charles stross – Terminally Incoherent http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog I will not fix your computer. Wed, 05 Jan 2022 03:54:09 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.26 Bit Rot by Charles Stross http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2013/09/16/bit-rot-by-charles-stross/ http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2013/09/16/bit-rot-by-charles-stross/#comments Mon, 16 Sep 2013 14:08:48 +0000 http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/?p=15505 Continue reading ]]> There are two kinds of stories awesome and not awesome. Professional critics may use much more granular scale, but for my purposes this is pretty much sufficient. The awesomeness of the story, as indicated by the back-of-the-cover blurb or it’s Amazon equivalent is more or less how I judge books when deciding whether or not I want to buy them. In order to interest me, a story has to have something that will capture my interest and make me want to immerse myself in it. Not all stories can actually do that. An example of something from the un-awesome category would be: “they are two cops, who are also buddies and they solve a complicated crime”. This to me says boring, mundane, unoriginal and pretty damn pedestrian. Of course with the right writing style, well rounded characters and an interesting mystery at the core, even such a safe and boring premise could become something quite amazing. But that does not happen very often. Most of the time you get exactly what it says on the tin: something that was written by people without imagination for people with even less imagination. That last group is also sometimes called “the mainstream public” and I honestly don’t even know why we keep them around.

On the other hand, sometimes you read a premise of a story and it is so mind-bogglingly amazing your pants literally fall of on the spot. Please keep in mind that there is nothing sexual in this sort of de-pantsment. It’s just that certain types of awesomeness are simply best faced in your underwear. Bit Rot by Charles Stross is exactly that kind of a story. Let me tell you just how awesome it is.

Bit Rot is a story:

  1. about sentient androids (descendants of now extinct humanity)
  2. on a relativistic deep space jaunt toward distant stars
  3. and suddenly there is a zombie outbreak
  4. and it is also ultra hard SF with like science in it

If your pants are still on, you are probably made out of stone, or an alien replicant of some sort who does not appreciate the “high-culture” of the internet. Charlie Stross however definitely does. Sometimes it is easy to forget that the man is one of us, seeing how he has a real life publisher and actual genuine book deals. But the stuff he writes sometime is so much in sync with the collective wants and dreams of the netizens it is not even funny.

Robot Zombies

Image somewhat unrelated but very on topic. By ~OSCAR-N.

A lesser writer would take the above premise and play it for jokes, but Stross takes it absolutely seriously. Not only does he develop a plausible explanation how a “zombie” style plague could break out amongst synthetic arndroid colonists, but he also confidently ties it into one of his book continuities. The story is actually supposed to be taking place in the Saturn’s Children universe. Unfortunately I have never read that book, mainly because of it’s cover. No, seriously I have no clue what his publisher was thinking but it made me avoid it. I generally make a point of not buying books with gratuitous amount of cleavage on the cover. But after reading Bit Rot I might need to re-consider because the setting actually sounds intriguing. Either way, the short story stands alone quite well and you actually do not need to have any knowledge of the novel to fully enjoy it.

It is distant future, and humanity is now long gone. The only thing we have left behind is the sprawling support system that is run by sentient androids of all shapes and sizes. After the last human died, instead of closing shop the care-takers decided to just continue doing their thing. There was no robot uprising or mass genocide mind you. Humans simply got fat, lazy and complacent and eventually didn’t even really feel like getting out of the house to reproduce so they have faded away. The androids were designed to act and think much like humans so that they could better empathize with their masters and so they inherited a lot of our good and bad traits. Some are nice, some are jerks and etc. They still remember humans quite fondly and refer to them as their “ancestors”.

In general their bodies are self-repairing and they have almost indefinite lifespans and as such they are much more suited to very long, interstellar jaunts at relativistic speeds. The story is about two “sisters” who sign up for one of such trips, mostly to get away from their rich, spoiled arrogant “mother”. I’m putting these words in quotations because they are all robots, so they don’t reproduce biologically. The protagonists consider themselves “sisters” because their personalities have been based on the same template. A rich Earth socialite forked them off in order to live vicariously through their adventures. But they got tired living in her shadow and booked a one way trip into the unknown to forge their own destiny far away from home. En route there shit goes terribly wrong (or terribly right, depending on whether you are a character or a reader of the story).

