Charlie's Diary

I collect conspiracy theories. The nature of what people are willing to believe about their neighbours tells us quite a lot about our attitude to the society we live in, our fears, our worries about deception, and so on. And the past half century has been a boom time for conspiracy theories, from the JFK assassination through the moon landings to the CIA introducing LSD/crack cocaine/AIDS/insert threat here into the USA, to Louis Mountbatten and MI5 trying to stage a coup against the British government in the 1970s ... wait, the last one was real. And, now I think about it, so was one of the CIA ones. That's the trouble with conspiracy theories: true history contains such weird lacunae of surrealism that it's very hard to sift the wheat from the chaff.

I ran across a new-to-me conspiracy theory today; on balance I think it's an urban legend, but it appeals to my credulity very neatly and I can't rule it out for sure. Let me explain why below ...

We are surrounded by stuff. Physical property, objects we use. Even the poorest of us have some basic stuff: footwear, clothing. Having possessions is one of the defining characteristics of being human—with the questionable exception of a few animal species that have been observed using ad-hoc tools in the wild, nothing else owns anything (and even the tools used by chimpanzees or crows appear to be spur-of-the-moment constructions, abandoned after their immediate use rather than retained for their future potential).

But where do our priorities lie? I am thinking that there are at least two categories: stuff we pay too little attention to, and stuff we prize too highly. And sometimes there are types of stuff that fall to a greater or lesser extent into both sets ...

Lots of meaty analysis from Paul Mason, economics editor at BBC's Newsnight, on the nature and origins of SYRIZA, the Greek leftist bloc that is opposed to German-imposed austerity measures (as opposed to PASOK, the main centre-left party, which is reluctantly going along with things).

SYRIZA is an umbrella organization with a bewildering, mangrove-like array of tap-roots. It's also quite possible that there'll be a new election in Greece next month—if the current attempt to form an emergency government of national unity, being brokered by President Karolos Papoulias, fails—and SYRIZA will get to form the next government.

As Mason notes:

the resulting government may, in effect, be little more than a left-social democratic government, despite its symbology and the radicalism of some of its voters. By forcing the mainstream parties into positions where they could not express the will of the majority of centrist voters, the EU may end up destroying the Greek party system as it has been shaped since 1974.

Meanwhile, I note with interest that Greece has the highest per-capita military budget in the EU, the military budget has barely been touched by the austerity measures devastating the rest of the Greek economy, that Greece imports most of its weapons from Germany and France (generously funded by German and French bank loans), and that the military, within living memory, have taken an over-active role in Greek political life. (One hopes that the fate of the junta will act as a salutory warning to any would-be successors.)

The smart, fashionable startup-people these days are all trying to come up with brilliant and innovative new business models that disrupt struggling industries and synergize for break-out growth potential forming new markets. (Ahem. At least that's what they say.)

I submit that it is somewhat harder to disrupt an industry that has been dead for so long that the corpse is fully skeletonized. By the time that we've got people seriously pitching for an IPO on the back of the poetry market[*], we're scraping the bottom of the barrel that started out full of brilliant and innovative new business models. What next: a dot-com startup targeting the overdue-for-disruption steam locomotive market?

I am calling this a bubble economy in startup bullshit, and it's just about ready to pop; we are now at the stage of the shoe-shine boys offering stock tips, and if I had any money invested in hyperparasites like Zynga I'd be yanking the eject handle as hard as I could.

[*] I have nothing against poetry; it's just that it has been impossible for anyone to earn a living as a working commercial poet in the English language for close to three-quarters of a century and counting. For various reasons, we just don't seem to consume the stuff any more. Or we give it a backing track and call it rap or rock music or blues. Gramophone killed the poetry star.

I'm going to be a bit scarce around here this week.

That's because after my last blog entry, I had a bad attack of RSI (subtype: numbness and tingling in fingertips, rather than shooting/stabbing pains in wrists) and need to lay off typing for a bit, and save what keystrokes I've got for the actual day job—that's the novel that is a few months behind schedule and facing a looming deadline.

No, I don't need your helpful tips on how to deal with RSI via furniture, posture, work breaks, or physio: I already have a recovery plan and know what to do. No, speech recognition software will not help me write fiction. (However, once I've trained it and learned all the speech commands, Dragon Express will probably do fine for blog entries—they're more conversational in tone and thus more compatible with dictation.) I just need to lay off the keyboard long enough to heal, then change the bad habit that's triggered this attack. You will not help me maintain my AFK status and recover if you ask me questions or attempt to engage me in discussion, so although I'm going to allow comments on this blog entry I probably won't respond to them.

This is not the blog entry you are expecting.

Science Fiction literature is unusual in that much of the work within the field exists in constant dialog with other works. Author A writes something; Author B reads it and writes something else by way of an oblique rejoinder. (For example: you won't get all the jokes and references in "Saturn's Children" unless you've read Heinlein's "Friday", to which it is in part a response. Again: Jo Walton's Among Others—on the Hugo shortlist this year, and I'm voting for it—contains numerous references and discussions of the sort of SF/F that a bright, bookish child growing up in the UK in the 1970s would be familiar with: and indeed, it spoke to me, because I was reading many of those works at the same age and time ...)

