Since getting his first novel published in 2003, Charlie Stross has maintained a level of artistic output that would shame the pulp authors of the 1950’s let alone the average genre writer who struggles to put out a novel a year. Given how prolific he is, you could be forgiven for expecting Charlie Stross to be pumping out Star Wars or Forgotten Realms novels. However, rather than putting his talents to work for the forces of evil, Stross has instead produced some of the most critically acclaimed SF of the last few years, a fact confirmed by his four consecutive Hugo nominations for best novel.
Though clearly comfortable in sub-genres as diverse as space opera (Singularity Sky) and contemporary fantasy (The Jennifer Morgue), Stross’ work has come to be characterised by a marked interest in the kind of political issues that keep websites such as BoingBoing and Digg in business. In fact, Stross has even argued that the online geek community are the natural constituency of SF.
In this interview I tries to get to grips with Stross’ feelings about the current state of SF as well as where it is headed. We also ask him about his politics and whether there’s a danger in explicitly pandering to online geeks and a few other things besides.
This interview originally appeared in Scalpel Magazine. When it did a number of people took issue with my attitude towards tie-in novels and some of the factual statements I make but rather than airbrush these issues from history I’m happy to stand by my views on both tie-ins and whether or not the Atrocity Archives is a novel. Anyway, I’ve deleted the original link on here so anyone who linked either to my link or to the Scalpel page should probably re-link to here.
Jonathan McCalmont : Congratulations on your fourth Best Novel Hugo nomination in four years. Are you starting to feel like the eternal bridesmaid?
Charles Stross : Nope. In addition to the four novel nominations, I've been shortlisted six times in various short fiction categories -- and won a Hugo for my novella, "The Concrete Jungle", in 2005. A score rate of one in nine (or ten) isn't bad, especially when you consider the record for nominations without a win is something like eighteen (for, if I remember correctly, my editor at Tor: David Hartwell).
JM : So you're not quite a Martin Scorsese figure yet then. In 2005 when the Hugo best novel shortlist was all British, you wrote in your blog about how British culture was more outward looking than American culture was at the time. Do you think that things have changed since then?
CS : Nope; if anything, the situation has continued to evolve in the same direction. There's a remarkable lack of near-future, forward-looking SF coming out of the US this decade; it seems to be driven into eclipse, largely replaced by far-future wish fulfilment fantasies, supernatural romance, and carnographic war-porn. This isn't the literature of a society that feels optimistic about the future.
JM : Do you not think the same malaise also afflicts the British? British politics is just as much about personalities and British mainstream popular culture just as vacuously aspirational as the Americans'. In what way do you think British society is more forward looking than the US's?
CS : It's not just a matter of the immediate political climate. In August 1945, the UK was within one week of bankruptcy. The country had just come out of a state of total mobilization; housing stocks had been bombed heavily, factories were worn out wrecks from six years of wartime production, and so on. Part of the cost of recovery was shedding an empire, and the effect of the retreat from empire on the national psyche between 1945 and 1982 cannot be underestimated: the sun was setting on our past greatness, the future was uncertain but clearly going to be a lot worse than the past, and so on.
Then we hit the 1980s, a time of massive upheaval and political/social polarization. Since the 1990s, there's been grounds for optimism. The imperial past is over and done with, the UK is prosperous once more -- we've had ten years of solid economic growth -- and panic over the middle east notwithstanding, our suppurating sore of a terrorist insurgency is definitively over in Northern Ireland. The real political issues seem to be how to deal with global warming and how to keep the good times coming, not how to manage a retreat from empire. And so, since 1990 there's been an optimistic note in British SF that was largely missing in the period from 1945 to 1984.
JM : The Bob Howard books have tackled Len Deighton and Ian Flemming. Do you have any plans for an ageing Bob to follow in the footsteps of John Le Carre's George Smiley?