It has been quite a while since I have seen an original take on zombies. While zombies in space have been done before, I don’t think I have ever seen a zombie story that involved androids and no humans. Neither have I ever seen hard science used to explain the plague. Bit Rot has probably the best, and most plausible kind of zombies out there. My only complaint about the story is that it is too short. Stross ends it just when things start to get really interesting, leaving the rest to the imagination of the readers. I would love to see it fleshed out to a full length novel, a movie or a video game. Anything really, because the premise is amazingly awesome.

If you have a few free moments, definitely check this one out. Good news is that the full text of the story is available online. The formatting is not the best though, so I recommend running it through Instantpaper, Readability or Pocket to get the enhanced readable version instead.

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Halting State by Charles Stross http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2011/07/13/halting-state-by-charles-stross/ http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2011/07/13/halting-state-by-charles-stross/#comments Wed, 13 Jul 2011 14:08:15 +0000 http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/?p=8599 Continue reading ]]> Halting State is definitely one of Charlie Stross’ low end books. It is nowhere near as impressive and intellectually stimulating as Accelerando or Glasshouse. I’d probably put it in the same category as Singularity Sky. Still, it is quite interesting and in a way prophetic like much of his work.

The book is one of these near-future SF novels. It’s year 2012, mobile technology almost completely replaced personal computers in regular day-to-day life. EU, China and India are the established superpowers while US lost it’s technological edge, and is struggling with economical depression and infrastructure collapse. Now, I know this does not sound like science fiction, but you have to keep in mind that the book was written four years ago. That’s like a decade and a half in Internet years. To wit, while Stross describes the “futuristic” mobile technology in great detail, he fails to mention the iPhone or the Android platforms. Why? Because they did not exist when he was writing his book. In halting state the leading platforms are WinCE with .NET, Symbian and RIM.

Symbian? When I read that I actually flipped back to check the publishing date. I was like “wow, is this book from like the 80’s or something?” Then I remembered than in the 80’s cell phones were the size of bricks and gave instant cancer to everyone within 20 feet. It puts things in perspective, doesn’t it? The mobile revolution has happened within the last four years, but it feels like we had this rich smart-phone environment for decades now. Gotta love the exponential nature of human progress…

Book Cover

Charlie did get a few details a bit wrong though. Apparently by 2012 all major MMO makers ditch the PC, and go mobile. Apparently two or three open, cross-platform frameworks have emerged that allow you to run pretty much the same code on a myriad of smartphone models, regardless of hardware and OS they are running. Granted, that’s what should have happened – having the mobile world divided between a closed monoculture OS/hardware combo and a cross-platform OS made by a frightening, yet lovable infovore is probably less healthy than a flowering of platforms bound together by common frameworks and protocols.

Oh, and in 2012 everyone has Bluetooth specs which can be used as a semi-transparent overlay or go completely opaque if you want to do work, or play a game. I don’t know about you, but I can’t fucking wait. Are HUD glasses really that difficult to make? They would make life so much easier. Right now I actually have to hold my phone in my hand when I’m lost and I’m following Google Maps directions. And when I use Yelp’s Monocle HUD like feature to find restaurants, or use Google Googles to find more information about something I end up looking like a tool or a pervert snapping pictures of random people on the street.

EU cops have more than that – they walk around studded with twenty odd concealed evidence cameras that record everything they see and upload it to central databases in real time. I’m suspecting this was supposed to be a bit spooky and Orwellian, but on the other hand this would be a great way to combat corruption and police brutality.

