But enough about you

A month or so ago, Charles Stross came to visit Google Kirkland for a reading. I took careful notes but failed to write them up promptly after the visit, so I could easily misremember or misrepresent something. Here's my best recollection of his visit, and apologies in advance if I get anything wrong.

Stross is a Scotland-based writer who manages to be jolly and superior simultaneously. Not superior to the audience - he was quite friendly to us - but he had a bit of that attitude that is so common amongst the geek in-crowd. He was dressed all in black and cast witty, wry aspersions on SCO, Microsoft, and various other tech companies.

He said he and Cory Doctorow were kicking around an idea about five years ago about massively multiplayer online virtual reality. There's been very little near-future science fiction written lately, maybe because it's so difficult. Stross is interested in gaming, MMOs, virtual reality, and in extrapolating Moore's Law accurately and then project the social consequences on top of that.

Stross read from the first three chapters of his latest book, Halting State, which he wrote 12-18 months ago. It's mostly a police procedural/espionage thriller, but also a thesis on the future of MMOs. It's written in the second person, which is the most natural voice for games. All games use this: "You are in a maze of twisty little passages," etc.

After the reading, Stross took Q&A. These are all paraphrased from my notes and shouldn't be treated as direct quotes.

Q: How do you make sure your prose is accessible to those who aren't in the industry?

A: Why bother? I've had more complaints about Scottish dialect than tech talk.

Q: (A question about what Stross predicts for the near future.)

A: Mobile phones ten years from now will be as powerful as desktops today. Phones will have GPS and other location data. The internet will know where you are. The internet will come out of the computer and into the real world. URLs will be conjured up from GPS coordinates and as you move around, your phone will auto-fetch local data.

Start practicing being very polite to police officers - they will all be wearing cameras that will send video directly to locked down evidence servers.

Police will have Copspace - a VR overlay that shows criminal record and recent known activities baced on face recognition.

The general populace will have other types of VR overlays that project pregenerated textures onto the surfaces around us. Why have nice plain beige walls when you can see something else instead?

Canadian author Karl Schroeder writes about the far future of the same thing.

There will be an overnight change like that caused by the switch from slide rules to pocket calculators. Nobody today knows how to use a slide rule. Maps and street signs will go the same way. Soon we will see the first generation who has no idea what it is like to be physically lost.

Q: Did you get any resistance to writing the book in the second person?

A: Amongst readers - some people don't like it. It's important not to tell a reader something that's inconsistent with their view of reality. So in the second person, stay out of the character's head. Don't tell people what they think.

Amongst publishers - there was some pushback. Ace wants space opera for the second book in the contract.

Q: What are you working on now?

A: I have two publishers, Ace and Tor. [Note: I got a little mixed up here and I'm not sure what projects he's doing for what publishers.] For Tor, I'm working on an ongoing series. I'm also writing a Heinlein tribute. Everyone is doing Heinlein tributes right now. Most people are writing in the style of early Heinlein, but not me -- I'm doing a late Heinlein! (Laughter...) There's a red headed sex robot with nipples that go sproing. It's set a hundred years after humans go extinct. Robots all around.

Q: ... some question I don't have written down ...

A: There is an easter egg in Halting State: the words "software" and "computer" are never used.

Q: What about "Google?"

A: Yes!

Also, the prologue and the epilogue both appear to be spam and aren't.

Q: What do you think of your own work?

A: High art is no good if no one wants to read it/look at it/etc. You can't be boring. I aspire to high art but also to entertain. I want to keep readers interested and amused.

Q: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

A: Write. Finish what you start. It takes practice. Often, it seems to take about ten novels to write something worth publishing. In my case, 20 novels. Zelazny said you have to write a million words of crap. It's harder than learning to write code: there are no compilers, books run on human brains, and they're all different.

Q: Like writing JavaScript!

A: [Stross chokes on his drink.]

Q: What do you think of personal publishing?

