Charlie Stross: April 2016 Archives

Update: this is superseded, see: The Laundry Files: an updated chronology.

I've been writing Laundry Files stories since 1999, and I recently passed the million word mark. That's a lot of stuff! And it occurs to me that while some of you have been following them from the beginning, a lot of people come to them cold in the shape of one story or another.

So below the fold I'm going to explain the Laundry Files time line, and give a running order for the series—including short stories as well as novels.

Right now, the British (and by British I mean London) press are currently obsessed with a single topic: the up-coming BRExit referendum on June 23rd, asking whether the UK should leave (or remain in) the EU.

(This topic is somewhat less visible in the Scottish media because we have a general election coming up on May 5th. Campaigning is currently frantic, with Labour and Conservatives scrabbling to come second, the Scottish Greens (not the same as the English Greens) looking to upset the Liberal Democrats in fourth place, and Pat Robertson presumably saying "I knew it". But I digress.)

I already blogged about the BRExit referendum back in early 2013, when it was still only an idiotic twinkling in David Cameron's eye, and I still maintain that it's basically just an internal Conservative Party power struggle—the stench of hypocrisy and opportunism hangs over the contenders. But I'm not going to bore you with arguments I already went over years ago. Instead, I'd like to kick open a discussion (noting the presence of lots of non-British readers on this blog: I'm intrigued to know how this very British lunacy looks from the outside) with two observations I didn't make the previous time round.

Hi! Charlie here. I'm a bit burned-out and busy with real-world stuff right now, so for the next week, guest bloggers are standing by to keep you perplexed bamboozled entertained. Starting with an interesting essay on deep learning and chatbots by Hugh Hancock, later today ...

Hugh adds: The film I've just released is called DANGEROUS TREASURES. It's a geek action-horror-comedy about Lovecraftian horror, deepweb forum culture, and frantic Googling.

The tagline I'm using is " These geeks think of themselves as 2016's Indiana Jones. Too bad the thing they've awoken knew Cthulhu. Personally. "

Last Sunday I gave a brief talk discussing world-building in SF/F at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

I've been quiet since then because of a combination of work and a stomach bug. Meanwhile, here's the outline for my talk. (Yes, it's fully collapsible/expandable.)