On the Spot at BSC – Charles Stross interview (2008)

First off, I’d like to thank Charles Stross for agreeing to this interview and welcome him back (we’ve had him before in 2005) as our guest On the Spot.

For those unaware of his existence, Charles Stross has written a number of prolific works ranging from fantasy (his Merchant Princes series) and Lovecraftian horror (The ‘Bob Howard – Laundry’ series) to science fiction (most notably Accelerando, Glasshouse and his most recent effort ‘Halting State’). Accelerando has won the 2006 Locus Award for best science fiction novel was a finalist for the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the year’s best science fiction novel, and was on the final ballot for the Hugo Award in the best novel category. Glasshouse won the 2007 Prometheus Award and was on the final ballot for the Hugo Award in the best novel category. His 2007 novella Missile Gap won the Locus Award for best novella. In addition to his work as a writer, he has also worked as a freelance journalist, programmer and pharmacist. A versatile man, indeed.

Lawrence – Halting State has just been released in trade paperback in the UK last month. What can readers new to author Charles Stross expect in this novel?

Charles Stross: A bit of a departure. Hitherto, I’ve mostly done far-future SF. Halting State, in contrast, is a very near future police procedural, in which the protagonists are investigating a crime that doesn’t exist yet. Or that didn’t when I began writing the book, in 2005-06 — weirdly, bits of it seem to keep coming true on a monthly basis this year!

Lawrence – What were your aims when writing your latest novel, Halting State?

Charles Stross: Halting State is an attempt to explore the very real virtual realities that are now coming into existence. VR was meat and drink for SF from 1984 — with William Gibson’s Neuromancer — until some time after Neal Stephenson published Snow Crash, but it hasn’t had a lot of love since then. Which is odd, because we finally have broadband internet and massively multiplayer online roleplaying games which actually fit the model for large VR communities! So I decided to revisit the whole VR in SF thing, but on the basis of existing technologies, and see where it was set to take us in the near future.

Lawrence – The novel is most notable for its unique second person perspective. I admit I approached the novel hesitantly at first, but I quickly found it worked out pretty well. After a few pages, it was feels as ‘natural’ as a first or a third perspective for that matter. It got me thinking, though. Why this perspective?

Charles Stross: It’s the natural voice of the narrative computer game, all the way back to the 1972 Colossal Cave Adventure on mainframe — “you are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike”. The computer *is* the narrator, and it’s addressing you, the player, from outside your own head. I wanted to give the book some of the feel of a computer game. And it was also a good excuse for getting away from interiorization and the portrayal of my characters’ internal states of mind.

Lawrence – Is Halting State (in part) meant as homage to the popular Colossal Cave Adventure, the first ‘real’ computer game, released in the seventies?

Charles Stross: Yes.

Lawrence – What interests you in these massive multiplayer online games, that’d you decided to use it in one of your science-fiction works?

Charles Stross: That people are using them as social networking tools and inventing strange new ways to behave in them. You’d think, looking at a game like World of Warcraft from the outside, that it’d be straightforward hack’n'slay stuff. The idea that Chinese sweat shops would get into gold farming — kill the monster, grab the treasure, then sell it on eBay to frustrated western gamers who want to level up fast — never really hit anyone before it actually started happening. Then there are the court cases; the couple who, getting divorced, ask the court to divide up their WoW loot: the guy who walks into a police station in real life to file a crime report because the sword he’s just been sold isn’t enchanted. These events hint that there’s a whole new layer being added to our existing scope for multi-layered social interaction, in which matters previously confined inside games start having real world consequences.

And the final straw was the study in 2005 that suggested if you took treasure prices on eBay for Ultima Online, and multiplied them by the total treasure in play in the game, you’d end up with an economy the size of Hungary.

It’s a virtual nation, with its own economic infrastructure, interacting with our own, and it has an economy the size of Hungary? And we SF writers have missed this happening, how, exactly?

