Charles Stross
Charles Stross
Charles David George "Charlie" Strossis an award-winning British writer of science fiction, Lovecraftian horror and fantasy...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth18 October 1964
character track progress
I don't keep anything on paper (except within an actual novel in progress, at which point I need a file to keep track of plot threads, characters, and so on).
writing ideas care
If an idea is compelling enough it'll stick in my head until I am forced to write it. If it's forgettable, who cares?
book thinking pirate
Back in the pre-internet age there were pirate publishers, especially in the third world, who would print physical copies of books, sell them, and never inform the author/their agent/their publisher just trousering the money. I think we can agree that this was piracy?
video youtube clicks
I do not click on random youtube videos.
book writing two
No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.
book dirty average
The dirty little secret of publishing is that, all along, each book sold has had an average of 5 readers. That's an 80% "piracy" rate if you insist on looking at it in those terms.
thinking problem scales
The problem with ebook filesharing is simply one of scale. But I think the "piracy" problem is massively over-rated.
war writing spy
I like lassic British spy thrillers. Seriously. If the cold war was still on, that's something I'd be writing.
dog house puppets
What I'm hoping for is something that goes much, much further than the conservative enablers of dog-eat-dog capitalism putting on a puppet show of cleaning house. But that's probably not going to happen just yet ...
years needs answers
Any replacement to the current copyright position (life plus 70 years) needs to have an answer lined up for this, and similar, messy edge cases.
half linux firsts
I was Computer Shopper's linux columnist for more than half a decade, from the late 90s onwards. Yes, I know about Linux. (My first review of a Linux distro in the press was published in late 1996.)
mean plot use
Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.
exercise thinking sky
I tend to think that immortal souls, invisible sky daddies, and Santa Claus all belong in the same basket. The disposition of that basket is left as an exercise for the reader.
crazy dots steam
The late 90s were crazy science-fictional if you were inside the superheated steam bubble of the dot-com 1.0 industry.