Charlie Stross: November 2014 Archives

I'm fifty. I'm not the same guy I was when I was forty, or thirty, never mind twenty, or ten. I visualize identity not as a solid object but as a wave form travelling along the temporal dimension through a complex emulsion of memories, experiences, and emotions, bounded at front and back by singularities—boundaries beyond which there is no continuity (and almost certainly no persistence of identity). We're all waves travelling through this common soup of human existential phenomena, occasionally refracting through one another and being changed thereby. And as we move, we change. Not only are our physical bodies not made up from the same individual atoms: the bits you could notionally use to describe us change, too. New data is added, old patterns are lost (I have the memory of a goldfish these days).

Beyond the obvious (gross physiological deterioration and pathologies of senescence), what are the psychological symptoms of ageing?

To the eternal whine of the superannuated free-range SF geek ("dude, where's my jet pack? Where's my holiday on the moon? Where are my food pills? I thought this was supposed to be the 21st century!") can be added an appendix: "and what about those L5 orbital space colonies the size of Manhattan?"

Well, dude, I've got your L5 colony right here. In fact, they turned it into a vacation resort. I just spent a day checking it out, and I'm back with a report.

I'm in Berlin! (Combination of vacation and research trip.) And I'll be in Brauhaus Südstern (Hasenheide 69, 10967 Berlin) on Sunday evening from about 7pm. I gather they have good beer, and food. Conversation too, if you're in town and want to drop by.

(Facebook event here.)

The Japanese economy is officially in recession, and David Cameron chose to use his last speech at the G20 summit to warn of the risk of a new global economic crisis. I wonder if he knows something that the rest of us don't (yet)?

I'm off to Berlin tomorrow. I'll try to blog, if I have time and if the global economy doesn't collapse while I'm away. (If it does, I'm going into hiding.) Alas, the Stasi Museum is shut for construction; guess I'll just have to be content with the DDR Museum instead. Oh, and one final piece of news: I finally got (and signed) the US contract for "The Annihilation Score", so I guess next summer's Laundry Files novel is officially A Thing. (I never quite believe it until I have a chance to read the small print.)

This is an open question primarily for British readers. (If you're American and a non-expert on British political/constitutional affairs, I reserve the right to delete your comments in the interest of keeping the signal to noise ratio high on this discussion.)

Where do you think the sources of power in the British political system will lie in 2034?

Bonus points for references to Bagehot, Piketty, Marx and Wiener.

(Note: I'm making the key assumptions that the Beige Dictatorship is unstable and that something else will come to replace it in time: also that the Labour/Conservative political duopoly is drawing to a close after nearly a century as both parties lose their mass base, that they won't be replaced by other mass-movement parties as such (unless Anonymous qualifies as a political party), that the average age of TV audiences is going up by more than 12 months per year, that newspapers are in a death spiral, and mass media in general are being replaced by a foamy carbonated sea of micro-targeted filter bubbles. I'm also making the assumption that we're not all going to go a-flying up to AI Singularity Heaven within the next 20 years. So: after the next couple of stuck coalitions/minority governments, and maybe a fiscal/banking crisis or three, what replaces the current system?)

Answers on the back of a postcard, please.

I've been quiet for the past week because I've been hammering on the redraft of "Dark State", the first book in my big fat post-Edward Snowden near-future SF trilogy. (Same universe as the Merchant Princes, set 17 years later, but still awaiting a new series title because, eh, series reboot.) For some reason I don't have much energy for blogging while I'm elbow-deep in the transmission tunnel of a novel: must be getting old or something.

Later this month I will be visiting Berlin. (That's Berlin, Deutschland, not Berlin, North Dakota. Sorry, folks.) Partly it's R&R—I've rewritten two novels since the beginning of September—and partly it's research (big hunks of "Black Sky" and "Invisible Sun", the second and third books in the trilogy, are set there, and I need to refresh my memory, walk some routes, and check out certain museums). But while I'm there, I'll be doing a kaffeeflatsch at Otherland bookshop (Otherland Buchhandlung Schmidt, Tress & Weinert GbR Bergmannstraße 25 10961) on Thursday November 20th from 7:30pm. (Facebook event sign-up here.)

I also intend to go here and here: guess which is for R&R and which is for Research? (Actually, that might not be obvious: Tropical Islands is like something out of a William Gibson novel—it's really mind-blowing, like an L5 space colony that has touched down on the East Prussian plains.) And there will be a pub meet-up announcement in due course!