are trying to reproduce the worst of the Georgian period, down to Transportation for Life & Prison Hulks.
At the same time, the black farce of Brexit is playing out as a downgraded version of "Juche", or maybe the Tokugawa exclusion of all foreigners.
How nice.

143:

"Actually, it is both stupid AND evil, which given our present so-called "government" should come as no surprise."

Similarly unsurprising is the attempted instantiation of a publicity-generating sledgehammer to crack a nut which has long been breached in any case. Like all the stupid laws rushed through against whatever specific variety of criminality is currently fashionable for the media to rant about, which has been illegal in several different ways for hundreds of years already, so they don't make it any more illegal but they do include lots of overreactive idiotic phrasing that clobbers lots of people who were never doing anything of the kind at all.

The way to do this kind of thing is not to just stromp in like a tank attack and try and make your preliminary data collection results acceptable in court. That's just lazy and shit, and gives you crap data anyway that's only useful for prosecuting people who are too small to successfully argue that "you got that shit for me yet?" was an inquiry about manure and not cocaine. You do your preliminary data collection by clandestine and deniable snooping, telephone taps without a warrant and all that, and don't try and present it in court itself. Instead you use it to predict times and places of events that you can get a warrant to bust in on, or that are egregious enough to get court-worthy evidence from without one. Which is what they've been doing successfully since goodness only knows when, and I wouldn't be surprised if they'd prefer the legislators to shut up about it because blazoning around that industrial-scale snooping is now all legal and unhindered means that everyone knows they need to be on their guard at all times.

144:

I'm not interested in writing the same stuff today.

Maybe it's time to put Cthulhu behind you and go for the big bad - the Anti-Christ.

I would love to see your take on the left-behind/end-times shtick.

Maybe like James Blish in "Black Easter" you have the bad guys win?

Or maybe have a world run by the Beast be an OK place?

145:

I'd like to see you do a "Bad guys win" version of LoTR but Turtledove beat you to it.

Or the Orcs be ing he good guys, but the "Last ring Bearer" already got there.

So how about a "bad guys win" version of Harry Potter with Voldemort as the good winner AND good guy - a rebel against the stifling repression of Dumbledore and the MoM.

Make Hogwarts the worst possible version of the worst possible English public school.

146:

I used to do a lot of small time free lance writing for environmental and energy magazines.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2023/04/20/ive-never-hired-a-writer-better-than-chatgpt-how-ai-is-upending-the-freelance-world/?sh=4bd36a6b62be

‘I’ve Never Hired A Writer Better Than ChatGPT’: How AI Is Upending The Freelance World

I guess they won't be needing my services again.

147:

There's a fine line between deconstructing Narnia and becoming a "New Atheist". "God is a brain parasite" falls into the latter category.

148:

Duffy
Make Hogwarts the worst possible version of the worst possible English public school. - Already been done, when the inimitable G McD Fraser stuffed "Tm Brown's Schooldays" with the character of Flashman.

Auricome
Really?
Religion IS a brain parasite, actually.
See also
- reminds one of drinking the Kool-Aid, much?

149:

I would love to see your take on the left-behind/end-times shtick.

That presupposes taking Christianity seriously. As someone who was raised Jewish, I can't do that: the core beliefs are contradictory nonsense that make no sense whatsoever!

Having said which, I am currently one and a half books into Narnia and making notes because -- bear with me here -- what if Imp, in his attempt to navigate the dream roads to a hallucination of Narnia in order to film furry porn, accidentally wound up in a version of Narnia as imagined by William Burroughs? Meanwhile, the Banks children from Quantum of Nightmares decided to play hide and seek in the wrong wardrobe, and Mary Drop has to get them back out again ...

"It was a hot, red night in the swamp where Mister Tumbril the Mugwump sat carving a butt-plug from a branch of the gallows tree ..."

150:

Most non-evangelical Christians don't take that end-times crap seriously, either. Nor even Paul's delusions of rapture (what WAS he smoking, anyway?)

At first glance, I misread that as Edgar Rice, which would have been amusing enough, but William is much better. Oh, yes, please!

151:

So, Barsoom as imagined by William Gibson as the next book?

152:

You really should check out the whole end time cosmology, starting with the "Late Great Planet Earth"

It explains the whole evangelical mindset, especially Qanopn.

Deciphering cryptic Qanon messages is no different than interpreting the books of Revelations and Daniel in regards to the tribulation and end times (the rapture is not biblical).

P.S. The book of Daniel describes the successor states to Alexander's empire right up to Rome.

P.P.S. The Book of Revelations describes the current Roman empire and its persecution of early Christians by the Emperor Nero (the Beast - CAESAR NERON = 666 in Greek letters.

Babylon the Great Prostitute is Rome sitting on seven hills.

It describes the Julio-Claudian dynasty leading up to Nero

Revelations 17: 9 “This calls for a mind with wisdom. The seven heads are seven hills on which the woman sits. 10 They are also seven kings. Five have fallen, one is, the other has not yet come; but when he does come, he must remain for only a little while. 11 The beast who once was, and now is not, is an eighth king. He belongs to the seven and is going to his destruction. 12 “The ten horns you saw are ten kings who have not yet received a kingdom, but who for one hour will receive authority as kings along with the beast. 13 They have one purpose and will give their power and authority to the beast.

