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Sci-fi Author Charles Stross Cancels Trilogy: the NSA Is Already Doing It
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?).'"
The Scotts are to have a referendum on independance next year, as far as that goes.
Still, us English folk can only hope that a future which consists of the Scots living quietly amongst themselves and us not having to put up with that awful dirge Auld Lang Syne every bloody New Year's Eve isn't the stuff of science fiction...
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
Who needs quantum computers to hack public keys.
All those Bitcoin mining computers are actually secretly hacking encryption keys for the NSA.
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
Dear NSA,
You not only cost us our privacy, the privacy that we treasure so much.
Now you cost us a good book !
What else are you going to cost us, NSA ??
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Would we rather see...
- A Neal Stephenson world
- A George Orwell world
- A Cory Doctorow world
- A Aldous Huxley world
- Name your world...
Agreed!
A lot of fiction looks dated when current events or technology surpass what was supposed to be a look at the future. This time it caught up with this novelist before he even finished his story. Some are suggesting it caught up with him before he finished the previous piece of it.
Such is the life of a novelist. Next time be more novel.
Be quick and write that book where a large government structure, say like the Bastille,
is being stormed by citizens, and the Repulbic of the truly Free can finally be established
It's not just books. There I was, happily watching Person Of Interest, and then it turns out the premise behind a Sci-Fi show is true.
I don't know how many bottles of scotch the writers must have got through before they managed to start writing Season 3, but I'm guessing it came by the crate.
Somehow, despite all the odds and the lessons learned from WW2 we managed it. Apparently the reality of corrupt, greedy, paranoid government abuse of civil rights in order to funnel cash to the owners of entities like Booz Allen Hamilton is too much: A noted science fiction author with futurist skills can't keep ahead even though he's the guy who figured out the trend of lifelogging as the likely end of privacy.
We win, the news is a functional replacement for new Stross novels! Of course we lose too, because at this point it's only a question of who gets to be either middle class or upper class instead of a serf. Considering automation technology is advancing by leaps and bounds there may be no serfs in the future. That hypothesis is in accord with the Obama-administration play of drone strikes as the preferred means of dealing with unpersons.
Seriously, we fucked up. We should've never let the surveillance-state develop and now it's too late to claw it back from Microsoft, Google, NRO, NSA and the rest of that terrifying crew of large bureaucracies. The only real question is whether we stand a chance in the war that has already started, or if they did too good a job of dividing and conquering and it'll just be slow extermination.
The NSA has been heavily monitoring Internet traffic since the 90s, and no one seemed to mind.
Perhaps it was predictive in the sense of people suddenly becoming outraged about it now.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You're fucked!
We are already fucked no matter how you look at it.
The technology that we have (and the more advanced versions of technology that the BIG BROTHERS get to play with) today already enables 24/7/365 tracking - and the way we laid out our "rules and regulation" we have already submitted EVERYTHING THAT IS RELATED TO US (our name, our address, our car registration number, our HAM radio identification, our spouse' identity, the identity of our children, our education, the subjects that we took in the schools, and so on) to the authority (aka BIG BROTHERS).
They know us better than we know ourselves.
They know us so well that they can actually predict what we most probably going to do and/or going to be next week/month/year, while most of us do not even know what we are going to do next weekend.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
All indications are that Verisign and others were compelled to turn over their master keys, so what's left to crack? Seriously, via MitM they can own just about any internet-using box on the planet, and failing that, there's always the cousin of Stuxnet.
The only solution at this point is a human one - make them stop. Technologically, it's already past game over.
I wouldn't have cancelled the trilogy - there's a unique opportunity here for a twist ending. For example, the president of the NSA could be a cyborg. Or maybe the third book could be a satire - introduce a Snowden-type character into the novel and have him assassinated / kidnapped by the government, or start a war between the US and the country providing his asylum that ends in nuclear winter.
You're plugging Doctorow on this site? Lemme get my popcorn....
More options, and more hope.. and Moties look like they would be fun to hang out with. Tho preferably after the Kzin wars are over.. i don't want to be eaten by a cat.
Can i sign up to be an ARM agent?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It could be worse, The Laundry could be becoming reality.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
The plot you mention doesn't contain any sci-fi, at all. Drones have been about for ages, VR is still crap, and no one car get stuck in it (how would that even happen, anyway?).
Predictive fiction has always been problematic... I don't know one writer who's got the last 50 years close to right. Half thought we'd be living on the moon and mars, the other half thought the Soviets would have invaded or bombed us to dust, and none of them predicted the pervasiveness of computers or the Internet.
... anything sufficiently distancing itself from reality is too farfetched to make a plausible premise. I mean, he COULD say that they take DNA from citizens and then create virtual humans inside a matrix to predict human interaction to better control the population.
Then we have a virtual Snowden break lose on the web like Max Headroom and someone ends up with another case of writers block.
>>"ad space available -- low rates!!!"
HHGTTG had six books in the trilogy, so I think we are being short-changed here...
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
It seems the NSA is into turning fiction into fact - so don't give them any ideas
You and I may think that as long as we do not give them any idea it's fine.
