The Stross Formula

 

This piece began as a review of Saturn’s Children (2008), but as I began to write, I came to realise that many of the things I did not like about the book were not flaws in the individual text but actual patterns, present in many of Stross’ works that have started to grate upon me due to their repetition.  Therefore, rather than simply write a review and claim that Saturn’s Children feels overly familiar, I thought it better to write about what I think is an increasingly formulaic writing style that has come not only to characterise Charlie Stross’ work, but also to confine it within a state of arrested development.

This essay breaks down into two parts; One dealing with the structure of Stross’ style of writing and the other with his choice of subject matter.  As Saturn’s Children provided me with most of the insights that this essay is based upon, I decided to include a more detailed presentation of my views on the book in the middle of the essay, so if you want to know what I think about Saturn’s Children, just skip to the end of the first section and the beginning of the second one.

Structure

Stylistically speaking, Stross’ books are all spy stories.  This is explicitly the case in his Bob Howard - The Laundry series of Cthulhu spy story pastiches including The Atrocity Archives (2004) and The Jennifer Morgue (2006) but it is also the case in his SF works, which tend equally to revolve around conspiracies and secret agents (Missile Gap (2007), Singularity Sky (2003) and Glasshouse (2006) to name but three).  However, this comparison is deceptive as Stross’ spy stories are formally different from many works in the spy genre.

The spy genre is a sub-set of the thriller genre, which tends to be characterised by the dominance of plot.  From the erotic thriller to the psychological thriller, works from the thriller genre tend to revolve around a central plot such as foiling a scheme to blow up the world, hunting a serial killer or solving a mystery.  For the thriller writer, the plot is primary and all other aspects of the novel such as style, ideas and characterisation, get pushed into the background, existing only to frame and support the main plot.  For example, the Bourne films are partly about a man’s quest to recover his identity but surprisingly little of the films are devoted to Jason Bourne agonising over whether he’s the kind of person who used to read The Guardian or The Daily Mail.  The loss of Bourne’s identity is only there to drive the plot forward by giving him a reason for wanting to investigate things, it is not really what the films are about.  Of course, there are exceptions to this rule.

When I interviewed Stross in 2007, I asked him about the possibility of his producing a Bob Howard novel based upon the works of John Le Carre.  Stross’ response made it clear that such a novel would never be written and, upon further reflection, it is obvious why.  John Le Carre’s approach to the spy story is diametrically opposed to Stross’.

Le Carre’s magnum opus is arguably Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1974).  Inspired by MI6 moles such as Kim Philby, the book presents a mole in the British secret service as an act of personal rather than political betrayal.  Indeed, when the book’s mole Bill Haydon delivers a speech about how he hates America and this is why he was working for the Soviets, it is presented almost as an afterthought and comes across as insincere and just a little too glib.  Haydon did not turn his back upon a way of seeing the world, he turned it upon friends, colleagues and lovers just so that he could remind himself of how much cleverer he was than everyone else.  For Le Carre, the personal drives the political in that conflicts emerge from interactions between characters rather than clashes between ideologies, and as a result, the characters are placed in the foreground.

As a writer of spy stories, Stross is just as heretical as Le Carre in that both steadfastly refuse to write textbook thrillers.  Le Carre’s heresy lies in his prioritisation of character not only as a motor for the plot but as the entire basis for the book.  Stross, by contrast uses characters and plots as information firewalls, their points of view and pacing serving to dictate what idea the audience is introduced to at a given time. For example, when Freya from Saturn’s Children is upgraded from sexbot to assassin, it is simply a means for Stross to shift from conveying basic information about his world to conveying the kind of secret political information that only a trained assassin and political operative might have access to.  In other words, Stross’ books are built around his speculation.


This foregrounding of ideas at the expense of character and plot has had a number of knock on effects that emerge throughout Stross’ work.  For example, Stross tends to shy away from violent denouements;  In Halting State (2007), Glasshouse (2006) and The Merchants’ War (2007) the final scene takes place off-stage while in The Jennifer Morgue (2007) the main protagonist is side-lined by his girlfriend who turns up and fights the bad guy with a magical violin (thereby making the ending something of a fiddle).  This narrative quirk appears to be a cop out if you look at Stross’ novels as thrillers but it makes perfect sense when you understand that Stross’ plots are means of presenting an argument to the reader.  By the end of the book, the ideas have been presented, the plot has served its purpose and there is simply no need to end the book with a big fight that would provide emotional closure.  That would be missing the point.  Similarly, Stross’ protagonists all tend to be Competent Men differentiated by a few cosmetic traits (Manfred Macx is Bob Howard is Freya is Robin).  This arises from the fact that the characters need to be able to sweep aside opposition once the argument is won and to dwell for too long on how the victory is accomplished or on a character’s attitude to their limitations would be to distract from Stross’ foregrounded ideas.  Indeed, it is no accident that both Saturn’s Children and Accelerando (2005) exile humanity from their own civilisation, this leaves the stage free for a properly de-humanised ideological conflict.