Authors responding to one another isn't unusual. But in SF/F it's particularly visible. It got started in the pages of the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 1930s and continues today, both in short fiction (we're unusual insofar as we still have a vibrant short fiction ecosystem) and at novel length.

So you probably began reading this blog essay expecting a cunning reference to Elizabeth Bear's essay in Clarkesworld, Dear speculative fiction, I'm glad we had this talk ... or to Abi Sutherland's response in "Making Light", on talking it over. Both well worth reading, I should add: Bear's conceit is that SF is reified into personhood and is of course having one of those annoying mid-life crises, wanting to be taken seriously and consequently dressing in black and reading too much bad goth poetry while hanging out outside the doors of literary award bashes thrown by that cool kid, Mainstream.

Well, that's not what I'm here to talk about. I'm here to talk about something much more concrete: the likelihood that within another decade, two at most, science fiction as a literary genre category may well die.

The hidden easter egg in "Halting State" is that at no point does the book use the words "computer" or "software". Despite it being a book engaging with the social consequences of distributed computing and virtual reality.

(I do this sort of thing as a discipline, to focus my writing. The reason for the second-person voice in "Halting State" should be obvious to anyone who has even briefly played an adventure game: the second person is the natural voice of that particular game genre. Deliberately not using those particular words forced me to bear in mind that I was writing about people in a near-present where those particular signifiers have been so seamlessly absorbed into our culture that we don't think about them. Any more than we think about catching a train in terms of the procedural aspects of driving a train.)

I've been reading my reviews again. This is always bad for the authorial blood pressure. However, we have a technical term for an author who argues with reviewers: "idiot". So I'm not going to do that.

However, below the cut, I'm going to put some bullet points for those of you who've read "Rule 34", just to draw your attention to some aspects of the novel that you might otherwise have skidded past.

The security theatre is getting surreal:

The Ministry of Defence is considering placing surface-to-air missiles on residential flats during the Olympics.

An east London estate, where 700 people live, has received leaflets saying a "Higher Velocity Missile system" could be placed on a water tower.
...

But estate resident Brian Whelan said firing the missiles "would shower debris across the east end of London".
...

"It [the leaflet] says there will be 10 officers plus police present 24/7."

Lunacy on stilts. (Oh, and let me add, the residents don't get any choice over having missiles billeted on top of their homes.)

If one of those things is ever fired, either in anger or by accident, it'll shower white-hot supersonic shrapnel across the extremely crowded residential heart of a city.

Hmm. It's a good thing I'm a novelist who dabbles in technothrillers, not a terrorist. If I was a terrorist I'd be licking my lips, trying to work out how to trigger a missile launch. Using a motor-powered model aircraft, free flight design (no radio controls to jam) aimed vaguely towards the Olympic stadium, with a nice radio beacon or some sort of infra-red source (a flare, perhaps) on its tail to make it easy to track? These missiles will be the close-in option, because we know the RAF will already be flying combat air patrols over London; they won't have much time to evaluate threats or respond intelligently. So launch from the back of a panel van, like the IRA mortar attacks on places like Heathrow or 10 Downing Street. The twist in the scheme would be to aim past the missile launchers along a vector that would attract a hail of hypervelocity missile launches in the direction of, say, a DLR station at rush hour.

Olympic security is out of control and irrational; the best solution would be to designate a permanent Olympic venue somewhere isolated — Diego Garcia would be a prime candidate — and hold the games there permanently so that they don't endanger life, limb and civil liberties. Alas, that would reduce the corruption corporate sponsorship opportunities, and the games are entirely about milking the host nation for money these days.

Fuck the Olympics in 2012.

(Oh, and incidentally it would be illegal for me to say this if I happened to live in London or my blog was hosted in England—the enabling laws for the Olympics override our basic civil rights, including free speech. Luckily I'm north of the border in a country that remains semi-free. But if a future independent Scotland even thinks about bidding to host the Olympics, you bet I'll be organizing street marches in opposition ...)

Last week's blog entry on Amazon's ebook strategy went around the net like a dose of rotavirus. And, as we can now see from Tor's ground-breaking announcement I was only just ahead of the curve: people at executive level inside Macmillan were already asking whether dropping DRM would be a good move. Last week they asked me to explain, in detail, just why I thought abandoning DRM on ebooks was a sensible strategy for a publisher. Turns out my blog entry on Amazon's business strategy didn't actually explain my full reasoning on DRM, so here it is.

Note that I am not responsible for Macmillan's change of policy. An internal debate was already in progress; this move was already on the cards. I caught their attention and was given a chance to offer some input: that's all. The final decision to drop DRM on ebooks from Tor/Forge was taken by John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, who ultimately has to account for his actions to the shareholders.

