Charles Stross discusses the influences behind The Atrocity Archives and the rich seam of existential horror from whence they are mined:
There’s nothing terribly funny about “A Colder War”: I was groping in the dark for a way to express the alienating horror of nuclear annihilation that I’d grown up with, and Lovecraft’s monsters came perfectly to hand. The existential dread they evoke is not so alien to those of us who lived through the original Cold War.
Gareth L Powell has decided to refute Charlie Stross’s recent claim that near-future science fiction is impossible to write. As a quick recap, Charlie said:
We are living in interesting times; in fact, they’re so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF.
Gareth sees that as shrinking away from the challenge:
I don’t see SF as a dry, intellectual game of prediction. I don’t feel the need to be proven right by posterity. If the immediate economic future looks a little uncertain, I’ll fudge a little. I’ll make my best guess and hope for the best. I’ll write a story about people.
After all, this kind of uncertainty is hardly new. Science fiction writers in the 1980s had to consider the fact that the futuristic stories they were writing could be rendered obsolete at any moment by a full-scale global nuclear war – but they kept on writing. They made some basic assumptions and they went for it.
For instance, William Gibson wrote Neuromancer in the early Eighties, at the height of the Cold War, when the superpowers were on the brink of a holocaust, and as far as he knew, he could have been vapourised before finishing the novel, but he finished it anyway.
I’m going to side with Gareth on this one – after all, we publish near-future stories here at Futurismic, and no other type!
But what about you lot? Do you find the plausibility of the predictions in a piece of near-future science fiction as important as the plot and the characters?
Kevin Kelly has written a typically intriguing post on ubiquitous metering: what if everything were measured, monitored, recorded, and indexed?
Imagine a world were any set of historical data was available to you. Everyone has their own favorite data stream from history they would love to have. Such a trove would transform our lives. For that reason, monitoring everything will become commonplace. Cheaply metering data, in fact, is what propels the free economy. Metering is a type of attention. Products and services will be given away in exchange for the meta data about their use. Data about the free is now more valuable than the free thing itself.
This is an interesting idea, very much in the vein of Charles Stross’ brilliant The Beginning of History.
I suppose a Panopticon of sorts is fairly inevitable. Hopefully the transition to a world where everything is recorded all the time will be well-handled, and won’t be used for authoritarian or nefarious purposes.
It’ll be a massive change, perhaps one of the biggest social changes ever.
[from Kevin Kelly’s blog][image from Unhindered by Talent on flickr]
Futurismic readers based in the US should be pleased to hear that hyper-prolific British science fiction writer Charlie Stross is being whisked off for a promotional tour of the States by Ace Books. The dates:
Tuesday, October 9th
12am – Amazon.com Fishbowl session at Amazon’s Union Station Offices in Seattle.
7pm – a public reading (and signing) at University Bookstore at the Science Fiction Museum (325 5th Avenue North, Seattle).
Wednesday, October 10th
2pm – reading and signing at Google in Kirkland. (NB: Google staff only, sadly.)
Thursday, October 11th
7:30pm – reading and signing at Powell’s City of Books (1005 W. Burnside Street, Portland).
Friday, October 12th
1pm – reading and signing at Google in Mountain View.
7pm – another reading and signing at Borders at 400 Post Street, San Francisco.
There are also plenty of radio and magazine interviews in between, apparently, so you should be able to catch the man in action somehow, wherever you may live. And I recommend you do so – I’ve had the privilege of seeing Stross speak a number of times, and in addition to being a fine writer he’s as sharp as a tack, and a very funny man indeed. [Image ganked from the (now sadly defunct) Table of Malcontents blog]