A: There's an illusion that you can short circuit the learning curve. The function of major publishers is to filter out garbage. There is a 500-1 rejection rate.

Q: What kind of hours do you keep?

A: I get up between 8 and 11 am. I make tea, read email, and look at the web until... 3 pm. [Unclear if he was joking about that time; he laughed when he said it.] Then I work. It takes self discipline. When I'm on a roll, I write seven days a week for several weeks in a row.

---

After the talk we were given copies of Halting State. I read mine and enjoyed it very much. I hadn't read any of Stross' books before but I would definitely recommend them. If you just want a sample, there is a free novel online: Accelerando. Enjoy!

UPDATE: Stross visited Google headquarters in Mountain View a few days later. The video of that talk was posted to YouTube.

Here's a follow-up to my science fiction book list, concentrating on fantasy books this time. Once again, if your tastes overlap mine, please make recommendations! And Kristin, please remind me of the title and author of the book you gave me for Christmas last year. I really liked it and would like to continue in the series, but I lent the book to someone and now I can't remember any of the details I would need to look it up.

John Barnes


One for the Morning Glory
Finity


Marion Zimmer Bradley


Mists of Avalon


Orson Scott Card


Tales of Alvin Maker series


Jacqueline Carey


Kushiel's Dart


Susannah Clarke


*Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell


Terry Goodkind


Wizard's First Rule and series, though they go downhill


Mercedes Lackey


Last Herald Mage trilogy and other Valdemar books


George R. R. Martin


*Song of Ice and Fire series


Anne McCaffrey


*Dragonflight/Dragonquest/The White Dragon
Moreta
Crystal Singer series


Naomi Novik


*Temeraire series


J. R. R. Tolkien


The Hobbit
The Lord of the Rings series

One of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, visited Google Kirkland on Tuesday of last week. I was lucky enough to have lunch in a small group with him, and then hang out with him for about an hour in the game room before he gave his 2:00 talk.

I did my homework and read his website before he arrived. He says a lot about how giving talks and doing tours and book signings is generally not a good use of his time, and that he would much rather be at home writing. He also links to an article about being an introvert and says it describes him quite well. I felt honored he had decided to come and talk to us at Google, and like we'd better have some pretty great questions to ask to make it worth his while. I think on the whole we did all right in the question-asking department.

In person, Neal (can I really call him that? It's not like we're on a first-name basis now, but "Mr. Stephenson" seems pretty stilted) is personable, thoughtful, and easygoing. He took all of our questions seriously and tried to give the best answers he could. He asked a few general questions about the Google Kirkland office and our relationship to Google HQ, but mostly he talked about whatever we asked about.

In the game room, he idly threw some darts with a Googler while chit-chatting with us. He was OK at darts but he really dominated once he switched to playing Robothon on the arcade machine. He managed to rack up a high score before it was time for the talk and he entered his initials. Granted, the office we were playing in had just been set up a month ago, so the pre-existing high scores had not had time to become truly impressive and entrenched yet. He says he doesn't play as many video games as he used to due to RSI issues, but that he plans to buy a copy of Halo 3.

So... on to the questions and answers!

Things I particularly wanted to know, or that friends asked me to ask:

Q: What's up with the Diamond Age miniseries?

A: He said something along the lines of, "I wish I could give you a better answer than this, but unfortunately the only thing I can say about that right now is that it is 'in production.'"

Q: What are you working on right now and when will it come out?

A: He's writing a science fiction novel unrelated to Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle. It's set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It's really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit, just like the pirates kept people engaged in the Baroque books. He's nearly finished writing it, and if he doesn't finish by the end of the calendar year he'll have to give some money back. If everything proceeds according to schedule, it should be available in stores in about a year.

Q: Would your earlier books have been longer, or were they kept short by editorial pressures?

A: No, the earlier books were about the length they were meant to be.

