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.

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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.