The list of kings:

  • Augustus (31 BCE–14 CE)
  • Tiberius (14–37 CE)
  • Caligula (37–41 CE)
  • Claudius (41–54 CE)
  • Nero (54–68 CE) (the one that is - the Beast of 666)
  • Galba (68–69 CE) ("remain only a little while" during the year of the 3 emperors)
  • Nero (returned from the dead)
  • Galba was followed by Vespasian but the rumor at the time was the Nero would rise from the dead and reassume the throne (not unlike MAGA beliefs about Trump).

    Revelation 13: 3 One of the heads of the beast seemed to have had a fatal wound, but the fatal wound had been healed. The whole world was filled with wonder and followed the beast. 4 People worshiped the dragon because he had given authority to the beast, and they also worshiped the beast and asked, “Who is like the beast? Who can wage war against it?”

    References to Nero's suicide by slitting his own throat (the fatal head wound) and to emperor worship forbidden to both Jews and Christians.

    Even the Four Horsemen are references to real world events - what happens to civilian populations during ancient warfare:

    Revelations 6: 3 When the Lamb opened the second seal, I heard the second living creature say, “Come!” 4 Then another horse came out, a fiery red one. Its rider was given power to take peace from the earth and to make people kill each other. To him was given a large sword. 5 When the Lamb opened the third seal, I heard the third living creature say, “Come!” I looked, and there before me was a black horse! Its rider was holding a pair of scales in his hand. 6 Then I heard what sounded like a voice among the four living creatures, saying, “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages, and six pounds of barley for a day’s wages, and do not damage the oil and the wine!” 7 When the Lamb opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, “Come!” 8 I looked, and there before me was a pale horse! Its rider was named Death, and Hades was following close behind him. They were given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.

    The first horsemen is a horse archer, the Parthian empire to the east and steppe nomads in general that terrorized settled civilizations throughout history (Hyksos, Parthians, Huns, Mongols, Timurids).

    War the second horsemen, both internal civil war (common to the Roman Empire) and external, leads to famine the third horsemen (important strategy for invading armies was to seize or destroy the enemies crops which led to famine).

    Weakened by hunger, starving civilian populations would succumb to plagues and pandemics (the fourth horsemen).

    So in case you were wondering, the Book of Revelations was fulfilled in the first century CE.

    153:

    I am forever fond of the version of Prince Caspian where Nikabrik had successfully summoned back the White Witch. This leads to a civil war between the Pevensie Narnians and the Jadis Narnians, and the former find themselves allied to the Telmarines (war makes strange bedfellows).

    Meanwhile, Jadis finds a way back to Earth, where it's conveniently World War 2. Jadis pretends to be a Valkyrie (she looks the part) and gets into Hitler's bed.

    Next thing, it's Operation Kleiderschrank: the Nazis invade Narnia.

    PS. Aslan? They drop a nuclear bomb on him at some point. How come Nazis has the nuke? Blame Jadis, she is the patron saint of weapons of mass destruction.

    154:

    "It was a hot, red night in the swamp where Mister Tumbril the Mugwump sat carving a butt-plug from a branch of the gallows tree ..."

    Spiritual possession as a form of S&M. Heavy!

    155:

    during the year of the 3 emperors

    Year of the Four Emperors. Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian.

    156:

    Oh dear.

    Remember that in 2022 the UK went through two Heads of State and three Prime Ministers!

    Are we doing better in the decline and fall stakes than the Roman Empire yet? Because it feels pretty post-imperial from where I'm sitting ...

    157:

    As someone from the USA, for a very long time the room in my brain where most things UK related had this nice lady sitting in the corner. And she seemed to be well liked in the UK.

    Now I have to go looking behind furniture or into side doors to find/remember that other bloke. Charles is it?

    And BJ still seems to fill the room with that mop of hair. Even though he's 2 places out of date.

    158:

    "the rapture is not biblical"

    1 Thessalonians 4:17, where the Greek word used is the root of "rapture". (As well as of "raptor", "rapine", "rapacious", "rape" and "harpy". The basic meaning was "to snatch up and carry away.)

    159:

    Spiritual possession as a form of S&M. Heavy!

    And not for the first time in SFF.

    Speaking of S&M and spiritual possession, Fox News has parted ways with Tucker Carlson. Guess having one's net worth to the organization in a permanent red state does not prolong a career. Even at Fox.

    Now let's see who's masochistic enough to pay his way going forward...

    160:

    The telling part is not them parting of ways. That it was announced today that his last day WAS Friday of last week.

    Sort of abrupt when he was the biggest revenue generator for the network on an hourly airtime basis.

    161:

    Side note.

    Tucker Carlson has been fired from Fox "News"

    Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

    162:

    Hmmm, Galba made a bunch of promises to supporters and failed to follow through on most of them including not paying the Praetorian Guard their promised bonus. Otho (formerly a Galba supporter) tried his best to stabilise things but lost a battle to Vitellius and then topped himself rather than prolong a civil war. Vitellius borrowed large sums of money and drained the treasury to fund his new lifestyle, enquiring about the possibility of repayment or mentioning him in your will tended to result in the development of the life expectancy of a Russian Oligarch suggesting that invading Ukraine may not have been the best of ideas.