Another interesting tidbit that came out in response to someone else's question is that Neal has really gotten interested in swordfighting lately and has taken it up as a good form of exercise. "Much more interesting than jogging," I think he said. It came about as he was researching a fight scene for one of the Baroque books, in which the characters are fighting with rapier and dagger. When he went to write the scene, he realized he didn't know what he was talking about, so he started to read heavily on the subject. Soon he was practicing the moves himself. Now, a few years after publication, he's still swordfighting. He didn't say how he finds practice partners.

One last anecdote. About 40 minutes into the one-hour Q-and-A session, someone asked about Neal's characteristic "sudden and unexpected" style of ending books. In response, Neal said, "It's been a pleasure speaking here at Google" and made for the door. He was only kidding, of course; he was just making a sudden and unexpected ending to the talk. He quickly returned and gave the more serious answer that he likes his endings just as they are, and that while they are apparently not to everyone's tastes, it's not that he just gives up and stops writing. He dislikes pat endings that explain everything and tie everything up with a neat little bow; in real life, there are no convenient termination points. On his website, you can find a longer version of what is surely a standard set speech for him on this topic, so I will suddenly and abruptly end my paraphrasing of it, and of this entire blog entry, here.

A co-worker asked me recently for a list of science fiction books I'd recommend. I haven't been reading as much science fiction in the last five years as I used to, but that's partly because my success rate at finding stuff I liked dropped off a bit. If my list of favorites signficantly overlaps yours, please comment and let me know what I'm missing.

I'll follow up with a separate fantasy post sometime soon. It will have some author overlap, but this list was long enough already. My favorites are starred.

Iain M. Banks


*Player of Games
Use of Weapons
Excession


John Barnes


*Orbital Resonance
A Million Open Doors


David Brin


Uplift Series
The Postman
*Heart of the Comet
Glory Season


Orson Scott Card


*Ender's Game and rest of series
Homecoming series


Mary Gentle


First History series


Robert Heinlein


Starship Troopers
Podkayne of Mars
*The Moon is a Harsh Mistress
I Will Fear No Evil
Time Enough for Love


Frank Herbert


*Dune


Nancy Kress


Probability series
Beggars series


China Miéville


Perdido Street Station


John Scalzi


Old Man's War


Dan Simmons


*Hyperion series


Neal Stephenson


*Diamond Age
*Snow Crash
*Cryptonomicon


Vernor Vinge


Marooned in Realtime
*A Fire Upon the Deep
*A Deepness in the Sky


Connie Willis


*Doomsday Book
Bellwether
To Say Nothing of the Dog
*Passage

I'm re-reading The Princess Bride at the moment. For anyone who has seen and loved the movie but never read the book, check it out; the book is even better.

Just as the movie is interlaced with those scenes with Peter Falk and that kid from the Wonder Years, the book is interspersed with commentary from the author, William Goldman. There are some very funny bits about his ex-wife and kid, and about fights he had with his editors about what should be in the book and what shouldn't. Many of the characters are a lot deeper in the book than in the movie, and one is substantially shallower. (It turns out Buttercup is not particularly bright.)

I first read this book when I traveled to France in eighth grade. My aunt, uncle, cousins, and I barged up the Rhone from Marseilles. We saw a lot of amazing things on that trip, including the medieval castle at Carcassonne, but I remember reading The Princess Bride as one of the top highlights of the trip. I re-read it when we returned to the barge the following year in Holland, but not since then.

LibraryThing

I'm half tempted to stay up all night entering my book collection. Except I'm exhausted.

This might help solve my what's-really-worth-reading problems.

After a very long hiatus, I finally finished a couple of books. Hurray!



The Invisible Computer is a technology book written in 1998, so I had a lot of fun flashbacks to the bubble and CSE 590IP, the computer science/business school seminar I took in grad school. We read Crossing the Chasm and Going Public and lots of other standards, from which Invisible Computer draws extensively.

On a completely different note:



Chainfire is the ninth in a fantasy series I've been reading for the past few years.