Lawrence – There were a couple scenes in the book really struck me and I wanted to ask some questions related to those. First, the chapter in which Jack is introduced. He has just been fired in Edinburgh, so he decides to fly to Amsterdam and drink alcohol excessively with his friends (natural order of things I presume). Now the funny thing is, I happen to be Dutch. I was pleasantly surprised when I encountered some Dutch words here and there. I’ll have to hand it to you, it did really struck me as ‘authentic’. You managed to capture the atmosphere fine (from a tourist point of view that is). Is the particular chapter a result of thorough research or have you actually been to Amsterdam a couple of times?

Charles Stross: I’ve been to Amsterdam several times. Thanks to the weird state of the British transport network, it’s easier for me to get to Amsterdam than London! (Nobody sane drives from Edinburgh to London, and the trains take five hours; flights from Edinburgh to Amsterdam cost the same as flights to London, and the train in from Schiphol is cheaper and better than the Heathrow Express.)

Of course, I have never woken up drunk and chained to a street sign, sitting in a stolen armchair. But it could happen …

Lawrence – Secondly, there is a chapter where Jack and Elaine sort of get to know each-other a little better, while logging on in Avalon Four for the first time. Once again, these scenes struck me as very authentic. The general process of ‘character creation’ seemed to be based on at least a couple of massive multiplayer online games popular in the world of today. EverQuest and World of Warcraft come to my mind. With the level of detail, I can’t help to wonder whether you’ve actually enjoyed playing (these) games in the past?

Charles Stross: I avoid gaming like the plague — I can get sucked into it much too easily — but I confess to having spent too long messing with Neverwinter Nights (not an MMO, but scales up to 100 players per server). Also, I did a lot of tabletop roleplaying when I was in my teens (D&D, then AD&D when it first came out).

Lawrence – Like I said, we have had you on FBS back in 2005. At the time Book II of Merchant Prince’ series, The Hidden Family, had just been released. Neither Glasshouse nor the Atrocity Archives had seen the light yet. How would you reflect on the years passed since 2005 from a writer’s perspective?

Charles Stross: It’s been a fairly good time. I’ve been pushing out books as fast as I can (in part because I switched to writing novels full-time in 2005, and needed to earn a living!) and they’ve generally been getting a good reception. I’d like — in all honesty — to be able to take more time over my work and focus on improving the quality, and I’ve got a number of side projects I’d like to explore, but I’m doing what I always wanted to: I’ve got no grounds to complain.

Lawrence: In the last few years, there has been enormous proliferation of on-line sources of reviews and discussion of genre fiction. You run a blog on your website “the anti-pope” yourself. What do you make of this recent growth? How has the rapid growth of internet affected you as a person and as writer?

Charles Stross: Well, I’ve been on the internet since 1989, and I started my own blog back in 2000 (when, amusingly, the blogosphere anti-pundits were saying that this blog fad had peaked and would inevitably begin to decline). I’d say it’s broadly been useful socially, and professionally. Being a full-time author is an isolating job (it’s an office job, but unlike most such, you’re entirely on your own) but the internet is a social life-line; give them broadband and it turns out that authors like to gossip and network just as much as anyone else! And it’s a really useful research tool. Want to look up something really obscure in a hurry, verify the wording of a half-remembered quotation, or check to see if a book title is already taken? In order: wikipedia, google, amazon. In the past, any of those jobs could have eaten half a day and required a trip to the library. Today, they’re easy.

On the flip side, the internet has conditioned us to multi-task, to the detriment of our ability to focus on any single activity. And it’s taught a whole generation of kids that plagiarism is trivial and research is easy (which will bite them very hard indeed when they take the bad habits they’ve picked up into the real world). We’re in a transitional stage: not everything is online yet, so the temptation to use the online (hence, easy and accessible) resources means we tend to ignore the offline ones (like many if not most books).

Lawrence – Now I realize most authors don’t usually like to talk about their upcoming work. Still, could you lift a tip of the veil and tell us a bit about your upcoming novel Saturn’s Children (to be published in 2008)?

Charles Stross: Sure!

Saturn’s Children was written in 2007, the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Robert A. Heinlein. Like him or hate him, Heinlein was hugely influential on the development of SF: he’s impossible to ignore. So I decided to write a Heinlein tribute novel. But …

… Everybody’s doing it. Spider Robinson, John Scalzi, John Varley — they’re all pumping out pastiche Heinlein juveniles, echoes of his 1950s young adult novels that served as an SF gateway drug for the baby boom generation in America!