This is hardly a ground-breaking analysis of Stross’ work.  Indeed, early criticism of Stross’ books frequently revolved around his unapologetic infodumping and shameless refusal to “show not tell” the details of his own worlds.  However, as more and more books have been produced it has become increasingly clear that Stross’ fondness for infodumping is not a flaw in his writing style, it is the result of a deliberate decision to convey certain kinds of information in certain kinds of ways.  In short, Stross has a style of his own, he is not bad at plot or characterisation, he simply has no interest in either of them.

Saturn’s Children is a wonderful example of Stross’ extreme formal conservatism as it is not just an exemplar of Stross’ style, it is a reductio ad absurdam of it.  As with most of Stross’ works, the book’s plot is driven by a gigantic conspiracy whose precise aims are never made absolutely clear.  Indeed, much of the book is spent with the characters robbed of any kind of agency and being dragged from one set piece to the next until Basil Exposition turns up and fills in the plot retroactively.  In and of itself, this is a rather frustrating but not unenjoyable way of telling a story, Tom Holt has become increasingly fond of it for example.  However, Stross’ lack of interest in the plot is accompanied by a similar lack of interest in characterisation and so when the lines between the characters in Saturn’s Children start to blur, the book rapidly becomes unreadable as Freya becomes her sister as well as her cover identity while her actual sister becomes a different secondary character while all of them plot against or fall in love with a load of robot brothers who are barely differentiated between in the text making it impossible to determine who is doing what to whom and why.  John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) also have slippery points of view but in both cases the characterisation is strong enough that one can identify when one has shifted between points of view.  Unfortunately, all the characters in Saturn’s Children sound the same and so the result is a novel whose narrative elements are utterly crippled to the point of incoherence.

Saturn’s Children is not only a book that very closely resembles all of the books that Stross has written over the last two or three years, it is also a book that collapses under the weight of Stross’ indifference to his plotting and characterisation.  Stross fans may not consider this a terminal problem as Stross is widely seen as a hard SF writer and as such one reads his works mainly for the speculation.  However, while the structure of Stross’ novels are showing undeniable signs of repetition, the same can also be said for the way Stross selects his ideas. 

Subject Matter

Saturn’s Children is initially an intriguing read as it marks a departure for Stross from his geek and Singularity comfort zone.  Indeed, the whole work is characterised by an attempt to reinvestigate and reinvigorate old tropes by blending them with a more modern perspective.  For example, Freya’s relationship with humanity actually mirrors SF’s relationship with the robot trope; in both cases they were once hugely important but over time they are conspicuous only by their absence.  The book also turns another old trope (that of runaway technology) on its head by having the robots fear the emergence of pink or green goo made of dangerous self-replicating entities called cells.  This blending of ideas is a key element of Saturn’s Children and Stross’ style in general.  The book has been widely publicised as an homage to the work of Robert Heinlein (right down to flame-haired beauties with nipples that go spung), and in understand what is meant by the use of the term ‘homage’ we can gain a further insight into Stross’ methods.

An homage is often understood to be a nice way of saying that someone has imitated someone else or re-used their ideas but traditionally, if one author sets out to imitate another, the product is referred to as a  pastiche.  However, as Stross himself has pointed out, he is not the world’s greatest stylist, and pastiches tend to be largely stylistic imitations.  Stross does not write pastiches, he writes hodge-podges.

The hodge-podge is the original pastiche in that the dish that the pastiche takes its name from is defined by its use of different ingredients all thrown together.  The pasticcio was popular in baroque opera as different composers would borrow each other’s arias, change the libretti and combine them with some original material in order to create whole new operas that were a testament to less draconian copyright laws.  It is particularly interesting that the pasticcio should prove so popular during the baroque period as baroque music tends to be less about the nuts and bolts of a piece and more about the ornamentation and so an opera that took someone else’s tune and ornamented it in really interesting ways would not be considered to be derivative (John Barnes has written a fascinating column about the relationship between the history of classical music and the history of SF at Helix). 

To accuse Stross of producing hodge-podges is really not to say anything new as SF is almost entirely made up of them as different authors pick up tropes and rework them or reorganise them to tell new stories.  In the Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction (2003), Farah Mendlesohn talks about SF being a conversation because each generation of author picks up what previous generations have been talking about and puts their own spin on it.  However, what is interesting about Stross is that in addition to adding to and remixing ideas from the genre commons, he is also one of the few authors who explicitly sets out to borrow the ideas of particular authors.

