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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 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.
It wasn't public knowledge. Everyone who believed it was considered paranoid, at least during the 1960's-70's. Maybe they were. (If you think you know when they really started listening to everyone, I think you're over estimating certainty.)
P.S.: Surveillance was not the point of the Stross books. It was background, Just like Scottish independence. In Halting State the big surprise was supposed to be a bank robbery inside a virtual game. Shortly after it was published, it happened in Eve-online. The police (and others) were wearing something considerably like google glass. (Actually, I think they looked more like a pair of heavy sunglasses, but I'd need to reread to be sure.) There were virtual overlays on reality published by advertisers, game players, etc. The wierd thing is those have started happening while almost nobody is wearing a VR headset. Spooks, a VR mixed with reality game, was a major subplot. So my brother-in-law walks in with a game called ghosts played on his phone, where he's supposed to chase around after a ghost that can only be seen on his phone, but where the chasing happens in physical space. (That's not Spooks, by any means. For one thing the ghost tried to get him to chase it in front of a car driving down the street. Spooks had more awareness of the actual surroundings.)
Or, another sub-plot involved remotely driven taxis. But Google has nearly gotten fully automated vehicles working.
Basicly, the world that developed made a lot of choices that weren't the same, and the stuff that was supposed to be new and exciting kept happening before most people bought the book. Near future SF used to be easier. Unexpected changes were slower in arriving. They ALWAYS arrived out of order, and with some choices not the same, but usually you had several years leeway (so most of your sales could happen before the book was obsolete).
So now he's discontinued the series. And he's going to wait until the votes for Scottish independence and Britain remaining in the EU are in before he tries any more near future books. Quite reasonable. (Snarl! I don't care if the series didn't match this universe, I wanted the next volume.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
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"