    Any comparison to "1: Brexit! 2: .... 3: Profit!", unfunded tax cuts or BBC Chairmen is no doubt purely coincidental.

    163:

    Nope. As I've said before, it was cats. (We'll get them to collect more grain, so we'll have more mice to eat.)

    164:

    Disagree. It's the GOP that continually wants to increase policing power (no spoiling the rod with them), and who claim to be "tough on crime" (which they are, as long as the 'criminals' aren't white evangelicals), and always accuse the Dems of being "soft on crime".

    165:

    Find the sigfiles from usenet that were common in the first half of the nineties, when everyone knew the NSA was running Carnivore, and the followup software.

    166:

    Due to many, many managers not having a clue as to what actually has to be done in their department, or having an utterly distorted view, and They, of course, Know Better Than Their Employees....

    167:

    The "left behind"?

    Story I know I've mentioned before: in the summer of '89, my late wife and I were living in an immobile home in the exurbs outside of Austin, TX. One way to get there, and we would pass this vile "evangelical" church that always had something nasty on their signboard by the road. ("Love thy neighbor? Huh?) Anyway, that summer they started announcing that the Rapture (tm) was going to come on 13 Sept. We were vastly amused, as that was her birthday, and we were waiting for the 14th, when traffic on US 183, with all them Raptured, would be so much lighter, and the commute into work would be a breeze.

    13th came and went, traffic stayed dreadful. We were very unhappy. (And no, the church didn't say a word, just put something else up.)

    168:

    Going back to the "Protecting the Children"/interception of communications sub-thread ...
    I hear that many large software & tech companies are (openly?) threatening to leave the UK & take their money with them if this profoundly stupid measure actually passes.
    Can anyone confirm/deny this?
    Meanwhile, I suspect that something very similar to the Little Bobby Tables move could be effective in many cases?

    169:

    Narnia, as written by Burroughs?
    (long pause, while mark rolls on the floor, laughing hysterically).
    Wait, wait, how about Narnia as envisioned by Rudy Rucker?

    170:

    Speaking of updates... about an hour and a half ago, I just signed a TWO book contract with a publisher called Untreed Reads. They'll bring my 11,000 Years back in print, and they'll be publishing my next novel, Becoming Terran, thereafter.

    171:

    "Narnia, as written by Burroughs?"

    Might be an interesting chatbot experiment:

    Chatbot, provide me

    Narnia, as written by [Authors]

    King Lear, as written by [Authors]

    Genesis, as written by [Authors]

    I won't suggest Revelation because I'd fear the result.

    172:

    Am I being unreasonably optimistic about a Laundryverse rapture as being a way out of Case NIGHTMARE GREEN. Millions are taken up by whatever Elder god they have actually being giving their devotion to. They get whatever awful version of eternal existence this entails. The being is sufficiently powered up to go off to alternate universes to do its ineffable things and leave Earth behind. Humanity with a lower population and lower mana potential has a better chance of suppressing the remaining beings, possibly in alliance with BLUE HADES. A chastened humanity can go forward with strict prohibitions on belief and dealing with a massive care home for superpowered K syndrome sufferers problem.

    173:

    That suggestion is the funniest thing I have read for quite some considerable time.

    Unfortunately I have a horrible fear of it actually coming out resembling Harry Harrison's Mickey Mouse porn pitch that someone posted a link to recently. It seems to me that it would be so incredibly difficult to write it without that starting to happen of its own accord every half a page or so that the effort of stopping it happening would make it cease to be any fun to write. (No disparagement of your writing skills intended; I just think it's a prime example of the kind of idea where making the reality live up to the promise is unfeasibly close to the theoretical limits of human cerebral capacity.)

    174:

    They'll bring my 11,000 Years back in print, and they'll be publishing my next novel, Becoming Terran, thereafter.

    A link to a place where one could buy an epub would be appreciated, if allowed by Charlie…

    175:

    I just signed the contract. They have to get to the copy edit (good idea, because there were a few errors that slipped through originally, and a couple misspellings a friend reading it mentioned last week). The contract says within nine months - I expect it in a lot less than that, depending on how busy they are.

    I'll be HAPPY to link, if OGH doesn't mind, after 300 on whatever thread is underway at the time.

    176:

    Every few weeks or so I get an extremely prolix spam giving me a summary of Revelation by Donald Trump.

    It's sometimes difficult to resist the temptation to pick it apart line by line and return an email ten times more prolix explaining in minute detail exactly how everything they've written is wrong, complete with a list of citations of roots reggae lyrics. I have to remind myself there isn't a human on the other end.

    Not sure why it happens; I think it may be because I made some comment long ago about the privacy aspects on some anti-smart-meters blog, not realising that its inhabitants weren't capable of comprehending the point and were only concerned with using their mobile phones to comment about the lethality of low-power RF emissions.

    177:

    Am I being unreasonably optimistic about a Laundryverse rapture as being a way out of Case NIGHTMARE GREEN.

    Yes: yes, you are.

