Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Sci-fi Author Charles Stross Cancels Trilogy: the NSA Is Already Doing It

Posted by Soulskill on from the can-we-convince-the-NSA-to-spy-on-a-ringworld dept.

doom writes "Charles Stross has announced that there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy because reality (in a manner of speaking) has caught up to him too fast The last straw was apparently the news that the NSA planted spies in networked games like WoW. Stross comments: 'At this point, I'm clutching my head. Halting State wasn't intended to be predictive when I started writing it in 2006. Trouble is, about the only parts that haven't happened yet are Scottish Independence and the use of actual quantum computers for cracking public key encryption (and there's a big fat question mark over the latter-- what else are the NSA up to?).'"

6 of 208 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Wow! by ackthpt · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Another book becoming real!

    I think we can safely say this has advanced to the stage of yet another*.

    * it's a technical term.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  2. Bitcoin. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Who needs quantum computers to hack public keys.
    All those Bitcoin mining computers are actually secretly hacking encryption keys for the NSA.

  3. Probably writer's block by cold+fjord · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's probably just writer's block. Intelligence agency interest in on-line games was in the news back around 2006-2008, just like the warrantless wiretapping controversy. If he was going to abandon it for the stated reason I would expect he would have done it then. Besides, this sort of thing hasn't really stopped other writers from creating interesting stories.

    --
    much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
  4. Pick your favourite outcome! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Would we rather see...

    - A Neal Stephenson world
    - A George Orwell world
    - A Cory Doctorow world
    - A Aldous Huxley world
    - Name your world...

  5. New direction for his creativity by namgge · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perhaps Mr Stross could use his skills to to describe an imaginary world where the government told the whole truth to the electorate, there was a right to privacy, and only politicians were systematically spied on and investigated...

    It sure would be interesting to know what that would be like.

  6. Another Example Fiction = Reality: TobakkoNacht by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I sympathize with Charles Stross's problem. When I wrote "TobakkoNacht" in 1997, it was based on a prediction that by the mid 2020s we'd be seeing the introduction of smoking bans outdoors in public plazas (which NY's Bloomberg brought in three years ago and has been emulated in California and elsewhere), smoking bans in brothels to protect the "working girls" (old news now in Canada), people being shot in smoking disputes (numbers of them by now, including two pregnant women, as well as country singer Wayne Mills last week), a worldwide antitobacco treaty (similar to the 2000s' "World Framework On Tobacco Control" that is now threatening countries that refuse to abide by its dictates) and a president having to hide his evil smoking habit. The problem was that aside from a preliminary Kindle short story version in late 2008, I didn't get to fully publish it until a few months ago as an opening fiction-piece in "TobakkoNacht -- The Antismoking Endgame." When I originally wrote the story I was criticized for supposing that any such things could come about as early as the 2020s ... or *ever* come about at all.

    NOT "anonymous coward" here:
    Michael J. McFadden
    Author of "TobakkoNacht -- The Antismoking Endgame"