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
adapted aerospace boldly brick fiction hit ill outer profoundly science space until wall
Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.
attractive crude explain fiction lived science strong
Science fiction has traditionally been economically naive, with a strong libertarian streak, which I think is like a crude Leninism. That's attractive because it could be used to explain everything, and if only we lived by its tenets, everything would be perfect.
art ease entirely fiction form genre human ideas literary literature primarily pure rather science tool writers
Many science fiction writers are literary autodidacts who focus on the genre primarily as a literature of ideas rather than as a pure art form or a tool for the introspective examination of the human condition. I'm not entirely at ease with that self-description.
fiction flash
I don't do flash fiction.
writing fiction firsts
Fiction is about human beings, first and foremost. (It's not impossible to write fiction with no human protagonists, but it's very hard to keep the reader interested ...)
business difficult fiction human humans ignore obsessed rather thus
The business of fiction is the study of the human condition, and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with, thus making it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human condition!
bring broaden condition definition doomed fiction human insight key needs remain science study
I think that if there's one key insight science can bring to fiction, it's that fiction - the study of the human condition - needs to broaden its definition of the human condition. Because the human condition isn't immutable and doomed to remain uniform forever.
best clear fiction itself life merely outcome precisely reader showing suspect
I suspect political fiction is at its best precisely when it doesn't preach, but restricts itself to showing the reader a different way of life or thought, and merely makes it clear that this is an end-point or outcome for some kind of political creed.
ashes attitude british context engage fearful future less open optimism pessimism quite science since social uk view whereas
The social context of the UK is more open to the future, the old pessimism has been scrubbed and there's a view that you can engage with the future again. There is quite a lot of optimism in British science fiction, much less of the sackcloth and ashes and 'we're all going to die' attitude that it used to have, whereas the Americans have become more entrenched and fearful since 2001.
best effects hatch maybe possibly pubs
Pubs are, disturbingly, where I hatch most of my best idea-sculptures: possibly it's something to do with the disinhibiting effects of alcohol, or maybe it's just having company to yack at.
closer compact north relatively
Britain is relatively compact and much closer to the borders of the U.S.S.R. than anywhere in North America.
multiple published
My books are published by Hachette. My books have been blacklisted and blocked on Amazon on multiple occasions.
foreground humour matching principle response tend work
I tend to work on the principle that much humour relies on cognitive dissonance - on the foreground not matching the background, on the protagonist's response to a situation being inappropriate, and so on.
children computer exploring human information interested
I write more for the children of the computer revolution, who are also interested in speculation and exploring the human condition, but approach it from an information perspective.