I found this one pretty tedious. I guess it's time to stop.


So... the drought is broken, I finished a couple of books, but evidently my selection strategy needs to improve if I'm only going to read a book or two a month. I used to read any old thing that came down the pike, but those days seem to be over now. Any book I choose to read brings with it an opportunity cost: what about the much better books I could have been reading instead?

Time to get snooty.

As of 10PM last night, there were 62 books on my "Books to Read" shelf (BTRS). Given that the last time I finished a book was September fourth, and given that I seem to be adding books to the BTRS at a rate of three or four books a week, I knew I had to take action, or my BTRS would quickly consume all the matter in the universe.

New stats:

12 books I have committed to read
3 books I have committed to try to read but it's OK if I give up
13 books on the backup queue -- books I kind of want to read but it's perfectly OK if I just never do
18 books are going into the permanent library without further review
16 books that are leaving my life forever

Happier now. :)

Just finished Evolution's Darling, by Scott Westerfeld. It came out in 1999, so I'm a little behind -- I came to Westerfeld via his young adult books, which I've been gobbling up as fast as I can get my hands on them.

One of the Amazon reviewers mentions that Westerfeld reminds him of Iain Banks. If the reviewer means Iain M. Banks, then I totally agree. (Banks writes science fiction with the middle initial, and horror without it.) Reminds me, I've got to read Excession again one of these days...

Best part of this book: the discussion of using an updated version of the Turing test on a brain-damaged, comatose human to determine if she was still a person. In the book's universe, a machine is considered a person with full legal rights when its Turing quotient rises above 1.0. The Turing quotient, which can be measured via an automated challenge-and-response process, is a measure of the gestalt of the machine's being. Can the machine love, or intuit, or crack wise, in a way that is not traceable to the data in its memory banks? Then it is a person.

But in the book's universe, humans are granted a free pass, personhood at birth. It's almost a throwaway line for Westerfeld when he calls newborn humans "mewling, mindless, screaming bags of want" -- the implication being, not people under the modernized Turing test.

It always fascinates me to watch people arguing about abortion and predicating their views on the timing of the beginning of life. What if, instead, we talked about when personhood begins? And what if that moment were significantly after birth? I know that when Elliott was a newborn, either of my cats had a much higher Turing quotient than he did, but even so my cats had fewer legal rights. I don't think our culture is ready to strip away the human status of infants, even if they are just mindless bags of want. Instead, some people want to give human status to blastocysts. Whatever.

But I digress...

Second best part of this book: the hot machine/human sex scenes. Darling, the main machine character, can very precisely monitor his lover's every physical reaction and fluctuation and tailor his actions accordingly. I know, it sounds pretty dry and scientific when I put it like that. You'll just have to read for yourself.

Perhaps my rating is inflated, due to the glut of mommy books I've read over the last few years, and the paucity of sci-fi, but I'll give this one 9/10.

Best book on mothering I've read (and I've read quite a few):
Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute Of It, by Andrea Buchanan. Thanks to Kristin King for mentioning it a few months back.

I think I'm done reading about mothering now. For a long time I was looking for something that would render this unrecognizable new life of mine understandable. I never found that book, though Mother Shock would have been even better had I read it a year ago or more.

Now I think I'd rather read the kinds of things I used to read: science fiction, fantasy, history, and the odd bit of smut.

Elliott news: We walked around Greenlake with a new acquaintance today. Her baby is only 7 months old so I hope she wasn't horrified by Elliott's "I'm almost two and I'm my own person!" antics. She seemed to take it in stride. Elliott wanted to walk the whole way (nearly three miles) but he had trouble staying on the path. It was much too chilly a day to contemplate any unplanned swimming in the lake, so I couldn't allow him to be a complete free spirit. Periodically I stuffed him into the stroller despite his protests and we power-walked to get some distance behind us. Next time I hope macabre0 can join us!