Charlie Stross

Recent Actions

• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Lewis Carroll just made a pink bunny in a Victorian girl’s frock pop out of my watch to remind everyone that good fantasy literature doesn’t need magic rules. Eh, if you haven't already I strongly recommend reading "The Annotated Alice"...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Most people live in a magical world today, anyhow: it's how computers, the internet, the cloud, AI, and semiconductors work. You say the magic incantation "Hey Siri ..." or equivalent, or draw a glyph on a magic slate, or tap...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Correct. Readers need internal consistency to make fiction plausible -- suspension of disbelief is contingent on the fictional world making sense (in a way that the real world is under no compulsion to follow). You can't use magic in fiction...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Haven't the ignorant idiots writing this trash ever heard of Isaac Asimov & the Three laws of Robotics ?? Greg, you can make a trivial end run around the three laws of robotics by redefining "human". As real world humans...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Aren't you kind of falling for the whole Christian dualism nonsense about an afterlife, heaven, hell, etc? There are plenty of mythologies/superstitions/religions that don't posit an afterlife at all. Or that don't automatically connect demons/spirits/kami/demiurges to a Good Place or...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  What the U.S. needs for passenger rail travel (particularly longer distance high speed passenger rail) to be viable is for the TRACKS (but not the railroad companies) to be nationalized like the highways and placed under management similar to air...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I think if you're focussing on the mechanics of the magic system rather than the depth and richness of human relationships in those books then you're kind of missing the point ......
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Yeah nope, that's about as funny and amusing as a three-day-ripe haddock to the face....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Heh. I take it you have never met a lawyer ......
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I suspect the only way to handle it is via something like Graydon Saunders' Commonweal series -- where magical ability is innate so sorcerers become nobility until a major disruptive event occurs and there's a revolution and then a harshly...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  No I really do not want to meet the demonological equivalent of Perl 5, thank you very much. Unless it's one of the later iterations with "use strict" enabled by default and all the safety checks welded and padlocked in...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I like the idea of magic as Unix - each little thing does one thing, but does it well. Unfortunately that theory doesn't always link up to the reality. We get simple single-purpose tools that crash and burn when you...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Version control is a hot mess. The spell associated with a particular word can be updated by anyone using the same technique used to replace it. So its quite common for a magic word to suddenly change its effects or...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Oh, the coal/heat thing is easy. Magic, the demon-powered variety, is powered by pain. Demons collect human souls and torment them to generate the pain they use to make stuff happen. Coal? Raw heat? It's all for tormenting the captive...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Why not use souls? You really need to go read the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone. Start with Three Parts Dead, then continue ......
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Charlie, which works of High Fantasy do you genuinely like? Not Lord of the Rings (too pastoral-ish) or Game of Thrones (I dislike grimdark and I don't need to be spoon-fed the history of the Wars of the Roses, with...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  A very long time ago. Not what I have in mind....
• Posted Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again) to Charlie's Diary
  So, I get these random ideas for SF/F from time to time, and I have no idea what to do with them, and sometimes when I don't want to use them I post them here. This is one of those....
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Sounds familiar. Visitors to Edinburgh should note that the tram line (singular, FINALLY fully operational to both ends of the line as of next week) serves the Royal Bank of Scotland campus and the Gyle centre (big out of town...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Nope. Boston's silver line is ... well, take a bendy-bus (one of the extra-long single decker variety with the power train in a trailer behind a concertina joint two-thirds of the way along it, so three axles). Turn it into...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Yep. My point about public transport in the USA is not that cities don't have downtown bus or rail terminals, it's that airports mostly don't. And airports are the main long range public transport. Even when there is a transit...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  I'd just like to add that my regular copy editor for Laundry books, Marty Halpern, wasn't available for this one. (He acquired and edited the first two books for Golden Gryphon and I'd managed to keep him for 11 books...
• Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
  how hard would it have been to hire a copyeditor who knew the subject area? Very! It's a specialised subject area -- specific to fiction set in the UK -- and copyeditors are grossly underpaid. Also, you can't just drop...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Yes, but those city-centre stations are sitting on those commercial freight railroads which limit them to what, 86mph? -- due to primitive signalling fuckery and freight having right of way. Meanwhile your airports for the most part have no railway...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  it seems at least plausible that the Shinkansen system arose as part of the reconstruction effort. Nope. Fixing the Japanese railway network was a transport priority after August 1945 -- Japan ran on rails rather than motorways -- but the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Yep. Also in 2007, we did Tokyo to Kyoto (350 old-school miles) in two hours and six minutes on a Shinkansen Nozomi express -- two intermediate stops only, speed limited to 125mph within city limits (then as we cleared the...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Nope. Japan went for narrow gauge railways early on, due to the amount of mountains they had to handle in the interior. Shinkansen run on standard track gauge but a wider loading gauge (more like European). While standard gauge was...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Rules today for tracking to carry passengers have way more safety rules than a few decades back. Rules in the USA because those passenger trains have to travel on tracks shared with badly-maintained, enormous, freight trains which derail with a...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  they say it only takes a few days. I figure on applying for it in Jan. Early Jan. Suggestion: apply in December. Six months is probably long enough in normal times, but I expect the Home Office to get flattened...
• Commented on Shrinking the world
  Insects never really invaded the sea, one of those little puzzles. Saw an article about that relatively recently ... But general internet search degradation renders it undiscoverable! (General summary: some of the enzymes used by insects when molting and rebuilding...