Interview: Charles Stross
Charles Stross is one of Britain’s best and most prolific science fiction writers. He emerged in the 1980s as a short story writer appearing in Interzone. Apparently he could often be seen at SF conventions wandering around with a half-finished manuscript under his arm. His talent and persistence paid off; his first novel, Singularity Sky, was published in 2003 and nominated for a Hugo the year after. He has since released a whole string of books, each one stuffed with fizzing ideas, strong characters and an I-dare-you-not-to-turn-the-page attitude. We welcome Charlie to our first issue of Shoreline of Infinity.
Shoreline of Infinity: When and how did you first realise you were a writer? What influenced you and what drew you to SF?
Charles Stross: I’m not sure when I began writing. Certainly, one of my earliest memories was of my mother sitting at the kitchen table, hammering away on a manual typewriter, trying to write a novel. I think she only got about two chapters done—but somehow this imprinted on me the idea that books were written by people, and it was okay to write fiction.
Around age twelve I got an English teacher who set my class a fiction-writing project, to fill an entire exercise book with a story over the course of a term: I was one of the 10% who filled two books. At that time, the mid-to-late 1970s, Dungeons and Dragons was catching on in the UK and I was playing with friends. I borrowed the portable typewriter my sister’d learned to type on for writing up D&D adventure scenarios, taught myself to type, then somehow slid into writing fiction around the age of 14 or 15.
This was in the late 1970s to early 1980s. We made our own entertainment back then: we had 3 channels of TV in black and white, no VCR (let alone DVDs), no internet, no computers. On the other hand, I grew up surrounded by books ...
I never really thought about writing anything other than science fiction or fantasy. It was what I grew up reading, because it held my interest—remember, we’re talking teenaged males here. And what I wrote was pretty dire until I hit my twenties, much as you’d expect: the real function of literature is to explore the human condition through creative but plausible lies, and you can’t really do that until you’ve acquired at least a minimal grip on what the human condition is. SF and Fantasy offer the broader context of letting us examine how the human condition might be modified by—in the case of SF—possible but not actually existent circumstances, and in the face of fantasy, by frankly implausible conditions that nevertheless have emotional (or mythic) resonance.
Together these genre categories belong to what critic John Clute labels the fantastika—that branch of literature that diverges from the ultra-mundane path that so much mainstream literary fiction took during the 20th century.
It’s worth bearing in mind that one of the functions of fiction is play. Much as playful activities provide young mammals with an opportunity to rehearse useful adult behaviours—if you’ve ever seen kittens or puppies play-fighting, there’s a big clue—fiction provides us, even as adults, with an opportunity to rehearse situations we’ve never experienced.
The trouble I had with the realist mainstream branch of literature when I was young was that it was rehearsing stuff that didn’t resonate with my life. You don’t have to live an adventure-filled life, hob-nob with aliens, or spend time in a haunted dungeon, to feel that a form of literature that barely admits the existence of the technological sphere—much less of any technology more abstruse than the television, telephone, or automobile—is somehow missing key aspects of how we live.
Let me give you a concrete example. Since I turned 18, our computers have grown in performance roughly a billion-fold, and we all think nothing these days of carrying around magic mirrors that give us access to the sum total of human knowledge at a finger’s touch. We use them for watching cute animal videos and for taking photographs of ourselves. One side-effect of this technology is that our governments spy on us in a manner that would have warmed the chilly hearts of any pre-1970s dictatorship’s secret police. Another is that we’re living through the most photographed time in human history, with about 20% of all photographs ever taken having been snapped in the past year, and 30-40% of them being uploaded to Facebook, which in turn has a few million computers permanently tasked with recognizing and tagging faces in those photographs, working out where they were taken and what this says about our physical social relationships ... and then using this insanely hypertrophied police state infrastructure to market consumer goods at us.
So we’re under Gestapo-on-steroids level surveillance all the time, through automated snitches that we pay for the privilege of carrying, and the main subjective consequence of this is that if we’re seen frequently with someone who just died, we get ads for wreaths and condolences cards.
SF gives me a tool for working through those issues, and in particular through the consequences of the third industrial revolution that I’ve lived through. The traditional literary realist-mode novel doesn’t do that. Most novelists don’t really get a start until they’re in their thirties (it’s that human condition thing, again: you have to have some experience of life before you can write about it), and by the time they’re into their second decade of writing they’re middle-aged—the typical point at which engaging with change becomes difficult. If they spent their youth acquiring a pure liberal arts education, then they almost certainly missed out on the quantitative sciences and the engineering arts—and so they won’t be a very reliable guide to the world in flux around us.
Your first story, The Boys, was published in 1987 in Interzone. That, dare I say, is looking back nearly 30 years. Before that was the ‘Golden Age’ of SF in the 40s and early 50s, with writers such as Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein and pals. How would you compare being a Science Fiction writer in those earlier days, to when you started out, and for anyone new to writing SF today?
CS: I have no idea how to compare being an SF writer today with the 1980s, because the changes wrought by the arrival of the internet have been so pervasive and insidious that it’s hard to remember what things were like back then.
Circa 1982, roughly 40 SF/F novels were published in the UK per year, and one magazine (Interzone) was regularly buying and publishing short stories. Unless you lived near a town with a specialist bookshop who could buy grey-market imports from the USA, that was it. Much like trying to explain the era of two television channels in black and white to someone reared on cable TV and YouTube, it’s very hard to think yourself back into what it was like in those days.