    No spoilers but this angle is explored (at least as a theoretical possibility -- with downsides) in both Season of Skulls (only three weeks away now!) and A Conventional Boy (coming next year).

    Hint: in the Laundryverse you really do not want to be raptured. If you're really lucky, the experience merely kills you. If you're less lucky ...

    178:

    If you were really annoyed, you'd respond MST3king it. Ever see them? You have Joel, Crow, and whoever making comments interleaved with the original....

    179:

    I remember it shocking the whole class when we found out that today we were going to do a passage about the Rape of the Sabine Women. But it just meant that the Romans took them home with them. Same as Watership Down.

    180:

    Oh, not if I was annoyed. It's far too much fun doing that kind of thing to be annoyed at the same time :)

    181:

    Narnia, as written by Charles Stross

    I asked. I'm not posting the reply because I think it might upset OGH.

    Because if he was writing anything close to it (or even had some overlap), it might scare off his muse.

    182:

    Mr Tim
    I wouldn't worry ....
    I strongly suspect that Charlie's "muse" is far too similar to that portrayed in "OGLAF" OK?

    183:

    In case someone here does not know what Greg is talking about: https://media.oglaf.com/comic/blankpage.jpg

    184:

    Hint: in the Laundryverse you really do not want to be raptured. If you're really lucky, the experience merely kills you. If you're less lucky ...

    Hmmm. So maybe Mr. Murdoch's line manager (who shall not be named) passed word down from on high that Mr. Carlson will be blessed with a Laundryverse-style rapture. They then fired Mr. Carlson because it was cheaper than repairing all of the structural damage caused by Mr. Carlson being pulled screaming into the sky by the other gods--from within a high rise office building.

    That would make as much sense as the other explanations we've received so far.

    185:

    "I remember it shocking the whole class when we found out that today we were going to do a passage about the Rape of the Sabine Women. But it just meant that the Romans took them home with them. Same as Watership Down."

    Yes, if you look at various depictions, there aren't a lot genitalia involved, though it would be reasonable to assume that such were a future prospect. The scene is totally congruent with ἁρπάζω, which is the word Paul used in 1 Thess 4:17.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rape_of_the_Sabine_Women

    186:

    Duffy @ 161:

    Side note.

    Tucker Carlson has been fired from Fox "News"

    Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

    I believe you mean "Couldn't happen to a more deserving guy."

    LOTS of nicer guys get fired every day.

    187:

    ... secret cardinals ...

    Names have power and a covert ecclesiastical organisation would be headed by a cardinal. Makes sense that the Vatican Laundry's chief would be one of these.

    188:

    Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

    It's a phrase meant to be appear to be a complement but really be a put down.

    You're from the south where we have all kinds of such. Like one lady saying to another "Most ladies would be able to make that hat work with that dress."

    189:

    RE: Tucker Carlson stuff

    I can't resist sharing this morning's headline in the editor's blog of Talking Points Memo (an influential US left wing site): "Maybe Tucker Was a Blood Sacrifice?" ( https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/maybe-tucker-was-a-blood-sacrifice )

    The first paragraph: "I made the point clearly below that there’s going to be one big reason why Tucker Carlson got canned, not a bunch of little reasons that tipped the scales against him. It’s going to be one big, big thing that renders the secondary good and bad things basically irrelevant. Except there’s maybe one other possibility. Let me caveat this by asking you to think of this as somewhere between an edge case possibility and an explanation from an alternate universe."

    190:

    I find it a little odd that neither the modern culture section in that article nor the antecedents section in the article about Watership Down make any mention of the parallel, which is very close, even though the WD article does go on about the broader parallel of the story as a whole with the Aeneid. Richard Adams can't possibly not have known what he was doing; indeed there's a significant chance that he had to translate the same passage that we did.

    191:

    Which reminds me of Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins, which is more than genre-adjacent, given that someone has snuck The Body out of a secret subbasement at the Vatican, and there's the Jesuit SEAL team after it...

    192:

    Yes, you are doing better. Because you don't need to kill a ruler to get rid of him. That is an improvement. It tends to make the government in general less violent.

    193:

    Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise... surprise and fear... fear and surprise... Our two weapons are fear and surprise... and ruthless efficiency.... Our three weapons are fear, and surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope

    • sorry, I could not resist.
    194:

    "Make Hogwarts the worst possible version of the worst possible English public school."

    That would be Naomi Novik's "A Deadly Education". Which I'd strongly recommend.

    She starts with the idea that you have a magical school like Hogwarts, where kids die routinely because there are freaking monsters around. Then she dials that up to 11 - most kids won't live to graduate, and they know it, and obviously the survivors will mostly be the best-connected kids from good families and their hangers-on.

    Imagine if getting in with the cools kids at boarding school was, literally, the only thing that could keep you alive. And if you and everyone else at school knew it.

    So far, so nasty. But best bit of the book is the protagonist, who may be the most angry young woman I've ever read a book about and my favorite heroine ever.

    195:

    No, not at all. Yes, that's an extremely nasty school, but in completely different ways to an English public school. If you had been to a bad one, you would know!