But you and I do not know that by deciding NOT to give them any idea, it is already another IMPORTANT idea that we are giving to the NSA (and all other BIG BROTHERS)
Remember, to those who know how to play this game - Silence is an answer, non-cooperation is an action, and not-giving-any-idea by itself is a very useful idea.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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.
I still want to read it!!!! I love Stross' work and I imagine his 3rd installment would still be a good read, regardless of real world applicability.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
You need to go so far into the future, for which you need to know so much about physics and engineering and etc. to even try and predict what will happen, that you may as well start looking for a job applying that knowledge rather than struggle to be a writer with totally uncertain income.
Maybe that's a sign that the Singularity is indeed going to happen. The whole idea is that the speed of technological achievements continues to increase to the point new advances start coming faster than we can follow them. After the Singularity you're presumed to live like this: you start to become acquainted to the last industrial revolution-like development, with all it entails in terms of new technologies, and you hear it's already 20 generations behind, individual technological achievements within each of those revolutions so numerous they can't even be numbered. Then you start to vaguely and very superficially try to get a glimpse of what they were about and 50 new revolutions happened in the meantime...
Science fiction just isn't possible when science goes faster than your writing. At best you start writing fantasy as the difference isn't clear anymore.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Sorry, I actually did RTFA (well, I follow Stross's blog...), and he said nothing of the kind. In his opinion, the NSA revelations break the universe he created for Halting State/Rule 34 so he does not feel like another book in the same continuity makes sense. On the other hand, Halting State and Rule 34 weren't really related plot-wise anyway, so the fact that the third book---which the linked blog post says he still intends to write--won't be in that continuity doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
Bro do you even type?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
So somebody that has been continuously publishing work gets accused of writers block?
They are just the ones that didn't see Nixon coming. Who would have thought that the USA would throw away an expensive space station despite having several years to save it and enough bits of Saturn V already built to do so. I think that was the turning point, throwing away Skylab, giving up on the moon and distracting everyone into the ever changing Shuttle project for long enough that a generation of expertise was lost.
So that's where my anal polyps came from! NSA!!
Can we have a Kickstarter to get Charlie Stross to write a book about a nice utopic Singularity where nothing horrible happens to anyone?
He should go back to the previous books, revamp them then publish updated versions as v2.0.
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
20 years without actually using a device, or WITH using one? Popping off one little nuke, with witnesses, really changes the challenge factor there.
Who is John Cabal?
Get all that encryption math and computer power together, and . . . what gets summoned?
I had an idea for a book (that I'd probably never write) where a Canadian spy service turned out to be one of the worst offenders for international assholery. The basic premise was that nobody would think of Canada as a bunch of meddling douch-nozzles; and then damn it turns out we are.
The whole stupid thing is that if you were to add up all the value that Canada has received from our super spy stuff that it would pale in comparison to the damage that has been done to our international reputation. How many companies won't deal with us? How many countries don't view us as fairplay sorts of people? How many countries are now going to think, "If Canada is even doing it then so should we."?
If it turns out that the spies were stopping a James Bond level supervillain every month or so then it might have been worth it. But my guess is that the sum total was that other spy agencies fed crap information to us combines with their discovery that people who they knew were bad, were, in fact, bad.
But the premise of my book being that Canadian's could wander the globe un-molested (except for the 2 minutes that people thought they were Americans) is now in the crapper. Prior to recent events I suspect that a Canadian who wandered into North Korea could potentially be believed that he thought that South Korea was the one he wasn't allowed to do and then before he was released organize a mining contract with the government.
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"
Maybe that's why wireless power is pushed these days ...
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Maybe his new book would have been about intelligence agencies threatening science fiction authors who come too close to reality. The NSA read his manuscript from his computer and thought: "Great idea, let's test it on him."
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
..faster than it is becoming the past."
(That may be a paraphrase of a quote in the last year or so from a lady whose name I can't recall. Nor can I find the original text where it appeared. But it has stuck with me just the same. My apologies to the original author.)
Writing is not easy for everyone as when you are writing about something which you imagine, If you are doing ok with it you are one of the best writers, everyone can write about current issues but writing about something you never seen only listing the stories and with watching movies that make it more difficult which you are doing right now. Appreciate it what you are doing right now and wish you the best of luck.
By the way, may I thank all of the pedantic nerds in the audience for complaining that the headline joke is not a precise replication of the entire content of Stross's posting, as well as making the clear implication that there is something terribly misleading about not quoting the entire post so as to make it obvious to people unwilling to click on the link that Stross actually does know something about current events in Scotland?
I'm glad to see that you guys are upholding standards. You make slashdot what it is, truly.
But I must say that people accusing Stross of simply making excuses for writer's block and so on are doing an awfully weak job... if you actually knew anything about Stross you'd realize that he is extremely prolific, and is in fact one of the more highly regarded SF writers out there at the moment (though admittedly, only among people who actually read).
And if you want to look all clever and accuse Stross of being disingenuous, you're missing the obvious: he's bragging, and hiding it inside an amusing complaint: "Oh no, I got everything right again! I hate it when that happens!".