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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...
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...
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.
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 !
It could be worse, The Laundry could be becoming reality.
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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.
In a word, NO. Stross wrote three books that are formally Singularity/Post Singularity novels, and I guarentee you he absolutely cannot write a nice utopic singularity (although Accelerando has a happy ending for some lobster dataclones, and some individual people in the Iron Sunrise duology make it through all the horrible things happening and have nice enough individual lives, a Strossian Singularity inevitiably includes mass extinctions.). His current series include one with a possible future singularity-like event looming over the protagonists, as directed by Lovecraft's Nyarlathotep, and a "fun with cultural misunderstandings of various robots, settling down after they have already killed off their human masters" series. Read his short novella, "Missle Gap", or "A Colder War", and THEN ask youself if he could write a story where where everything changes but nothing horrible happens to anyone. You could offer him income like J. K. Rowling's to do it, it's the one thing he just couldn't do.
Who is John Cabal?
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"
..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.)