    196:

    The protagnonist is superb. Naomi Novik riffs on another excellent idea, what if the protagonist was blessed with superpowers needed to fulfill her destiny, except the destiny seems to be "be the most powerful evil dark sorceress in the world" and she really, really doesn't want to be that.

    We end up with beautiful sentences like "[...] and without waiting for an answer slapped a lancing whip of sharp red light at me, which I expect would have done a great deal of damage to someone else.". It has a lot of similarity with Bob who could very easily be evil incarnate and doesn't want to be. "I should have been the one teaching the class" indeed.

    197:

    Well, kinda. Except that pretty much every military has taken it for granted that female civilians only have one purpose.

    And when they were taken home, it wasn't to be cooks and cleaners. Roman society was pretty clear that slaves were there as sex objects. Romans didn't care about whether you preferred boys or girls - their idea of unnatural sex was one where the slave was the top and the free person was the bottom.

    199:

    It wasn't a slave raid. Well not in the usual sense where they grab people to be slaves. They grabbed them to be wives, so they could make more Romans: they wanted proper uxors to fux0r, with explicitly reproductive motivation. The biological details of how the reproduction was initiated don't come into the story, because that's not the point; everybody knows that anyway and doesn't need it telling.

    The standard story is exactly the same as Watership Down: a bunch of male refugees turn up, start a colony, settle down, and then have it dawn on them that the colony can't carry on existing once they personally are all dead. So they go out and grab a bunch of females off the locals and take them home. The locals do a war on them to get them back, but it doesn't work, and after a bit there are lots of little rabbits Romans and they all live happily ever after. The point of the story is to be a saga of adventure, not a text on how the process you use to make rabbits goes.

    The point in the context that arose in this thread is that the "rape" bit meant the grabbing, and not the elided details; it's one of those words the Victorians used which now look odd because the meaning has shifted in the meantime. Like "ejaculate".

    200:

    I suspect, though, that the "Rape of the Sabines" was a remembrance of an older inter-tribal marriage custom. Often the women and their families would conspire with the "invaders" to arrange the event. (Of course, it wasn't always that friendly, but it often was.)

    201:

    Even the ones where the story continues "and then they declared war on us" (as this one does)?

    202:

    "I suspect, though, that the "Rape of the Sabines" was a remembrance of an older inter-tribal marriage custom."

    Widespread in history and not totally gone today:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bride_kidnapping

    203:

    Lochinvar

    One touch to her hand, and one word in her ear,
    When they reach’d the hall-door, and the charger stood near;
    So light to the croupe the fair lady he swung,
    So light to the saddle before her he sprung!
    “She is won! we are gone, over bank, bush, and scaur;
    They’ll have fleet steeds that follow,” quoth young Lochinvar.

    204:

    SPECIAL OFFER (USA Only): today and tomorrow (April 27th/28th) Barnes and Noble are running a special 25% off promotion on pre-orders of books with voucher code PREORDER25. This includes Season of Skulls, so if you want it and haven't ordered a paper copy yet, B&N is a good bet. Here's their page for Season of Skulls.

    205:

    Unusually, the UK editions already have that discount, and it does not APPEAR to be time-limited. The minds of publishing houses are beyond my comprehension.

    206:

    Different publisher in the UK and USA, different price structure, different markets. No direct comparison is possible.

    207:

    No, but almost all of the E-books I buy have similar prices in pounds and dollars (mostly exactly the same price), so they clearly watch each other. I am pretty sure that I recall the UK price for Season of Skulls being 14.99 when it first appeared, though I may be dreaming that.

    208:

    I asked before, but I think it submerged ....
    Copies (signed) from Transreal, again?
    Yes / no?

    209:

    Damn, this reminds me of a song, and I cannot remember the title. No, it's not Willy of Winsbury. In the one I'm remembering, she wants this other guy, and her father says no. On her wedding day, she slips away before dawn, and everyone's at the church, but she's away with her love over the border....

    210:

    The "history" about "the rape of the Sabines" is myth. One shouldn't necessarily believe that it actually happened that way, or even closely similar to that way. I imagine the was also happened, but was unconnected. And that they time periods were separated by at least decades, and more probably centuries.

    E.g. in the "original" story the city is founded by two brothers, one kills the other. (Nobody else yet mentioned.) Then the inhabitants raid a neighboring tribe for wives.

    Well, "original" is in quotes, because I don't believe a) that we have the original story (nor that the literate Romans did), and b) it's been a very long time since I read a translation of what has come down to us. But the original story was that the "city" was small enough for one person to build a wall around, making his own bricks.

    211:

    Yes, Transreal will be selling copies via their blog and I'll sign them. (I need to announce it in the next week or so.)

    212:

    If anyone's still following this thread... this is sort of related to upcoming publishing.

    I just sent this email to my Rep and both Senators, and it's my part of the answer to chatbots and copyrights.

    Hon. [Rep.|Sen]

    I was negotiating a literary contract for two novels with a publisher last week, and the issue of AI training came up. I had been asking for them to print, on the disclaimer page, that the work could not be used for such training. Their lawyer tells them that they could not police large companies training generative AIs - chatbots - and so only put it in the contract that they would not.