We’ve seen such a massive flowering of written and visual media in our field that it’s hard to remember that it was a mostly-ignored ghetto back then; today geek culture is mainstream. A third of Hollywood’s movie output is tailored to the public appetite for SF/F; Dr Who is one of the BBC’s most watched TV shows by adults: if you turn on the TV and watch the adverts, you’ll rapidly see that around 80-90% of them employ computer-generated graphics and generally use them to portray impossibilities—often relying on SFnal imagery. While rhetorical devices (”that’s really science fictional, isn’t it?”) are part of the language of the TV or radio commentator or newspaper columnist, the reality is that we’re living in a science fictional age. We don’t have jet packs, food pills, or holidays on the moon, but we have 250mph atomic-powered trains (or at least the French do), sushi on every street corner, and the pocket-sized magic mirrors that connect us to the sum total of human knowledge.
One side-effect of this is that the markets for fiction are evolving furiously fast. We tend to forget that, although people have been experimenting with ebooks since the mid-1980s, the commercial market for them was less than 1% of all book sales as recently as 2009. (Today, 50% of my book sales are in electronic form.) Any advice I received when I was starting out is long since obsolete; any advice I could offer to a new writer starting out today will be of similarly questionable utility.
You said in an interview in Revolution SF “the core study of any branch of fiction is people.” I’ve just finished reading your latest Laundry Files book The Rhesus Chart and it’s been a pleasure to watch Bob Howard mature and grow throughout the series.
How important to you is getting the human perspective of your ideas and story across to your readers? Maybe it’s time for other SF writers to focus a lot more on how people react and respond to our “Sfnal” world?
CS: I find the human dimension of storytelling increasingly important as I grow older. We’re living, as I said earlier, in the science fictional future of the 20th century: if you want a mere sense-of-wonder kick and the weirdness of the cosmos or the elaboration of our technosphere you don’t need to read fiction for that—you can get it in the pages of New Scientist every week, or in the newspapers.
To the extent that relevance is important to written SF (and I’d be the last person to deny that you don’t need relevance for recreational escapism, which is and traditionally has been about 80-90% of our genre’s raison d’etre), we aren’t about naively predicting the future: rather, we’re about figuring out what human beings will make of the future. (While it’s possible to write SF that features no human beings at all—in settings where humanity never existed, or is extinct—it’s hard work, and it’s a niche market.)
Fiction is a ritualized rehearsal for life, so fiction in future settings that asks questions like “what is it going to be like to live in a world where everyone is on the internet 24x7 via their clothing and the artefacts in their environment” may be useful. Deeper questions like, “what happens when the sort of people who run fake Microsoft Support call centres to install RATs [Remote Access Trojans] on the PCs of pensioners in order to steal their bank details discover the Internet Of Things” can provide lots of material for stories of unanticipated consequences and humanity.
A lot of this stuff is deeply weird, because the way we’re embodying crude representations of our own intelligence in the artefacts around us echoes the paranoid, strange realm of a Philip K. Dick novel—advertisements that crawl cockroach-like into our cars or living rooms and shout at us, doorknobs that won’t let us out of our home until we pay a subscription fee in accordance with an arcane contract we don’t remember signing. And these representations of our intellect are deeply broken insofar as they’re inflexible and they model human modes of behaviour and cognition only partially. For example, consider Facebook’s attempt at giving everyone an annual album of their uploaded photographs from the past year, sorted by “popularity” (how many people “liked” the photos or tagged them). Obviously this seemed like a good idea to the bright twenty-something engineers who came up with the idea: it never occurred to them to put themselves in the shoes of a grieving parent whose only child had died of leukaemia over the preceding year, precipitating a divorce, because of course they and their friends never upload photographs to Facebook that are associated with sad or unhappy memories.
There’s going to be a lot more of this sort of weird emotional brokenness in our superficially-smart future. And that’s before we get into big current topics like climate change, the ageing of the global population, the fallout from the financialization and asset stripping of the west, and so on.
I’m going to ask this even though it’s just a few weeks before the General Election in the UK, with the whole thing up in the air and feeling balanced on the edge of uncertainty. How much would you agree with Arthur C Clarke’s 1970 comment when he said “Politicians should read science fiction not westerns and detective stories,” and what lessons can the politicians learn?
CS: ACC was right; unfortunately someone was reading him, and that someone was Rupert Murdoch (who used to phone up Clarke for a chat every week, or so I’m told). Murdoch got the message about satellite TV broadcasting and its utility in spreading a political agenda; since then, all the politicians have been living with the fallout of Clarke’s nostrum.
Politicians these days are mostly career professionals. To get to the top while still young enough to be viable as a prime ministerial candidate precludes any experience of the world outside of politics. This is, I think, a disaster for us in the long term because we’ve handed over our government to managerialists like Ed Milliband and public relations guys like David Cameron. They’re non-specialists who are at the mercy of lobbyists funded by the industries and economic sectors they’re supposed to control. These in turn are largely run by big public corporations. The joint stock corporation is essentially a form of very slow artificial intelligence that we invented about 300 years ago: these days they are increasingly replacing their executive and decision making functions with automated but not individually intelligent units. So our politicians are out in front, pretending to lead—but in reality they’re being steered from behind by not-terribly-bright sociopathic AIs fine-tuned for short-term survival and profitability at any cost.
How we get out of this mess is not obvious, but I doubt the eventual solution will emerge from within our existing political framework.
What can we look forward to seeing you publishing in the new few months or so?
CS: I’ve got a new novel coming out on July 7th, from Orbit (in the UK; in the USA it’s published by Ace). It’s “The Annihilation Score”, and it’s book six in the Laundry Files series. Unlike earlier Laundry novels, this one breaks with Bob, hitherto our sole narrator and first-person viewpoint—it’s told by Dr Mo O’Brien, who is parachuted into the Home Office to deal with an emergency: a plague of superheroes. And supervillains …
Charles Stross, many thanks for taking the time out to talk to Shoreline of Infinity.
Border Crossings
Steve Green