Also note that when trying to argue for a strategy, you need to frame it in terms of the concerns of the people you're addressing. Therefore what's below the fold is my response to the question of why I thought abandoning DRM would be good for Macmillan's business, framed to address the concerns of publishing executives. I thought I'd post it here as an historical footnote to the end of blanket DRM restrictions in the book trade, and because it features a line of reasoning about DRM which may be of interest to other publishers who are, as yet, undecided.

I'm doing the travel thing again this week, to sunny Zagreb, Croatia, where I'll be appearing at Kontakt, the 2012 Eurocon. Blogging will be patchy; for one thing I expect to be busy, and for another, international roaming data on my phone and iPad costs £10/Mb in Croatia (if I can't find a local SIM or free wifi).

It occurs to me that I haven't blogged about travel much recently. So here's a run-down of how and what I pack for a 6 day overseas trip ...

We've picked up another spammer botnet again. Blog spam is now coming in at around one every ten seconds. I am therefore switching off comments on all threads for a while until the scumbags stop tormenting my server and go away.

(The spam is being detected and binned. Unfortunately the process of doing so is machine-intensive — it involves running a CGI script that polls the Akismet servers over the internet, does regular expression matches for spam keywords, executes a SQL database insert, and a bunch of other stuff. There's no way around this bottleneck: it's a side-effect of the blog being designed to support many orders of magnitudes more people reading it than actively posting comments, and it works okay until a botnet with thousands of hosts starts firing spam at it every couple of seconds.)

Based on past experience the spammers were attracted by my essay on what Amazon's ebook strategy means, and they'll go away after a few hours if I block all inbound comments.

Normal service will be resumed presently ... meanwhile I can be found at @cstross on Twitter.

Update: re-enabling comments. Will switch them off again if the spammers are still hammering on the front door.

Just a reminder that I'm one of the guests of honour at Kontakt, the 2012 Eurocon (European SF Convention) next weekend in Zagreb, Croatia. I'll therefore be disappearing on Wednesday, and not coming home until late on the evening of Monday 30th.

(For those of you who care, this is also why I won't be at the Arthur C. Clarke award ceremony in London on Wednesday 2nd; London is an international flight away from where I live, or an unpleasant five hour train journey, or an even less pleasant nine hour drive, and I'm simply not geared up for routine back-to-back trips like that.)

We need teleportation booths. Of course, if we had them we'd then get to find out exactly what the security-industrial complex could do to really make a misery of international travel ...

Actually, there's a thought-experiment there.

Let's postulate a new technology. To the end user it consists of a transmitter and a receiver that you can step into and out of like an elevator car, it can transport you from A to B at the speed of light, without physically intersecting with anything in-between. It's a switched network, like the old-fashioned phone system, i.e. any transmitter can talk to any other receiver (if the receiver is willing—"unfriendly" transmitters can be blocked). The transmitter/receiver units are not cheap—let's make them comparable to a Boeing 737 or an Airbus 320, around the US $30-40M mark—so you don't typically find them in private dwellings and there is an incentive for the owners to charge for access and to manage traffic flow through them.

Limits: maximum size of a gate is about 27 cubic metres (3 x 3 x 3) so forget moving tanks or APCs through them in order to invade your neighbour. Oh, and conservation of energy applies: if you want to move around the earth you have to pump in enough juice to equal the change in kinetic energy and gravitational potential energy of the cargo (remember, the earth is a spinning sphere: standing still at the equator you're moving at 1000 nautical miles/hour, while at the poles you're stationary). And I'm going to disallow the movement of radioisotopes through the gates by declaring that it just Doesn't Work™. (No nuclear terrorism here.)

You can ship the components of such a gate through another pair of gates, but there's a minimum size of, say, sixteen cubic metres of machinery weighing around 10 tonnes. No maximum range is known, and you can't conveniently use them for refuelling rockets in flight, so no, it's not going to magically open up the solar system.

What are the immediate consequences? (Beyond "international travel gets faster".)

And what are the security consequences?

It seems to me that a lot of folks in the previous discussion don't really understand quite what makes Amazon so interesting—and threatening, for that matter—to the publishing industry.

So I'm going to take a stab at explaining.

Amazon was founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. And today it's the world's largest online retailer.

I submit that, as with all other large corporations, you cannot judge Amazon by the public statements of its executives; they are at best uttered with an eye for strategic propaganda effects, and at worst they're deeply self-serving and deceptive. Rather, you need to examine their underlying ideology and then the steps they take—and the actions they consider legitimate—in order to achieve their goals.

Now, first, I'd like to introduce three keywords that need defining before you can understand Amazon:

Been away; back home now, dealing with a week's backlog of non-writing work (and collating the annual tax paperwork; the UK's tax year runs April 6th to April 5th, which fell neatly during my trip).

As you probably guessed, I have some things to say about the news that the US Department of Justice is bringing a suit against Apple and three major publishers (three others settled out of court) over alleged price-fixing. While I'm not a publishing executive or a DoJ lawyer, I probably know a little more about this than the average person on the Number 19 bus.

However, before I foam at the mouth in public I thought it would be interesting to ask what you think is really going on here ...