Honestly, reading Halting State is almost like watching an episode of Sliders – the setting is eerily familiar, but wrong in very subtle and sometimes disturbing ways. Back in 2007 it would probably have blown my mind, but these days it mostly made me shake my head and go “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie – if you only knew…”

For example, if you only knew that the MMO market is going to become stagnant and reject any and all innovation. Stross is describing immersive MMORPG’s using procedurally generated content in pretty much the same way we talked about last week. Unfortunately, we don’t have anything like that yet because most companies out there are dead-set on making The New World of Warcraft™. And by that they of course mean making the exact, carbon copy of WoW with a single unique distinguishing feature and better graphics. No, seriously – since 2004 I have been waiting to see a single successful game to make a dent in the market without actually aping WoW. So far I have only seen one: Eve Online. Unfortunately Eve is one of these games that are awesome to read about, but not as much fun to play.

To say the least, this parallel dimension quality of Halting State makes it fairly amusing to read. It does however have one really cool idea, which I can’t reveal without spoiling some of the plot. So if you don’t want to be spoiled, please avert your eyes, and skip the next few paragraphs.

[SPOLERS BELOW]

Stross has this brilliant idea of intelligence agencies using ARG’s to train and recruit unknowing operatives. Just think about this – how many collective man-hours have been spent by online communities on stuff like Portal 2 ARG, or LOST Experience? We are talking about thousands of skilled, intelligent and educated people spending a lot of their own free time and effort to unlock stuff that was nothing more than a glorified “Remember to drink your Ovaltene”.

Or how about the internet detectives who can pull anyones dox out of their ass, if there are LULZ to be had. What if you could harness this power to your own end. What if you could semi-reliably control the unwashed masses of the internet. Every intelligence agency needs low wage grunts, and useful idiots. People to do the dirty, menial and potentially incriminating work.

For example, say you need to put a tail on some low priority target. You could send a highly trained spy team to do the job and incur high operational costs. Or you could send 6 independent teams of 2-3 idiots with cell phone cameras for free. They are not as reliable, but you pay nothing, and you get plenty of redundancy to make up for the quality.

In Halting State, there is an ARG called SPOOKS. You sign up, and you essentially play a spy. Every once in a while, someone will call you identifying himself with an agreed upon code-phrase and give you a mission. Pick up a package, and deliver it to this address. Take pictures of this building. An operative from the opposing team just entered the restaurant where you are currently eating lunch – report on his every move, and tail him if possible. That kind of stuff. New players get make-believe assignments at first, but once they prove they are reliable they might be assigned real spy stuff. Of course they are never told that. They think it is all a game – but unknowingly they are gathering real intelligence for whichever agency is running the ARG.

This is such a clever idea, I’m almost certain we will never see it happen in real life.

[END OF SPOILERS]

Before I wrap this up, I must mention one more thing. Halting State uses second-person narrative style. “You woke up at 7am, went downstairs and ate cereal” – that sort of thing. It is quite unusual, and takes some getting used to. Especially since the story is told from the point of view of three different characters. Thankfully Stross labels each chapter with the name of the appropriate character, but it is still quite weird. I can’t remember the last book I read that used this narration style. It’s not bad – it’s just different.

If you can deal with the odd narration though, it might be worth picking up. It’s not great, but a decent read with one cool idea I outlined above, and plenty of unintentional anachronisms, and almost-on-target-but-not-quite predictions. That, and Stross injects his novel with a decent amount of geeky humor making it a light an enjoyable read.

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Accellerando by Charles Stross http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2011/02/14/accellerando-by-charles-stross/ http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2011/02/14/accellerando-by-charles-stross/#comments Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:18:13 +0000 http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/?p=7647 Continue reading ]]> Charlie Stross is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors. He is very imaginative and his fiction is dense with interesting and well researched ideas. You may probably recall that I highly recommended his novel Glass House and said a few positive words about the somewhat weaker Singularity Sky. I really like this guy.