In 2000, Stross published a novelette that is not only a brilliant story, but also an entirely successful pastiche of nuclear holocaust stories.  “A Colder War” is barely recognisable as one of Stross’ works as it is entirely lacking in the light-hearted jokes and references that would come to characterise Stross’ more recent writings.  Indeed, the difference between “A Colder War” and The Atrocity Archives is a fascinating one as The Atrocity Archives, though clearly influenced by Len Deighton, is in no way stylistically similar to any of what we now think of as the Harry Palmer books. Instead the novelettes are written in a recognisably Strossian style, with the pastiche elements no longer stylistic but rather limited to purloined tropes and plot details such as Palmer’s lack of glamour, his relatively junior position in the intelligence services and the depiction of an intelligence service that is shot through with old-fashioned thinking and petty bureaucratic rivalries.  The Atrocity Archives works because it blends some of Lovecraft’s ideas with some of Deighton’s and examines them both through the lens of modern SF and the voice of Charlie Stross.  This is a textbook example of a hodge-podge.

Following the success of The Atrocity Archives (one of its novelettes, “The Concrete Jungle” won Stross a Hugo), Stross decided to return to this method of writing with The Jennifer Morgue, a blending of the existing Bob Howard books with some of the tropes favoured by Ian Flemming, again re-examined through the lens of contemporary SF, geek culture and Stross’ distinctive voice.  The same formula has been deployed in the writing of Stross’ short story “Trunk and Disorderly”, a story that seems terrifyingly bad if considered as a Wodehouse pastiche as it is a Stross story with Stross characters and Stross dialogue except that someone has a Butler and the characters occasionally remember to say “What Ho” to each other.  However, Stross is no stylist and “Trunk and Disorderly” is not a pastiche, it is a hodge-podge in that, much like the Bob Howard - Laundry books, it borrows some of Wodehouse’s ideas and throws them into a classically formulaic Stross story.  The same technique is again used in Saturn’s Children as the book is not at all stylistically similar to anything Heinlein has ever written, but instead Stross picks up some of Heinlein’s ideas as well as tropes from the period and looks at them through his formulaic lens.

As with the foregrounding of ideas, Stross’ use of the hodge-podge has moved from being a fun exercise to a preferred technique before becoming a rigid formula.  Indeed, at the time of writing this, Stross has just announced that he will soon be producing another Bob Howard - Laundry novel based this time upon the works of Anthony Price.

What is depressing about this is that as as time goes on, Stross seems less and less willing to leave the comfort zone of his formulae.  Much like Robert Jordan, he has found himself a formula that works and has settled down into a career as a professional writer.  He has three on-going series that will soon be joined by a fourth, he produces five books every two years and every twelve months he is guaranteed a Hugo nomination legitimising the whole enterprise.  Where once was an exciting author who seemed poised to turn the world of SF on its head, we now have an author who effectively runs an assembly line; each new book is competently constructed and utterly indistinguishable from the last, and that is a tragedy.

Comments

[Niall]

I haven't yet read Saturn's Children, but much of what you say here strikes me, unfortunately, as accurate to the point where I'm surprised it's not more widely commented-on. The Stross books I tend to have most respect for are those which either eschew the formula (Accelerando) or which are transparent about it (The Atrocity Archives and, to an extent, Halting State, though I know you have problems with that one). I particularly like your comments about the Stross-lens, and the way he uses a thriller plot as, essentially, a delaying tactic; he's attempting something quite different from what, say, Greg Bear was attempting with his Darwin's [noun] books. But as you say, there is the sense that his relentless productivity isn't leaving him time to think up new approaches -- I don't know whether it's personally driven or market-driven at this point, but I can't help wishing he'd slow down a little.

[Jonathan M]

I agree that Halting State was something of a departure but I think it suffers from similar plot and characterisation problems to his other books, just not to the same extent as Saturn's Children.

I think the speed he writes at is an important factor as he doesn't seem to ever take a break. He just slides from one book to the next and as a result I don't blame him for writing and rewriting the same book as he never steps out from behind the Stross-lens.

Thanks for the praise though :-)

[Mike G]

Have a look at his novella "Missile Gap", which is more similar in tone and feel to "A Colder War" than the novels. A splendid, chilling tale of the sort I wish he would write more of. But hey, he writes for a living, so I guess he's got to write what sells.

[Jonathan M]

I did read it and didn't think that much of it. It was a huge conspiracy full of poorly drawn agency-free characters AND a few nice ideas. You are correct though in that it wasn't written in "that voice".

[Charlie Stross]

There's just one element missing from this analysis: the broader context of my life. So here's an explanation, if not an apology ...

Back in 2005, I made two classic mistakes: I signed a pair of multi-book contracts with major publishers -- each of whom expected a book every 12 months -- and I got ill (which swallowed about 6 productive months, and drastically reduced my ability to work). My reason for signing two contracts was simple; I needed to earn a living, and one book a year was simply not enough. But, having signed, I then had to deliver: and what had looked like an easy workload in 2005 turned out to be unexpectedly onerous by 2007.