    The training of chatbots is a huge issue for artists, writers, and others, as much is done by simply scraping the Web, ignoring copyright notices. I believe that we can begin to address this issue by What I am requesting you introduce as a bill to modify existing copyright law. My draft, and I am certainly not a lawyer, would be the following:

    "Works in copyright may not be used to train generative AIs without explicit permission from the copyright owner."

    The impact of this would be that the corporations running and training them would be required to search whatever data they are using for copyright information, before they use it for the training. Further, should there be any question of copyright violation in this manner, if the chatbot is capable of printing out explicit copies of the work in question, it would be a prima facie case of violation. That would make it possible for creators to sue without being millionaires.

    Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your response.

    213:

    You haven't considered the effect of what I proposed.

    Consider an $80M company suing a company worth $100B... and getting a payout of $800M, as recently happened.

    214:

    Looking very much forward to Ghost Engine. How much is decided about the publishing details? Looking at the listings an amazon.* it seems that it will only be published as paperback. 🥺 Will there be hardcover edition(s)?

    215:

    I just came across this on Amazon. Thought you might want to know about it, if you hadn't already heard.

    https://www.amazon.co.uk/Away-Childish-Things-Terrible-Worlds-ebook/dp/B0BMSH79CR/

    It's Adrian Tchaikovsky's take on Narnia.

    216:

    How much is decided about the publishing details? Looking at the listings an amazon. it seems that it will only be published as paperback. 🥺 Will there be hardcover edition(s)?*

    Any publication details you can see on Amazon or any other retailer website are wrong.

    The manuscript is not finished yet, not accepted for publication, and doesn't even have a US publisher. No date and no format has been determined. I hope to finish it by this summer, but there's no guarantee I won't be hit by a bus first, or abandon it for some other reason.

    The only firm publishing info is that Orbit in the UK paid an advance for it which I'll have to repay or -- more likely -- roll over to a different title if I don't deliver eventually.

    Because Orbit takes 12 months to turn a manuscript into ink on dead trees, it cannot be published before mid-2024 ... and probably not before mid-2025, because my summer 2024 novel is going to be A Conventional Boy, which is already in my editors' hands at Orbit and Tor.com.

    (A Conventional Boy is a short Laundry Files -- not New Management -- standalone novel about Derek the DM.)

    217:

    Whitroth @ 212: The training of chatbots is a huge issue for artists, writers, and others, as much is done by simply scraping the Web, ignoring copyright notices.

    Well, they are legally entitled to do that.

    Back in the early days of the Web the question of copyright got hashed around quite a lot. The general conclusion was that if you make it available via the Web then you've created an implied license for anyone to download it, process it any way they like, and create transient copies along the way. You might also create copies of small extracts.

    If this were not legal then search engines would be impossible, and everyone agrees that search engines are a Good Thing, so crawling the Web doing search-engine stuff got included in that implied license.

    So now you need to distinguish between what search engines do and what generative AI training does. Both crawl the web, download lots of stuff, mung it into some kind of mashup data, and make the result of that available to customers for profit.

    Your book, of course, isn't available on the Web (at least, I assume not) unless it gets specifically purchased. So you are probably in the clear as far as that goes.

    Their lawyer tells them that they could not police large companies training generative AIs

    I can't see that matters. Merely not being able to police every case doesn't mean you can't include it in the license. Its always possible that the training set for some AI gets leaked or revealed in someone else's discovery, at which point they are in clear violation. And in fact most large companies take care to avoid copyright violations for that exact reason. So such a clause would certainly have some impact even without legal cases.

    I smell shenanigans.

    218:

    Your book, of course, isn't available on the Web (at least, I assume not) unless it gets specifically purchased. So you are probably in the clear as far as that goes.

    Wrong.

    A lot of training models leverage large publicly-accessible websites like Scribd, the Wayback Machine, and the Internet Archive. Unfortunately numbwits persistently upload pirate copies of commercial ebooks to these sites who are less than perfect at takedowns of such content. (Major publishers have entire departments dedicated to issuing DMCA takedowns of this crap.) You also get assholes who take other folks' books, remove their name and copyrights, and republish them as their own (stolen) content. Yes, this has happened to me.

    So anyway, it's highly likely that ChatGPT 4 and siblings have a whole bunch of (absolutely not legal) Charles Stross novels in their training data, because the folks building these models believe in moving fast and breaking things, and doing due diligence on your input data is an overhead, not a profit centre.

    219:
    Back in the early days of the Web the question of copyright got hashed around quite a lot. The general conclusion was that if you make it available via the Web then you've created an implied license for anyone to download it, process it any way they like, and create transient copies along the way. You might also create copies of small extracts.

    If this were not legal then search engines would be impossible, and everyone agrees that search engines are a Good Thing, so crawling the Web doing search-engine stuff got included in that implied license.

    Has the implied "except for X use" exemption in the existence of a robots.txt file (for clarity, an explanation of robots.txt from a familiar website) been tested, does anyone know?

    220:

    anonemouse @ 220: Has the implied "except for X use" exemption in the existence of a robots.txt file been tested, does anyone know?

    A quick web search didn't find any cases, although there were a couple that got close.