CS : John le Carre is off-limits for me; for one thing, Tim Powers did it far better than I ever could (in Declare) and for another, I don't much like le Carre. On the other hand, I have plans for more Laundry novels, and hopefully I'll get to write them in due course. But I'm not going to give hostages to fortune by talking about which spy writers I'm going to pastiche next!
JM : Apparently, some of the ideas you used in your up-coming novel Halting State have come true. Were you tempted to follow Gibson and just set the novel in the present?
CS : Halting State is an exploration of some of the cultural changes we're likely to see when certain trends we're seeing today (pervasive wireless broadband communications, ubiquitous location services, and massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) are likely to go in another decade. Obviously, some of the forerunners of those changes are visible today, if you know where to look -- but there's a big difference between being able to look at, say, Amazon.com in 1996, and see the potential there, and grasping the full implications of e-commerce in 2007.
One of the things that watching the birth of the world wide web and the initial dot-com rush taught me is that the attitude of the bleeding edge early adopters to a new tech field is rather different from the mass culture that will subsequently emerge; there's a qualitative difference when you hit the mass adoption stage which makes it interestingly different from the early stages. And so, while I could have written a novel about MMORPGs and computer crime set in 2007, I figured 2016-2018 was a much more interesting period to aim for -- when there's a generation of young professionals who don't remember a time before YouTube, MySpace and transparency, and a cohort of teenagers behind them who don't even understand the concept of being lost in a strange city because they *always* know where they are.
So I needed to make Halting State a work of near-future SF. But by the same token, I had to get it written *fast* -- because it's going to date rapidly. It'll be fun to re-read in a decade and analyse where I went wrong!
JM : Do you think about this type of thing when you're writing a book? Do you think that more plausible SF makes for better SF?
CS : Fiction in general is about the study of the human condition; I'd argue that SF and fantasy consider the human condition under circumstances that are, respectively, plausible but haven't arisen, and implausible. In SF, however, it's very easy for us to drift away from considering the possible into looking at the fantastic. Sometimes it's a good idea to get back to basics and ask, "is this *really* feasible? Does it make sense?"
Just once in a while. (The novel after Halting State is going to be a space opera, and very implausible indeed.)
JM : How do you decide , from book to book, where to draw the line between feasibility and fantasy? I would imagine it's quite a precarious process as one stray idea can potentially make an entire book seem ridiculous.
CS : Oh yes.
In my latest SF novel, Halting State (due out in the US in November '07), I consciously set out to write a near-future thriller with absolutely *no* implausible scientific or technological breakthroughs. Actually, that in itself will probably date it horribly, because we seem to experience at least one major paradigm shift in the sciences per decade these days. And it turns out to be really difficult to write convincing near-future SF, because over the past two decades the pace of change has accelerated so much in some sectors that just following the news is a science fictional experience.
Ultimately, the bedrock we cling to in writing SF is that we're exploring the human condition under circumstances not obtaining either today or in the past. (In fantasy we're exploring the etcetera under circumstances that cannot exist in our physical universe -- unless you really *do* believe in magic and fairies at the bottom of the garden.) But it helps to periodically remind one's self that faster than light travel -- or indeed human interplanetary travel of any kind -- are scientifically or technologically dubious enterprises. The universe isn't really scaled for human life, and we're not terribly good at understanding our place in it.
JM : You've said that SF was originally the agitprop wing of the technocratic movement, but that nowadays SF's natural constituency is the online geek culture catered to by sites such as BoingBoing, Digg and Slashdot. Does this mean that you are to online geeks what Tom Clancy is to conservative America?
CS : I think that's a slight misstatement of my argument; which was directed more at those writers who're trying to attract new readers to the genre by emulating the successes of the 1940s and 1950s. While it's true that we need new readers (otherwise our audience is going to age into retirement and we're going to die out), I don't think the type of "gateway drug" that worked in the 1950s is going to be remotely attractive today. I'd rather attract readers by writing fiction that speaks to their concerns and interests, and as a product of the online geek culture myself that's a natural home for me. But if I had to point the finger at the Tom Clancy of geekdom, I'm have to finger Neal Stephenson, not myself. (And I fervently hope that geekdom isn't an echo chamber reverberating with the same angrily defensive attitude as the American conservative blogosphere.)
