Charlie Stross: January 2013 Archives

I guess it's official now: Tor signs new Charles Stross trilogy.

(No, I can't tell you the titles, except that my working project folder is called "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation" and the opening sentence for accuracy reasons should, but for literary reasons should not, be "fifteen years later". Oh, and this is what all the work in 2012 towards re-drafting and re-releasing the first series was leading up to.)

Note: a trilogy is, in my view, a big-ass story that splits into three pieces, each of which is just about readable as a separate book, but which work best when read in sequence. It's going to run to about a third of a million words, or, in the unit of authorial bloat, about a thousand milli-Hamiltons. That's a lot of work, so it's unlikely to show up in print until 2015. Meanwhile, you get to chew on a new space opera and a new Laundry novel (both written).

Q: Why are there so many stupid people?

I have a speculative answer:

Edit: No, forget that question. It's misleading. Pointless. And everybody in the comments thread is completely failing to understand the point I'm trying to make below. Let me re-frame it:

Why is the human species only as intelligent as it is, and not more so?

I am in warm, sunny Detroit (at least, it's warm and sunny compared to the UK right now), with a mild throat infection and jet lag on top. Our luggage should even catch up with us in the next half hour. (We allowed 80 minutes for our connection in Paris, which would have been fine if our flight from Edinburgh hadn't been delayed on the taxiway for an hour waiting for a landing slot to open up at the other end. Paris really doesn't handle snow well. Luckily our onward flight was also running late, so we made a mad dash across Terminal 2E at Charles de Gaulle. Alas, our luggage wasn't so agile.)

Anyway, I now have mobile broadband, or something like it ...

What use is a human being — to a tapeworm?

A mature tapeworm has a very simple lifestyle. It lives in the gut of a host animal, anchoring itself to the wall of the intestine with its scolex (or head), from which trails a long string of segments (proglottids) that contain reproductive structures. The tapeworm absorbs nutrients through its skin and gradually extrudes more proglottids, from the head down; as they reach the end of the tape they mature into a sac of fertilized eggs and break off.

Nominations for the Hugo awards are open. If you want to find out what's eligible, there's a handy Livejournal community for sharing recommendations. (Disclosure: I am not a member of this community and have nothing to do with it.)

For my part, I only published three eligible works in 2012 ...

So, I just wrote and handed in a vampire novel.

What bit me?

(Author pauses to allow the shower of rotten tomatoes to subside ...)

Having just handed in the manuscript of "The Rhesus Chart", I'm taking some time over the next 3 months to make various public appearances at SF conventions.

I'm going to be appearing as one of the guests of honor at Immortal ConFusion from January 18-20th in Dearborn, MI. Also on the guest list are editor Scot Edelman, science writer Jennifer Ouellette, Usenet personality, RPG store owner, and spec fic reviewer James Nicoll, and author, puppeteer and voice actor Mary Robinette Kowal. Not to mention some secret guests of Subterranean Press who I can reveal (unsurprisingly) to be authors: Maria Dahvana Headley, Kat Howard, and, stealing the show, SF mega-star Alastair Reynolds!

More details on registration, in case you didn't know about it and want to go.

I'm also going to be appearing (albeit not as guest of honor) at Boskone 50 in Boston (February 15th-17th). (I will not be hanging around North America between these two conventions; these are two separate trips.) And I'm due to appear as guest of honor at DORTCon in Dortmund, Germany, from March 9th-10th, and as one of the guests at SwanCon 2013, in Perth, Western Australia (March 29th-April 1st), along with Lucy Sussex, Gail Simone, and John Birmingham. After which I will crawl home to nurse my jet lag by way of a short interstitial vacation before I start work on the project provisionally titled "Merchant Princes: The Next Generation".

Those of you with acute eyes or well-primed calendars will have noticed that this schedule leaves no time for me to get to the UK Eastercon this year, mostly because it coincides with SwanCon and we don't have sub-orbital passenger delivery or teleportation booths yet. This is a bit of a bummer: Bradford is an ace city, and the guest list for EightSquaredCon includes Walter Jon Williams, who I consider a national treasure of the SF firmament. If there's a repeat of the 2010 Icelandic volcano eruption and all flights are grounded before I make it to the antipodes, I'll be there drowning my sorrows. But the plan for Q1/2013 is to hit Detroit, Boston, Dortmund, and Perth in pretty much that order.