I'm probably not going to surprise you if I confess to having spent the last 18 months inside a pressure cooker. HALTING STATE took eight months to write, and ended up overdue; SATURN'S CHILDREN was a desperate catch-up exercise, rammed out in six months. This year I'm writing two Merchant Princes novels, to contract, because I'm still trying to dig myself out from under the contractual train wreck. It feels like I haven't had time to draw breath, much less re-evaluate what I'm doing.

My near-term goal is quite simple: once I finish off the Merchant Princes series, I'll finally be in a position to cut back to writing one book a year. Maybe then I'll have time to sit back and analyse the brick wall I've hit. But for the past couple of years I've been too busy trying to keep my head above water to dare to experiment -- because experiments go wrong from time to time, and I was in a situation where a single screw-up was going to cost me six months' income (because I simply didn't have the contingency time to fix things if my schedule went off the rails).

PS: And for a final reveal, I've always wanted to write Cold War spy thrillers. Alas, I was born too late ...

[Jonathan M]

Hi Charlie :-)

Thanks for stopping by.

That's a very honest assessment of where you currently stand and I'm relieved to hear that you are aware that you might well be overstretched and the repercussions this might have on the quality of your output.

I remember when you announced your health problems and you said that you hoped it would slow you down a bit but unfortunately the economics of writing don't change and illness tends to mean more effort in order to do less. So I'm entirely sympathetic to your position and I can totally understand the lure of spinning books out into franchises.

However, as a critic who has enjoyed your work in the past, I do hope that the situation improves enough to allow you some creative breathing room. I think it would be a terrible loss to the genre to see you go the route of someone like Robert Jordan.

As for the Cold War thrillers, have you thought of going the Stephenson route and writing a piece of historical fiction set during that period? I think that would be an awesome departure.

[Charlie Stross]

One of the main problems any full-time writer faces is that your work's sold years before they write it -- and your editor isn't shy about holding you to the contract you signed. Also: editors love to say "write me something just like the last book, only slightly different" -- it's the easiest pitch to sell to the suits in a marketing meeting, and they, too, have a job to do. (As it is, I had to kick hard just to avoid grinding out interminable sequels to "Singularity Sky" ...)

Which is by way of saying, next year I'm emitting a short story collection (in place of a novel) from Ace and Orbit -- this is key to stepping off the two-books-a-year treadmill -- and then I'm contracted to write a sequel to "Halting State", and finally, a third Laundry novel, at one year intervals. (At last! Room to breathe and time to take stock!) This has come at the cost of haggling with the marketing folks on their own terms; they're willing to increase my advances and boost my marketing, but only if I do something they understand how to sell widely: near-future thrillers rather than space opera, for the next few years.

Within the vague frames of "sequel to Halting State" and "third Laundry novel", I've got some freedom of movement, but radical departures like a Stephensonian historical novel ... not so feasible. The contracts say 100,000 to 12,000 words, and while I can do over a little it tends to militate against any attempt at his breadth and depth. I intend to hit some historic notes in the Laundry book (that, after all, is Anthony Price's forte, and I'm iterating through spy thriller writers in my spy series for a long-term reason), but that's not exactly what you're asking, is it?

What I want to focus on in the next couple of books is rounding out my characterisation and plotting. (Oh, and having the extra six months to finish the books properly is going to help, too.) But I'm afraid it's going to be another couple of novels yet before I'm in a position to try and sell my publishers on the idea of something radical.

However ... not all books are sold in advance. Sometimes an idea lands on me so hard that I get hit by a hypergraphic urge to write, and it comes out fast. Glasshouse happened that way, with the first draft emerging in just three weeks flat; it took another year on the shelf and a major re-draft to get it right, but that's par for the course. Once I'm down to only one contracted book per year, I've got spare time for experimentation. Which means I can start writing short stories again (I've had a moratorium on them for the past three years). And hopefully something will come of that, sooner or later.

[Jonathan M]

Well I'm delighted to hear that you seem to have a roadmap to innovation all prepared :-)

No, I wasn't suggesting that you embark upon a 3000 page epic work of historical fiction but rather that you look at the period closely through the lens of modern SF. For example, Adam Curtis' documentary the Power of Nightmares pointed out how a lot of the irrational thinking that goes on in the War on Terror has its roots in thinking about the communist threat and as a result, it would probably to write about the roots of the modern day in Cold War espionnage in the same way that Stephenson wrote about the roots of today being in restoration-era science. Just an idea :-)

I shall be looking forward to what you produce once you're off the contractual leash so to speak.

[Blue Tyson]

If that is stressed and under pressure, very impressive.

Historical terror stuff? There's always the Poul Anderson Time Patrol/Robert Ludlum hodge-podge.

:)