I sometimes feel like a lot of contemporary SF authors out there while very imaginative seem to be creating in this sterile void. They sort of ignore memes, modern net-culture and work real hard not to make references to any ongoing SF related debates, or point to any contemporary SF work least it somehow soils their novels. Stross is different. He is from the internet and he seems to have his hand on the pulse of the web these days. His work is full of references, nods and memes – it feels vibrant, current and connected.

The only other author I know of that does this sort of thing is Cory Doctorow. His prose reads similar to his blogging on Boing Boing. Since he is exposed to various web oddities every day, strange and yet oddly familiar themes seem to find their way into his writing. Stross is very much just like that. He gets us. knows his audience and he plays it up. Of course he can also hold it back, which is what he did in Singularity Sky which I wasn’t terribly impressed with. To me he is at his best when he is conversational, digressive, referential and web savvy.

Accelerando is a prime example of this style. Each page is “literally” pregnant with ideas and references. And by literally, I of course mean figuratively. Which reminds me – can we please invent and popularize a word that will signify exactly what most people mean when they say literally. You know, like when they say “I literally shit my pants when I read your blog post – it was that good”.

But let’s not digress. Let me show you an example of why I like the way Stross thinks. He is the only SF author I have ever read who actually mentions the solution to the halting problem being accomplished using a Turing Oracle. Most other authors don’t care about stuff like this, but I do and the fact that Charlie Stross does as well is awesome. Oh, and he also mentions that in the future the RIAA and MPAA are bought out by the Russian mob. Think about it, it makes perfect sense – they have pretty much same business ethic when it comes to extortion, and old-school gangsters are probably the most fiercely conservative beings on the surface of our planet. They are almost dinosauric in their willing refusal to go with the times, which makes them perfect candidates to invest in companies with a business model so utterly broken that no one else in the world wanted to have anything to do with them.

Book Cover

But this is not what Accelerando is about. It is about a modern, deeply dysfunctional, future absorbed family living through the singularity event. Which in Charlie’s book is not really an event but a gradual process which we are able to withes through the eyes of Manfred Macx (an anarcho-altruist with million ideas a minute who travels the world making people rich for free), his daughter Amber (who runs away from her domineering, fiercely traditionalist and conservative mother only to become a sovereign ruler of a colony in the Jovian space, and launch the first interstellar mission to investigate mysterious alien wormhole router) and his grandson Sirhan (a timid, conservative historian trying to chronicle the family history while the solar system is being disassembled and turned into Matrioshka brain).

The last book I read which offered this sort of scope was the Metamorphosis of the Prime Intellect but Accellerando is notably different. Stross pictures the singularity as a gradual process taking place over many years rather than an abrupt event. In fact, at one point he has his characters trying to pinpoint the exact moment singularity actually happened, and coming up with a many varying opinions. In fact, that very discussion prompted me to post this.

Secondly, Stross’ superhuman AI’s grow very gradually, usually starting as sophisticated corporate expert systems. They are naturally not bound by some artificial three laws of robotics, but they don’t immediately go on a human killing rampage. They do something much worse. Being inhumanely precise and efficient machines they basically take over our markets, making it very difficult for humans to compete with entities that can spawn incorporate and dissolve hundreds of shell companies every second. Of course it was sort of predictable, since no legislative body would grant AI’s human rights, which meant they had to be incorporated in order to have a legal presence.

Stros’s vision of post singularity solar system is actually quite frightening – old style humans being pushed out to the outer planets by ruthless sentient, weakly god-like corporations. The idea that post-singularity, super-turing minds would compete not on smarts but rather on how well can they exploit local markets and manage legal denial of service attacks (ie. barrages of automatically failed lawsuits aiming to saturate the opponents legal department) is brilliant, plausible, insidious and deeply depressing at the same time. Same goes for his vision of universe filled with burned out alien Matrioshka Brains populated solely by boring, super-efficient but degenerate corporate AI’s, self aware spam bots and sentient Ponzi schemes.

Accelerando is an amazing novel (brilliant, funny, ironic, current, interesting, fun, etc..), and you guys need to read it right now. I highly recommend buying it, but you actually don’t have to. It is available online under the Creative Commons license. So honestly, there is just no excuse for not reading it.

