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Worldcon in the news
You've probably seen news reports that the Hugo awards handed out last year at the world science fiction convention in Chengdu were rigged. For example: Science fiction awards held in China under fire for excluding authors. The Guardian got bits...
We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
(This is the text of a talk I delivered at the Next Frontiers Applied Fiction Day in Stuttgart on Friday November 10th, 2023. Note: early draft, contains some typos, I'll fix them next week when I get home.) In 2021,...
Pushing it back
(On vacation this month, hence lack of blogging ...) Apparently archaeologists have discovered the eearliest known wooden structure in Kalambo Falls, Zambia: two cut logs bearing tool marks that were shaped and joined to form part of a structure—476,000 years...
Summer webcomics
So I blogged about comics (and webcomics in particular) back in June 2015, which is a shockingly long time ago, so I thought I'd post a handful I've enjoyed lately and tout for more reading references! These are all webcomics...
Finding true love in the cosmos
This was a very casual off-the-cuff response to an interview I did for Amazing Stories, an online reboot of a famous old pulp SF magazine's brand. The questions were a whole bunch of generic one-liners (pick any five), and this...
Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
(Season of Skulls is the third book in the New Management trilogy, following on from Dead Lies Dreaming and Quantum of Nightmares. It's an ongoing story ...) It was a bright, cold morning in Hyde Park, and a detachment...
The gathering crisis
This is about the gathering crisis in the UK, not any other crisis-hit nation. Here is a compendium of the firehose of dismay that's been blasting me in the face for the past couple of weeks. Share and enjoy! And...
Behind the Ukraine war
Today is April 2nd. There's a good reason I skipped blogging on April 1st: the actual news right now is both sufficiently ghastly and surreal that any attempt at satire either falls flat or runs victim to Poe's Law. (I...
Oh, 2022!
Back in December of 2016 I took a look at what the next year held in store for us. It spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start...
Empire Games (and Merchant Princes): the inevitable spoiler thread!
It's launch day for Invisible Sun in the UK today, so without further ado ......
Fossil fuels are dead (and here's why)
So, I'm going to talk about Elon Musk again, everybody's least favourite eccentric billionaire asshole and poster child for the Thomas Edison effect—get out in front of a bunch of faceless, hard-working engineers and wave that orchestra conductor's baton, while...
Crib Sheet: The Labyrinth Index
This is well overdue because I kind of lost track of my irregular series of spoileriffic essays about my novels: it should have turned up in 2019, but I was dealing with a parental death, then trying to get my...
Because I am bored ...
While Bitcoin was originally proposed as a currency, it has most of the attributes of a commodity bubble, including a huge halo of swindlers and scam artists working to exploit it. It's also horribly energy-inefficient and contributes to the current...
Lying to the ghost in the machine
(Blogging was on hiatus because I've just checked the copy edits on Invisible Sun, which was rather a large job because it's 50% longer than previous books in the series.) I don't often comment on developments in IT these days...
Covid on Mars
Time for a thought experiment! (For those of us who don't want to keep chewing on the sore that is the US presidential succession—if you do, please stick to this already-existing discussion: cross-contamination into this new discussion will be dealt...
So you say you want a revolution
Today is December 6th. The UK left the EU most of a year ago, but a transition agreement is in effect; it expires on December 31st, and negotiations between the British government and the EU appear to be on the...
All Glory to the New Management!
Today is September 27th, 2020. On October 27th, Dead Lies Dreaming will be published in the USA and Canada: the British edition drops on October 29th. (Yes, there will be audio editions too, via the usual outlets.) This book...
Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
(This is the text of a keynote talk I just delivered at the IT Futures conference held by the University of Edinburgh Informatics centre today. NB: Some typos exist; I'll fix them tonight.) Good morning. I'm Charlie Stross, and I...
CMAP #16: Book Title Blues
So a couple of months ago I handed in a new novel (it won't be out until the second half of 2020--these things have a long lead time). And it occurs to me that it's probably worth discussing book titles...
Brexit! Means! Brexit!
So: Brexit means Brexit means, apparently, a choice between a deal negotiated by Theresa May's government which is broadly as appealing as eating a shit sandwich, or leaving the EU with no transitional arrangement in place, the equivalent of stripping...
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