I asked myself what I could do with Heinlein that was original. And it came to me: I needed to write a late Heinlein novel. In his later years, Heinlein tried to tackle deeper and more complex topics, but a combination of medical issues and a resistance to editing resulted in many of them suffering from certain problems. I turned 43 in 2007. Subtract my age from Heinlein’s, and you get 57 — the age at which in my view Heinlein reached his peak as a writer, working on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. So: what would a 57-year-old Robert A. Heinlein write in 2007, if he’d lived to see the internet, and too much Japanese culture, and MMOs, and global warming? And the answer was: a space operatic caper novel, with robots …

Here’s the (Orbit) book blurb:

Freya Nakamachi-47 has some major existential issues. She’s the perfect concubine, designed to please her human masters – hardwired to become aroused at the sight mere of a human male. There’s just one problem: she came off the production line a year after the human species went extinct. Whatever else she may be, Freya Nakamachi-47 is, by anyone’s definition, gloriously obsolete.

In the 200 years since the last human died, the robotic inheritors of the solar system have been busy – mining, exploring, terraforming. .. and emulating some of their creators’ less savoury practices. In two centuries, Mankind’s children have learned their lessons well, and a rigid social hierarchy every bit as iniquitous the worst in human history has installed a new ruling class that makes life hell for everyone else. So when Freya has a run-in on Venus with a murderous aristocrat, she needs passage off-world in a hurry – and she can’t be too fussy about how she pays her way.

But if Venus was a frying pan, Mercury is the fire – and soon she’s going to be running for her life. Because the job she’s taken as a courier has drawn her to the attention of powerful and dangerous people, and they don’t just want the package she’s carrying. They want her soul . . .

Lawrence – Let’s turn the tables. What have you recently read, that you would recommend to all of us looking for quality reads?

Charles Stross: I’m a bad person to ask — I don’t read enough! However, I can strongly recommend a trilogy-in-the-making by Canadian Karl Schroeder: “Sun of Suns” and “Queen of Candesce” (plus “Pirate Sun”, due in hardback from Tor in summer 2008). They’re a bizarre fusion of space opera with post-singularity information-driven SF, superficially slick adventure yarns but with some monumentally complex world-building underneath, and the most interesting Big Dumb Object in SF since Ringworld.

I’d also like to plug “Dust” by Elizabeth Bear — which evokes a most remarkably Gormenghastian atmosphere aboard a stricken generation ship — and (coming in summer) “The Night Sessions” by Ken MacLeod. (Which is all about religious terrorism. Presbyterian religious terrorism. And the political implications of the war on terror, projected decades into our future …)

Lawrence: You referred to William Gibson’s seminal work Neuromancer and Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash earlier on. If you were asked to list authors who have strongly influenced your (not just science fiction but also fantasy, cross genre) novels, who would you mention?

Charles Stross: I’d have to cite Bruce Sterling, who has consistently been the most insightful futurist working in the field (at least in the English language), since John Brunner’s peak in the late 1960s and early 1970s. (And Neuromancer was a huge influence on me at a certain age.) But I try not to be too influenced by any other single author. I’m trying to develop my own ideas; while I appreciate others’, I don’t want to be them!

Lawrence: What do you consider your main strengths as a writer/storyteller?

Charles Stross: Ideas.

(I’m not a great stylist, I need to work harder on my plotting, I can’t hold all the details in a multi-book series together clearly enough in my head — I need a prosthetic memory! — and I tend to keep to characters who’re close to what I know. But I’d like to think I can throw out ideas with the best of them. As to the rest … I’m working on them.)

Lawrence: What do you enjoy doing with you are not writing behind your computer?

Charles Stross: I’m actually pretty boring! I spend rather too many hours per week behind a computer …

Also, for many years writing was my hobby and my weird creative outlet. Now it’s the day job (or rather, the day job is the business of writing). I travel a lot, and I enjoy reading and drinking beer and listening to music, and I’m actually quite boringly normal. Apart from the writing!

I would like to thank Charles Stross for participating ‘On the Spot’, it was a pleasure. All the best with future projects.

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