MetaFilter posts tagged with Stross

Mercy and the Minotaur.

geos — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 12:22:44 -0800

"The subjects vary... but there is an ideological approach in America that is distinguished by one common characteristic: words and deeds utterly lacking in the quality of mercy," by Charles Stross. Or, in other words, is using a minotaur to gore detainees a form of torture?

"You can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself"

We had a deal, Kyle — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 14:56:18 -0800

Fantasy writer George R. R. Martin responds to fans impatient for the latest installment of his series A Song of Fire and Ice: "Okay, I've got the message. " Additional commentary by MeFi's own jscalzi and cstross is illuminating on the business and art of writing, particularly the challenges of maintaining quality and consistency across multi-volume arcs. John Scalzi, Pissy Fans: [T]hese same fans would say “Yeah, the series used to be good, but then he started phoning it in around book five.” You know, if I’m going to annoy a fan, I’d prefer to annoy a fan by not writing a book that sucks, than by writing one that does. Charlie Stross, The art of being late: Parallelism is hard for human minds to grasp. When you're telling a multi-viewpoint story, what you are doing in effect is equivalent to writing a whole bunch of short novels in parallel — one per viewpoint. And we are not good at doing this sort of thing. Humans generally don't multi-task well; we lose efficiency rapidly as we pay the price for switching context. An earlier Stross post touches on some similar issues: Why are SF and fantasy novels the length they are?

The Ghosts of Futures Past

Artw — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 15:42:35 -0800

"We are living in interesting times; in fact, they're so interesting that it is not currently possible to write near-future SF" – why Charles Stross might have to market his next novel as fantasy.

But what about the flying cars?

straight — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:38:11 -0800

Why science fiction is hard. Inspired by reports of a creative new, Rube-Goldberg spamming technique in World of Warcraft, MetaFilter's own Charlie Stross imagines trying to explain gold farming to someone from 1977. (Previously: 1, 2, 3)

Lobsters! Lobsters Everywhere!

jscalzi — Thu, 16 Jun 2005 09:38:46 -0800

Charlie Stross releases his new book Accelerando as a Creative Commons e-book, thereby buying in to the open source idea that offering up one's intellectual property (under certain circumstances) will result in greater sales of the physical object, not fewer (see: Cory Doctorow). In a time where promotional opportunities for new and "mid-list" authors seem to be continually shrinking, is offering up a complete work the current equivalent of the author interview or newspaper puff piece? Or is it simply a recognition that here in the 21st century anything can be pirated -- better to offer up your work in good will (and in a form where you have some control), and hope some of the kids will realize that behind the free content is a guy who needs to eat? And what happens if/when all books become digital books?