Charlie Stross

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Atrocity Archive(s)
  1. Off-topic. 2. Slashdot's been dead since 2001 at the latest. Probably 1999. Some time between Rob Malda having to start doing it full-time for a living and the acquisition by VA Linux and subsequent disastrous IPO....
• Posted Crib Sheet: The Atrocity Archive(s) to Charlie's Diary
  (This is going to be a slightly abbreviated discussion, because I discussed the book's ideas at length in the supplementary essay bundled with it, and answered a number of questions about it in the blog entry immediately preceding this one.)...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  You missed out Pinky and Brains and the fact that people sometimes talk to one another, including colleagues in other departments. (Also: there's an after-market in Kettenkrads. AIUI a good roadworthy one is worth something in the range £25,000-50,000. If...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  It's not big enough to be a novel. It's too big to be a short story. And ... short stories don't make lots of money and they're hard work to write -- harder per word than novels, and for less...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Regarding this, how much supplies did the remnants of the US government who crossed to the dead world have? Were they doomed to languish and die over there? They're already dead. They survive only in Cthulhu's mind. As toys, to...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Aaand ... The story I've been working on is nailed down so I can go back to work on the Merchant Princes and on the series of informative blog entries. However, I just wrote over 10,000 words in three days...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Did any of your other series begin as originally stand-alone stories? Yes: most of them. The only pre-planned series were the Eschaton books (aborted after #2) and the Merchant Princes (parked after #6, in the process of being revived for...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  There's only one JFK conspiracy I've heard of that makes sense to me: that he died of an epic cock-up, and the conspiracy that ensued was a cover-up to ensure that no blame could be attached to the people who...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  I was wondering how much of the background to the Laundry-verse you had already had in mind when you wrote TAA. That's easy: none of it! I started writing at the beginning and stopped at the end. New ideas occurred...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  NOTE I am still working on the novella that refuses to lie down and die so that I can write "THE END". When I've written "THE END" I shall be free to start composing a reminiscence about the germination of...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Bear in mind that "Irish" covers a gigantic range of characteristics, from "American, one of whose great-great-grandparents came from County Cork" to "lives in Dublin, commutes to work on the Luas, holds an Irish passport, and has non-white skin because...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Bob & Mo bear no resemblance to myself and my wife. (Seriously, what is it with readers thinking authors only ever write about themselves?) Well, okay: Bob has some of my interests. But then, Bob is a geek. So am...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  I was going to write a story for temps #3, but that fell foul of Penguin pulling the plug on the Midnight Rose anthologies. I had stories in both Weerde anthologies and in Mary Gentle's Villains....
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  It may also be down to budget issues. Non-descript office blocks are cheaper than Evil Overlord bunkers. People who just don't talk are cheaper security than lots of goons with guns. And so on....
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  The trouble with non-English classics is that I'm monolingual, so I'm entirely dependent on good translations existing. I've read a chunk of the Strugatsky brothers and Lem in translation, but some of those versions weren't terribly good. Yes, "Roadside Picnic",...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Off-topic: Are you ever going to take on the reverse trope? The one where humans are the most evil species in the universe/multiverse? Isn't that called "reality"? (NB: I might reconsider this stance if you can show me another species...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Both this question and Adrian Howard's one (immediately preceeding it) are answered in "The Rhesus Chart"....
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Mo has worse problems -- as does Bob -- but I don't want to discuss any of the content of "The Rhesus Chart" that might spoiler it this far ahead of publication!...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  "Used and new" in this context almost certainly means remaindered stock that's been sitting in a warehouse for decades ......
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  You are looking for a couple of shared-universe anthologies published in the UK in the late 1980s/early 1990s titled "The Weerde". Have fun! They were published direct to paperback, predate ebooks, and have been out of print for over 20...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  I haven't finished it yet. I can't try to sell it to anyone until it's finished -- this is short fiction, not a novel written on commission....
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Sort-of. (The novella I'm trying to finish right now puts a proper frame around it and explains exactly how unreliable a guide old H. P. Lovecraft is to the internal workings of the Laundryverse.)...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  It helps to have watched "Yes, Minister" throughout its original TV run, while reading "Private Eye" every fortnight, scrutinizing Chomsky for clues about how to deconstruct the (highly politicized) mass media, and also having worked in the NHS and as...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  It is worth noting that Bob is a very unreliable narrator. (Tentative plan is for book #6 to be written from Mo's point of view. But that's some years out.)...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  There's nothing in its history to indicate that they would be less willing to e.g. press demons into service. And indeed this is a subtext of book #6 (planned), and the setup is in book #5 (written, due out in...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  What's with the American hate? Don't worry: I have an equal opportunity hate on for all imperial superpowers, because they all suck massively. I just haven't had a chance to write anything set in the USSR or the [historical] British...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  I first heard about him circa 1988 from a fellow author who'd stumbled across him while researching background for a werewolf story set during the Russian Civil War. Subsequently, there's a biography of him in print in the UK --...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  So how much of the non-Lovecraft Mythos have you read/are you inspired by? Bits'n'pieces. The Laundryverse isn't intended to be canonical Mythos because in my opinion, the Mythos badly needs some spring-cleaning....
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  The Laundry Files short stories published on tor.com are available as low-cost ebook editions from Tor -- you can find them in Big River Co's archives. I hope to eventually have enough material to bolt together a Laundry Files short...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Do you have as much fun planting computer references and jokes as I do reading them? I hope so! But I should note that I've been out of the industry for over a decade now. This means I'm getting increasingly...