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Glasshouse by Charles Stross http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2010/02/09/glasshouse-by-charles-stross/ http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2010/02/09/glasshouse-by-charles-stross/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:49:07 +0000 http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/?p=4879 Continue reading ]]> When I picked up Glasshouse I didn’t really expect it to be anything special. The blurb on the back cover hinted that it would be a somewhat interesting futuristic detective type story with a twist. In a distant future war veteran tries to escape his past by going into a bio dome style closed circuit experiment. He and other volunteers agree to live in a historical simulation of 20th century American town. For several years they would have no access to advanced technology, no contact with the outside world, and would have to “role play” inside the simulation. Those who manage to adjust to the new environment and play their part will be rewarded with bonuses paid at the conclusion of the experiment. The only problem is that there seems to be more to the experiment than the volunteers are being told. Something sinister is going on, and the hero sets out to find out what it is.

Glasshouse Cover

What I expected out of the book was a bit of mystery and suspense. What I got however was an incredible vision of the distant future. What the blurb on the back cover does not tell you is that the experiment is but one part of Charles Stross’ imagined universe. One he meticulously crafts and describes via characters inner monologues or flashback sequences. While the main story is quite good by itself, what really makes this book exceptional is the setting.

In fact, I am even reluctant to describe it to you because discovering how Stross’ world works was half the fun. Let me put it this way: most SF authors imagine that human societies of the future will work pretty much the way they work now. People will spread across the galaxy, live on hundreds of different worlds, but there will be no mind boggling paradigm shifts, or cultural changes save for a few lost worlds which population went feral, and few technological utopian or dystopian worlds that are merely an exception to the rule. Stross however imagines a post-singularity, post scarcity universe in which everything has changed. Nanotechnology which can disassemble and reassemble matter on molecular level is ubiquitous replacing traditional methods of manufacture and traditional medicine. Human minds can be fully digitized, backed up and restored at a whim. People swap physical bodies the way we change clothes and they easily edit or manufacture memories at any time whenever they wish to forget, or remember something. Human societies spread across the galaxies with most of the populations living in cylindrical space habitats interconnected via intricate network of wormhole gates which make everything to be in a walking distance. It is visionary, strange, fresh and original.

Such post-singuarity, post-scarcity settings are basically the new frontier of science fiction. The standard space opera framework we have been using for years now is becoming incredibly stale. Similarly the “5 minutes into the future” novels tend to have a tendency to become “alternative history” rather than “science fiction” as time and science rapidly catches up to them. That’s why I’m always thrilled when I find an author that dares to look beyond that. Who crafts his own vision of a world that may exist after we cross over that magical technological acceleration point, and everything will change forever. I suspect we will see more and more such books in the future. For now though, I recommend Glasshouse as one of those very intriguing visions.

The prevalent theme of the book is identity, self determination and their relation to the concept of reality. Stross brings up some very interesting questions that I haven’t seen discussed in quite a while. For example, what defines who you are? Is it your memories? What if they were erased? What if someone tampered with them and falsified them? How can you distinguish which memories were real? In fact, how can you distinguish reality from a perfect virtual simulation? Does reality even exist? How do you know if you are really alive or trapped in some sort of autonomous solipsistic loop. These are the sort of dilemmas that Robin, the main character of the book deals with on a daily basis.

I highly recommend this book. It’s smart, somewhat philosophical but it never turns into a lecture. Stross keeps things interesting, and whenever things are starting to settle down he shakes them up so you can hardly turn pages fast enough. That said, the ending is a bit abrupt, and cut short. I personally think that the author could easily stretch the content he jam-packed into the epilogue into at least two or three more chapters. Still, this minor flaw does not change my opinion of the book.

Get it and read it. Or if you have read it, let me know how you liked it. Also, I’m always open for book recommendations. Do you have anything in your collection that uses similar distant, post singularity setting?

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