JM : Is this not a real danger of writing for a particular audience? Is there not a danger that, in writing for the online community and thinking about their concerns, you're preaching to the converted?
CS : Nope. If *everyone* was writing for the same audience, now *that* would be a problem. As it is, though, I see myself as aiming at an audience that is quite large but largely ignored by SF writers.
JM : Does geek media have the maturity to allow non-pandering engagement?
CS : Yes, definitely.
JM : If you were to go onto Digg and put up a pro-Sony and pro-PS3 post, I'm pretty sure you'd get a similar response to the one you'd get posting a pro-Clinton post on a conservative site.
CS : Yes. And there are good reasons for it; Sony's approach to that particular audience (indeed, to the public at large) is grossly exploitative, and exemplifies a lot of that which is wrong with the culture of the multinational media business.
(But I'm the wrong person to pin down for a rant on this topic. You really need to ask Cory Doctorow if you want chapter and verse.)
If you try to engage with them on less obviously loaded topics, you'll get a much more nuanced debate.
The key point in my original essay on the geek audience is probably this: SF as it originally developed keyed in to the interests of a technophillic audience who lived through a period of rapid technological change -- in which change was focussed on transport and mechanical engineering. Today, we're going through a similar period of rapid change, but it's about electronics and software and telecommunications.
Traditional SF doesn't talk to the preoccupations of this audience, but the forms of SF -- if adapted to their concerns -- work very well indeed. These people are (literally) the descendants and inheritors of the original SF readership, and to ignore them is to ignore the most important source of new readers for SF.
JM : Is there not a danger here? geek culture owes a lot of its iconography to literary and cinematic cyberpunk, so to converse with that culture you, an SF author of the 00's, are forced to use the cultural referents of an SF movement of the 80's. Is this not somewhat decadent?
CS : Geek culture isn't primarily about iconography; it's not a fashion thing. (Quite the contrary.) Literary and cinematic cyberpunk are popular among geeks because they're the branch of the artistic mainstream that comes closest to saying something significant to them ... but those aren't the real cultural referents.
JM : In your Merchant Princes series you have engaged with a number of ideas from development economics but we've yet to see a single magical sword or talking horse. Do you still think of that series as being fantasy or are you doing something similar to what MacLeod and Grimwood did with The Execution Channel and End of the World Blues, namely writing SF under the trappings of a more commercially successful genre?
CS : It's definitely SF, as book #4, The Merchants' War, should make obvious when it comes out in November. In fact, it's been based on a science fictional premise all along -- just one that wasn't made obvious -- and the methods of its heroine, Miriam Beckstein, are those of a rationalist technocrat. For a variety of reasons (more concerned with marketing than anything else) Tor packaged the books as fantasy at the outset, but if you want a historic genre reference point, they've got more in common with H. Beam Piper's Paratime books than with, say, Zelazny's Amber.
In retrospect, the confusion is understandable. In the first book, The Family Trade (published in two volumes as The Family Trade and The Hidden Family) I introduced a clan of somewhat mediaeval world-walkers, a family who could travel between alternate worlds. They come from a marcher kingdom offshoot of a highly developed mediaevalesque society, in a time line where Judaism went extinct circa 200BC and Christianity and Islam never developed; the castles and horses and swords are the furnishings of a primitive society, not signifiers of fantasy. Nevertheless, broad hints are dropped quite early on -- their ability is linked to a recessive gene, after all, and their political and economic predicament mirrors the third world development traps that have become all too familiar today.
I don't want to give away too much about where the series is heading, but if you approach it expecting a traditional fantasy saga you're going to get a big surprise …
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