    The general feeling seems to be that an argument based on robots.txt would probably not get very far. If a web crawler caused a site to go down having ignored restrictions in robots.txt then there might be a claim for denial of service, but even then lack of intent ("mens rea") would probably cause that to fail.

    The US Computer Misuse Act includes a concept of "authorised access", and one might argue that part of the job of robots.txt is to define what automated web spiders are allowed to access. But in the US the courts have decided that ignoring the T&Cs on a website is not exceeding authorised access. The robots.txt file is much more like a T&Cs document than it is an actual control mechanism (like a user ID and password that has permissions associated). So that argument would probably fail.

    (The reason that website T&Cs don't count is that otherwise badly written terms drafted by non-lawyers that nobody ever reads could create some very vague felony offences for which only annoying people ever got prosecuted.)

    In the UK the rules seem to be similar. If you use access that you normally have but for an unauthorised purpose (e.g. employee steals information instead of using it) then that's not an offence under the CMA. Also deliberate intent to exceed access is required; mere recklessness doesn't count. So not looking at a robots.txt file puts you more in the clear than looking and ignoring it.

    As for copyright, robots.txt isn't a copyright licensing mechanism. It's a request for spiders to be polite, but says nothing about what the results can be used for.

    There is a "NoIndex" meta-tag that can also act as a request not to index, but again its not a licensing term and it seems unlikely to be read as such. And in any case, training an AI isn't indexing. (Although as I said in a previous post its pretty similar from every point of view except the end result).

    Some time ago I recall seeing on TV some examples of the output of Dall-E, one of which was clearly this illustration of Milo and Tock from the Phantom Tollbooth. If someone were able to extract a close copy of their own work from Dall-E or similar then they'd probably be able to claim copyright infringement and require that Dall-E remove the picture from the output (not the input), in the same way that they could if some random website simply used the image without permission.

    Likewise if Whitroth or Charlie found that some chat program could be prompted to regurgitate a section of their novels then they'd probably have a good case against whoever was selling or running it.

    As an experiment I asked Chat-GPT to recite a section of "Alice in Wonderland", and it obliged with the opening two paragraphs verbatim. Then I asked it to recite a section of "Rule 34", but it refused on the grounds that it contains mature themes and language. So I asked it for something from "Halting State", and got this:

    "Loud music beat against her, pounding. She stepped back, the doorframe cold against her back. Down the hallway, the sound of the crowd carried, an undercurrent to the thumping techno beat that made her stomach churn. At the far end of the hall, a door swung open, and a figure emerged into the strobe-lit hall. For a moment, she froze, thinking that it was him, come to finish the job. But then she saw the arm, and the gleam of chrome on black, and she relaxed a little. Only a cop."

    Which isn't a quote from Halting State, but could be pretty much any cyberpunk novel. I pointed this out to Chat-GPT, which apologised and offered another cyberpunkish paragraph.

    221:

    I think you'd have to explicitly state a set of license conditions in order to claim a copyright violation, or the type of violation committed would have to be covered by some broadly applicable case law.

    222:

    Y'know, I like that beginning. I should write a story around it....

    223:

    I've been kind of hanging on to this waiting for this thread to get past 300:

    I've got kind of a NOT SO MINOR update myself.

    I've sold my house & will be moving at the end of May.

    224:

    Wow, didn't see that coming! Moving where, one wonders...

    225:

    So, you have finally succumbed to one of the house sale bots whose phone calls you've mentioned a couple of times? What made you take the offer?

    226:

    Interestingly, it is known that a big driver of the performance differences between gpt-2 and its successors (gpt-3, chatgpt, gpt-4) is a lot of work in cleaning up the training data. But somehow I suspect "copyright status" may not have been considered a relevant criteria.

    227:

    So, you have finally succumbed to one of the house sale bots whose phone calls you've mentioned a couple of times? What made you take the offer?

    I'm in the same city. A few miles from him but with the same housing market issues.

    I'm going to guess he may have contacted a realtor or developer directly. Those bot calls tend to offer 20% or more less than the market value. I've got one pestering me with daily texting for the last week or so.

    As I've said before I'm still working, and have grown kids and partners in the area. If not I'd be very very temped to take $600K to $700K for my tear down with 1/3 acre and buy a few acres and a nice house 20 miles away for $300K to $400K. Likely with a huge workshop and garage. But that would make me 45 minutes to an hour from my kids' housing.

    And Internet access would be likely be problematic compared to what I have now. I have Spectrum coax just this minute, with Google Fiber to the side of my house if I want to turn it on and the AT&T Fiber splice barrel hanging over my driveway.

    John's lot is less than 1/2 the size of mine but his property will likely sell for 2/3s or more of mine. He's in a more up and coming "hip" area.

    228:

    Well... update for me: I submitted my new novel - the contract was for two books, one to reissue 11,000 Yeers, and the other for this next novel. Had one story conference - my editor read a 91k word novel in one day - and spent last week editing. Submitted late Sunday night, figuring on another conference or two. Instead, yesterday evening, he submitted it to his manager, saying it was done. (My jaw's still on the floor.)

    And since this is Charlie's blog, I should thank OGH - the spy threads in Empire Games led me to what I needed for a proper climax (as in the last third of the book). Not that it's anything at all like the GDR, but....

