Sunday Times Interview
The Scottish edition of The Sunday Times (that's the Sunday edition of The Times -- the original British version, not the Times of anywhere in particular) ran an interview and article about me on June 5th. Here's the text version.
Extract:
Andrew Wilson, the editor of Nova Scotia: New Scottish Speculative Fiction (an anthology of new Scottish sci-fi to which Stross has contributed an original twist on the Faustian pact), sees Stross as being in the vanguard of a new wave of Scottish science fiction writing: "It used to be that if you spoke about a Scottish spacecraft, people just laughed. But now we are the country that produced Dolly the sheep, the country that develops artificial intelligence," says Wilson. "You don't need to pretend to be American to write science fiction. Charlie is clearly a massive talent. Rather like taking a broken down old car and sticking a fusion engine in it, he has the capacity to transform material that was looking old and give it new life.
"I think Accelerando is a crowning achievement. And this will be his year."
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Coming soon ...
The text of "Accelerando" will be available for download under a Creative Commons license from this site later this month (June 2005).
(Yes, you read that right. Now go away, I'm still preparing the text.)
That "S" word deconstructed
The focus of "Accelerando" is a fictional depiction of a possible Technological Singularity lying in our near future.
Being fiction, it will of course be misunderstood or misinterpreted by at least 10% of the total reading population.
So here's a Tough Guide to the Singularity, as drafted by my inner 14-year-old, with an eye to turning it into a GURPS supplement, or something even worse. (Be afraid, be very afraid.)
NOTE: The Tough Guide is a TiddlyWiki page. You'll need a modern Javascript enabled browser to view it properly; Internet Explorer 3.0 simply won't cut it. (Personally, I use Firefox.) In particular you should enable Irony 2.0 before approaching this content.
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Notes from the archives
You don't write a novel the size of "Accelerando" overnight. In my case, it took close to five years (during which time I wrote and sold four other books). With a quick project you can sometimes hold all the details in your head at the same time, but for something this big it helps to jot down notes. So here's a file full of notes I wrote around winter 1999, to remind myself what assumptions I was making about the underlying tech background of the book.
Today they're curiously dated. There's stuff missing that I'd put in if I was doing them again, stuff that's now part of my armory of tools for looking at the future. So read this as a document of its times, the optimistic dot-com bubble still inflating, no wars and turmoil on the horizon, NASDAQ still at record highs, and the future so bright that ... well, we saw where that went, didn't we?
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Harriet Klausner
Harriet Klausner, the most prolific reviewer on Amazon.com, has of course gotten her hands onto an early copy of Accelerando:
Extract:
This novel has appeared as short stories in Asimov's Science Fiction magazine from 2001-2005. Each story has been extended with its own chapter in a seamless plot. The individual members of the Macx family and those who came into their orbit show three generations of technological change and how it affects society. All three Macx characters are fully developed and have their own distinct personalities but when they come together they are a force to be reckoned with. Charles Stross has written the singular most explosive work of his career.
(I'd take this review with a pinch of salt. Harriet means well, but her output of 3-5 reviews per day should speak for itself. I include it here in the interests of completeness.)
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