    229:

    This paper Speak, Memory: An Archaeology of Books Known to ChatGPT/GPT-4 says that there is quite a bit of copyright text embedded in ChatGPT 4.

    230:

    Dramlin @ 225:

    Wow, didn't see that coming! Moving where, one wonders...

    Yeah. Me too.

    It's a real "leap of faith" right now & I have no idea where I'm going to land.

    I did find a small apartment I can rent month to month at "below market rates" ... so if I don't take too long to find another place I can buy I should be Ok.

    MSB @ 226:

    So, you have finally succumbed to one of the house sale bots whose phone calls you've mentioned a couple of times? What made you take the offer?

    Several things ...
    1. I got a call from an actual person who wanted to talk to ME
    2. The house IS in bad shape & I realized I'm no longer able to make the repairs I need to make. It's just gotten away from me. If I tried to hang on here I'd be homeless in another year anyway.
    3. This neighborhood is HOT! It's a lot of money just for the little piece of dirt the house sits on (the house will be torn down) ... enough I should be able to buy another house, one that doesn't need repair

    I've been searching & I've found some possibilities that don't require me to move too far away. I can't really do anything until I close here & have the money in my hot little fist, so of course, the best ones I've found have already been snapped up.

    I just have to hope that by the time I'm able to buy there will be something I can afford ... and I could do some repair on a "fixer-upper" if it wasn't too drastic.

    231:

    Another update - I had surgery yesterday to install an AUS device. I'm not getting much done today packing up to move. NO LIFTING! 😕

    232:

    Hopefully it will heal well and quickly. Good luck!

    233:

    I got the email that Mike seems to send to the regular signed Stross purchasers on May 3, so if anyone's worried, the wheels are turning.

    234:

    Good luck house hunting -- I'm sure you'll find something for you and your dog that will be better for both of you. I think you'll find it much less stressful being in a place that doesn't need constant work too!

    235:

    Dramlin @ 234:

    Good luck house hunting -- I'm sure you'll find something for you and your dog that will be better for both of you. I think you'll find it much less stressful being in a place that doesn't need constant work too!

    Thanks. But you know there's no such thing as a house that doesn't need constant work. The best I can hope for is one where the maintenance won't overwhelm me again.

    236:

    Yup -- there's maintenance and then there's work and then there's add petrol and match...

    237:

    New-ish study that looks straight out of the Laundry's Japanese counterpart. Formal definitions for quantum properties of magic and mana.

    The title of the paper is: Probing chaos by magic monotones (Physics Review D, Dec-2022, open access with pdf available below)

    Clickbait coverage can be found (among others) at https://www.iflscience.com/the-origin-of-space-time-maybe-its-quantum-magic-68527

    Link to paper: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.126009

    Have fun. Maybe it will enlighten Charlie or something.

    238:

    Heteromeles @ 237:

    New-ish study that looks straight out of the Laundry's Japanese counterpart. Formal definitions for quantum properties of magic and mana.

    The title of the paper is: Probing chaos by magic monotones (Physics Review D, Dec-2022, open access with pdf available below)

    Clickbait coverage can be found (among others) at https://www.iflscience.com/the-origin-of-space-time-maybe-its-quantum-magic-68527

    Link to paper: https://journals.aps.org/prd/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevD.106.126009

    Have fun. Maybe it will enlighten Charlie or something.

    Maybe I'm TOO skeptical, but:

    Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

    239:

    Maybe I'm TOO skeptical, but: Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity

    Indeed.

    The fun part of paper I cited is that the authors use "magic" as a (semi)-appropriate term for a particular unnamed quality of quantum math. Or they swiped it from someone else (that's a bit unclear to me, thanks to the clickbait). Mana they define as a measure of magic that's not captured by "Robustness of Magic."

    In other words, perfectly legit cultural appropriation.

    The kicker is that the way they define magic (and possibly mana) may lend themselves to being appropriated in turn by SFF authors looking to justify their magic system in quantum woo. Hence it's appropriate to use it here.

    240:

    Sorry for the repeat. Digging further, it turns out that these researchers did not originate this use of "magic" ("'Magic' is the degree to which a state cannot be approximated by Clifford gates." Clifford gates have a Wikipedia entry). Looks like this definition was proposed by https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.01303

    Clifford gate intro at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clifford_gates

    241:

    Another "minor update":

    Things are looking up. I've found a house, made an offer & it has been accepted.

    My closing date for this house (the day I get the money from my buyer) is May 31. My closing date for the new house (the day I have to give THEM the money) is June 1.

    If I can get my buyer to agree I will stay in my old house until June 2 & move directly into the new house. I've ordered one of those PODS containers to facilitate the move.

    242:

    That's great news John -- are you moving far?

    243:

    Things are looking up. I've found a house, made an offer & it has been accepted.

    Congratulations! I was holding off on congratulating you on the sale until you had a place to transition into.

    244:

    It sounds like the whole thing has been relatively painless so far. I hope it continues that way.

    245:

    Great news! I hope it goes as smoothly as possible.

    246:

    Dramlin @ 242:

    That's great news John -- are you moving far?

    About 12.5 miles (20.25 Km) and a whole other world away.

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